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Jonathan Chatwin

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, by Juan Du. Published by Harvard University Press. 4 stars
Is Shenzhen now China’s most important city? In August last year, the country’s State Council released a statement announcing that Shenzhen was to be developed into a “pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, with the aim of it becoming a “global benchmark city”.
The timing of the announcement was unsurprising and seen as a direct response to the current situation in Hong Kong. As an editorial in China’s Global Times newspaper put it: “Shenzhen has become a key ground for China to tackle tricky issues from a seemingly never-ending trade and technological battle with the US to chaos in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”
Juan Du’s new book The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, is welcome as it provides historical context on this city’s development. And context is sorely needed: much coverage of Shenzhen’s development repeats the same lazy, government-derived tropes of a “fishing village turned megalopolis” or a technological city of the future.

The author notes in her introduction: “Whether viewed as cliché or cherished as an origin story, the Shenzhen myth embodies China’s global rise at the turn of the 21st century. The myth has become more powerful than any facts about the city.”
Like all myths, Shenzhen’s has a relationship, albeit distant, with reality. However, the evolution of this city has been far less straightforward, or positive, than this founding mythology suggests.
The book begins not with an abstract story of Shenzhen’s early history, but a personal tale which epitomises its spirit of transformation. Jiang Kairui made his way to Shenzhen from the far northeast of the country in 1992, a few months after Deng Xiaoping’s now equally mythologised “Southern Tour”, in which the ostensibly retired leader toured Shenzhen and other nearby cities to affirm the policies of reform and opening which he had pioneered.
A tale of two cities: Shenzhen vs Hong Kong
At 57, Jiang was unusually old for an incomer to the city. This was a place where the average age was under 25. He found a job, however, and settled into his new life. A budding lyricist, in December of the same year he was moved to write a song about the city that had become his home.
It was called The Story of Spring and its lyrics read: “The year of 1979/ That was a spring/ There was a great man/ Drawing a circle by the South China Sea/ Mythically building a great city/ Miraculously forming a mountain of gold/ Shenzhen! Shenzhen!/ The Test Pilot of China’s Reform and Opening.”
The song would eventually become a huge national hit and forever entwined two images in the story of China’s economic reforms: Deng as a kindly “old man”, and the “miracle” of Shenzhen.

Jiang became a successful songwriter, composing other laudatory musical accounts of China’s leadership: in 2010, his Shenzhen transformation complete, he was named one of “Thirty Outstanding People of Shenzhen”. The story of Jiang and his song is foregrounded in The Shenzhen Experiment because, the author observes, “the story of Shenzhen is not simply one of reforms and policies; it is a collection of stories of personal struggles and redemptions”.
This employment of personal anecdote is carried over to the book’s other sections. The Shenzhen Experiment does an excellent job of balancing broader historical narratives of the city’s development with smaller scale stories of individual and community experiences, thus avoiding the dangers of talking of Shenzhen as a homogeneous, conscious entity.
China’s tech hub Shenzhen set to hit 2019 growth target
As well as relating the personal stories of the city,The Shenzhen Experiment also endeavours to move beyond the caricature of Shenzhen being history-less: a blank landscape onto which Deng simply drew a circle. The area which would become Shenzhen was a well-populated and culturally rich landscape, and its history is here outlined in detail. The author rightly comments:
“The region’s long history cannot be discounted in any narrative of post-1979 Shenzhen, and any understanding of industrialisation in the countryside must begin with an understanding of the countryside before industrialisation.”
Later sections examine the modern urban development of the city, and the tension between lucrative redevelopment and the preservation of Shenzhen’s urban villages. These villages provide essential housing to newcomers to the city as well as being fortresses of vibrancy and diversity in a city which is becoming increasingly homogenised, at least in architectural terms. At all times the individual experience of the city is foregrounded, ensuring the reader retains a sense of the personal within the urban.
As we try to read the runes of last summer’s announcement that Shenzhen is to become once more a pioneering model city for China, Du’s book provides a nuanced and detailed historical grounding, drawing on a diverse range of sources and primary research. Blending the personal and the historical, it is an outstanding primer on the fascinating fortunes of a city that will only grow in national and global significance over the course of the next decade.
Asian Review of Books


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In The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, Juan Du says the myth of Shenzhen’s rise has become more powerful than the facts
She details how the real story of Shenzhen is not simply one of reforms and policies, but a collection of stories of personal struggles and redemptions



The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City by Juan Du details how the real story of Shenzhen is not simply one of reforms and policies, but a collection of stories of personal struggles and redemptions.


Shenzhen

Chinese history

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