One of the great views of Shenzhen is from Hong Kong's closed boundary area near the border crossing of Lok Ma Chau. The towers of the special economic zone, a chaotic jumble, rise sheerly from the black and lifeless waters of the Shenzhen River.
Derelict concrete buildings with prominent patriotic signs stand next to glass high-rises. Across the river from the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation's immaculate new train station, scheduled to open today, lies its double, nestled among construction sites. Over your shoulder is the pastoral landscape of Hong Kong's protective frontier, with its white cranes and fish farms, and abandoned British garrisons brooding in the low hills behind.
The scene is a striking visual metaphor for the social and cultural isolation that exists between Hong Kong and its closest urban neighbour a quarter of a century after the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong's future.
Hong Kong's return to China in 1997 inaugurated a decade of soul-searching. But a pervasive reaction of disgust has governed any thinking about its relations with the grimy factory towns to the north.
The time has come to think harder about Shenzhen, and also Dongguan, Huizhou, Guangzhou, Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Zhuhai - an inverted 'V' of cities whose edges run together in a continuous strip of urban slum, crumbling industrial zones, and toxic farming and aquaculture. The massive urban funk of the Pearl River Delta is, in large part, Hong Kong's legacy, a product of US$194 billion in investment between 1979 and 2005 as Hong Kong exported its labour-intensive manufacturing economy to the delta. The partnership created great wealth for both, so that Guangdong has the mainland's highest per capita income - as long as its migrant worker population remains outside the equation - while Hong Kong has only recently been overtaken by Macau as China's wealthiest city. That productive collaboration is coming to an end, and Shenzhen is one of its symbols. Guangdong is under pressure from yuan appreciation, rising production costs and labour shortages, and is attempting to solve its problems by moving up the value chain, which means higher wages, skilled labour and goodbye to the type of contract manufacturing supported by Hong Kong investment.
Shenzhen has the mainland's highest minimum wage, its largest and most prosperous collection of private enterprises, the first stock exchange to publish corporate social responsibility guidelines, and even the first business association to promote good corporate citizenship, led by China Merchants Bank, China's first privately owned commercial bank.
