Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
“China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people,” announced a breathless headline in Sunday’s Telegraph, detailing plans to combine the cities of Guangdong province’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) into a massive urban conurbation. “Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan,” the British newspaper reported, noting that the new megalopolis would be “26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.”
The news generated quite a bit of chatter as it circled around the Internet, much of it predicated on the mistaken assumption that China would be building an entirely new city of 42 million. “What about all the cities already constructed but still empty?” wrote one commenter on CNNGo in reference to the master-planned, never-lived-in city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia. “Time to beef up security on the Hong Kong border,” tweeted a former Hong Kong resident.
The reality is less exciting. The PRD is already home to more than 42 million people and it already functions as a megalopolis with an economy worth a little under US$300 billion (about the same as the metropolitan areas of Shanghai, Boston, San Francisco and Milan). The billions of dollars in new infrastructure will complement an already well-developed network of highways, railways and waterways. In fact, the concept of a huge megalopolis tied together by roads and rail is nothing new: the Taiheyo Belt in Japan is an interconnected urban area of 80 million people linked by shikumen trains running every few minutes. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington form a mostly interconnected urban region of more than 50 million people.
In Baishizhou, five yuan will get you an hour of pool and a big bottle of strong beer. This is one of Shenzhen’s largest and liveliest urban villages. Pool is one of its favourite pasttimes.
The village is hard to navigate, with aimless roads and dark, foreboding alleyways, but I’ve come across a few outdoor pool halls in my wanderings there. My favourite is one that exists where an alley widens ever so slightly as it meets a larger street, a tributary joining its parent. It’s a simple operation, with a half-dozen tables and a beer cooler. The last time I went, with a few friends, the hours slipped by unexpectedly, and it was nearly 1am when we left, wandering back into streets that were only marginally quieter than when we arrived. Compared to Hong Kong, Shenzhen sleeps early, but this is not true of the villages — they stay awake all night.
The layers of irony in Nantou can be hard to appreciate. Here is a town that reigned supreme over the surrounding lands for hundreds of years; when China lost the first Opium Wars, it was here that British emissaries met Chinese officials to claim the nearby island of Hong Kong.
Later, as a result of Hong Kong’s prosperity as a British colony, the Kowloon-Canton Railway was built, bypassing Nantou and passing instead through the nearby town of Shenzhen. Nantou faded into obscurity. In the 1980s, after Shenzhen was declared a free-market Special Economic Zone, it was absorbed into the city’s urban sprawl. By the early 2000s, it had become just another urban village packed with migrants from every corner of rural China.
But Nantou was still littered with historic buildings dating back to its days as the economic and political capital of the surrounding prefecture, so Shenzhen’s officials decided to build a history museum and restore some of the old landmarks, which included the yamen where Hong Kong was signed away, temples, clan houses and 600-year-old fortifications. Unfortunately, nobody was interested, so the restored buildings were boarded up.
It’s easy to spot Mary Ann O’Donnell in a Shenzhen crowd. She’s the one wearing a pink-and-orange linen scarf and flowing dress. She’s also white — a rather rare sight in a wealthy city that is still off the radar of the roving crowd of expatriates that have settled in Shanghai and Beijing. Don’t let appearances deceive you, though, because O’Donnell knows Shenzhen better than just about everybody.
Armed with a camera and a notebook, O’Donnell roams the city’s streets, collecting stories and photos that sometimes posts on her blog, Shenzhen Noted. When she first moved to the city in 1995, it was just 15 years old, a shifty frontier town. Now it bears the veneer of global capitalism: giant malls that wouldn’t be out of place in Causeway Bay dot the landscape, in between luxurious housing estates and international chain hotels.
But Shenzhen is far more complicated than meets the eye. For all the new malls, the reality is that Shenzhen is still a city of villages populated by poor migrants who’ve arrived from across China for a shot at success. That’s the Shenzhen that fascinates O’Donnell.
I met her last month on a damp, chilly afternoon, in the western district of Nanshan. We strolled through a series of old country villages that had been absorbed into the fast-growing city.
The police have taken over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. They are rehearsing for an official event to happen later in the day and many of the biennale’s outdoor installations at Shenzhen’s massive Civic Square have been temporarily closed off to the public for the occasion.
Ou Ning, the biennale’s curator, is standing in the square watching thousands of police officers and soldiers march in.
“I’ve been taking photos of the police standing in front of the exhibits,” says Ou, dressed in black, standing unassumingly on the side of the square. “It’s quite funny to see.”
Ou lived in Shenzhen for a decade before moving to Guangzhou and eventually Beijing. More than any other Chinese city, he says, people in Shenzhen are eager for political reform. He sees the next step in Shenzhen’s evolution as becoming a political testing ground for the rest of China and he wants this year’s biennale to heighten awareness of Shenzhen’s political role through the use of public space.
Mark Ndesandjo, Barack Obama’s half-brother, is a talented guy. After graduating from Stanford and Brown, he moved to Shenzhen, where he gives piano lessons to orphans. Just the other day, he released his first novel — inspired partly by his troubled relationship with his father — and he’s now working on an autobiography.
But out of all of his achievements, the one that pleases me most is the success of Cabin BBQ, the chain of laid-back outdoor barbecue restaurants Ndesandjo started with Chinese partners in 2003. The original Cabin BBQ sits in a restaurant hub not far from Xiangmihu metro station in Shenzhen, four stops away from the Lok Ma Chau border crossing with Hong Kong. There are now ten branches across China, the farthest of which is in Yinchuan, Ningxia.
For anyone used to dining in Hong Kong, where the air conditioning is always on full blast and the lack of space forces elbows onto your dinner plate, Cabin BBQ is a relief. Somehow, despite being just 35 kilometres from the skyscrapers of Central, Shenzhen, with its mild air and abundance of palm trees, always feels more tropical. This is a smoky, outdoor dining paradise where street vendors sell coconuts next to the parking lot and people wander in to eat lots of meat and drink copious amounts of beer until the darkest hours of the night.
Hong Kong businesspeople and pro-Beijing politicians like to daydream about the day when Shenzhen and Hong Kong will be completely integrated, the border between them either gone or reduced to an anachronistic formality. For now, though, the two cities remain strikingly different despite their proximity and shared history. Shenzhen is brash, devious and seedy, but also vast and monumental, often aloof from its surroundings. Whereas Hong Kong has a well-entrenched local identity, Shenzhen is a seething melting pot of new migrants from throughout the country, making it in some ways the ur-city of modern China.
According to many, especially disgruntled Hong Kong shopkeepers, Shenzhen’s Luohu (Lo Wu) district functions as a giant discount mall, just over the border. There’s even a book (widely available in Hong Kong) titled ‘Shop in Shenzhen’ with advice on where to get the best knockoff purses, and where the best foot massages are to be found. Here’s what it looks like, if you’re able to make it out of Luohu’s Commercial City mall, where central Luohu actually has some quite lively pedestrian streets, just one metro stop north of the border with Hong Kong.
Further west, Hua Qiang Bei road is pulling young crowds increasingly interested in clothes, rather than wholesale electronics.
The rapid urbanization of Shenzhen since 1980 has generated a contemporary landscape dotted with a series of urban villages, enclaves of buzzing urbanity and street life situated on land owned by Shenzhen’s original rural residents. These areas house much of Shenzhen’s floating population of workers from across China.
The local farmers or fishers who are now the village landlords have usually completely re-arranged their village space, which is increasingly hemmed in by commercial or residential high-rise projects. Shenzhen’s urban villages are typically a fabric of tightly packed ten to fifteen storey walk-up apartment buildings, with ground floor commercial, arranged around a very permeable street grid, punctuated with the odd public space or market. There are usually some fairly spacious main streets, but most of the buildings are accessed through a warren of alleys and pathways, most less than two metres wide, that wind their way between the buildings. Amazingly, there’s still some commercial activity within the maze—such as informal bicycle repair shops or very small canteens.
While they have struggled with a poor reputation in Shenzhen, and in other Chinese cities in which the phenomenon occurs, urban villages are starting to be perceived as islands of vitality, street life, and holdouts of traditional culture in the sea of modernity that is Shenzhen. One village in Shenzhen’s Futian district, Shuiwei, is even being targeted for tourism, while many others are falling under the scope of the somewhat ominous-sounding Urban Village Renovation Project.
The Hua Qiang Bei skyline at dusk from the 20th floor of the Sichuan hotel, looking west. The tall building to the left is the 2nd highest in Shenzhen (for now) and was the site of the first electronics factory to be converted into a market, and subsequently an office tower. Its main tenant, SEG, is one of the biggest players in the neighbourhood.
When North Americans think of deindustrialization and China, we’re usually pretty quick to conclude that, since our cities have so little industry left, and so much of what we buy comes with a “made in China” sticker on it, then the new industrial zones, like Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta, must be chock full of factories working around the clock. But deindustrialization’s running strong in China, too, in cities that were first industrialized just a few decades ago. Like a time warp, Shenzhen and other places have sped through an industrial cycle that took more than a century to complete in Europe and North America.
The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was China’s first experiment of the type, decreed by Deng Xiaoping in 1980. The former collection of sleepy fishing and farming villages, just north of Hong Kong’s New Territories hit a population of 1 million in 1991, and now counts 14 million. The role played by the city of Shenzhen, which was in the mid 1980s the focus of enormous investments in manufacturing (most of which were made by Hong Kong entrepreneurs, as that city shed its secondary industry), has shifted towards services and distribution. Shenzhen’s now a sprawling complex of offices, shopping, and apartments, punctuated by a series of “high-high-high-end” (to quote some planners) shopping malls and increasingly gigantic central business districts, with nary a factory in sight. So what happened to the industrial areas?
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