ABOUT THIS BOOK
This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries.
Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.
REVIEWS
“Shenzhen is an extraordinary city, but until now, surprisingly little had been written about it. This book, which traces the story of Shenzhen from its late 1970s beginnings to its subsequent explosive growth into the present, fills that void. These chapters clearly and eloquently depict the ‘Shenzhen Miracle’ in its successes—and also its considerable human costs. Anyone who reads this volume, whether social scientist or interested layperson, will come to see Shenzhen in an altogether new light.”
— Gordon Mathews, Chinese University of Hong Kong
“Fluidly combining historical, ethnographic, geographic, humanities, and policy research approaches, this is much more than a study of the history and contemporary life of one city. Especially emphasizing the place of Shenzhen as model and anti-model in China’s marked turn toward urbanization, these essays sensitively explore the irreducible complexity of a Special Economic Zone turned futuristic urban exemplar. Clearly in conversation with each other, the contributors offer fresh theories and methods for engaging in critical scholarship on cities anywhere. This volume is a model of how to study the global contemporary moment with its burgeoning economic centers, mobile populations, and recurring crises.”
— Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago
"An incisive new book, Learning from Shenzhen... reveals that many of the advances seen since the city was opened up in 1980 came disruptively from below."
— Economist
"Twelve papers examine the political, economic, and social transformation of Shenzhen since 1979 as a pivotal case study of development in China, considering how policy experimentation and political model making came to be integrated into the official narrative."
— Journal of Economic Literature
"Learning from Shenzhen dives deeply into the ground-level dynamics of change to illuminate the forces and evolving cast of characters that made Shenzhen’s development process much more contingent and chaotic than suggested by dominant narratives about Shenzhen’s history. . . .An important addition to the literature on China, providing a rare in-depth look into the nature of Shenzhen and raising useful questions about the process of China’s transformation."
— Pacific Affairs
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Experiments, Exceptions, and Extensions - Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, Jonathan Bach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0001
[China;post-socialism;Shenzhen;space;urban planning;urban village]
Learning from Shenzhen details the progression of Shenzhen from experiment to official model, showing how the Maoist division of Chinese society into urban and rural territories was reconstituted in Shenzhen as a spatial division of planned and un-planned experimental spaces. This resulted in new formations of borders, citizenship status, and rural urbanization, anticipating social transformation at municipal, national, and international levels and ultimately reconfiguring the meaning of collective life in China today. (pages 1 - 20)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Shenzhen: From Exception to Rule - Jonathan Bach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0002
[development;globalization;modernity;space;zone;sovereignty;territory]
This chapter shows how Shenzhen emerged from the interplay between national and global dynamics and entered into the global circulation of models of economic and urban development. The author points to how zonal logics of exceptional spaces predicated the city’s rise. (pages 23 - 38)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Heroes of the Special Zone: Modeling Reform and Its Limits - Mary Ann O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0003
[ideology;post-socialism;reform;models;opening]
This chapter chronicles how, during the first decade of Shenzhen, political leaders modeled post-socialist political reform ideas for the nation. Their early successes and later downfall provide a template for understanding how Beijing leaders used Shenzhen to achieve national goals. (pages 39 - 64)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. The Tripartite Origins of Shenzhen: Beijing, Hong Kong, and Bao’an - Weiwen Huang
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0004
[modernization;Shenzhen speed;space;space-time compression;urban planning]
This chapter looks at the complementary roles of Beijing and Hong Kong in the making of Shenzhen. It argues that the mechanisms and logics that enabled Shenzhen’s high-speed construction and generally successful urban development can be found through an investigation of the heterogeneous forces that came into play during the early history of the city. (pages 65 - 85)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. How to Be a Shenzhener: Representations of Migrant Labor in Shenzhen’s Second Decade - Eric Florence
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0005
[gender;ideology;material civilization;migration;reform;Shenzhen Spirit;spiritual civilization;migrant workers;opening]
This chapter explores how rural-to-urban migrants were taught how to be workers in post-Mao China. As they learned to work in capitalist enterprises and to narrate their own life stories, they became national models. Their exploitation, however, challenged the legitimacy of a ruling party whose founding narratives continued to reject capitalist exploitation. (pages 86 - 104)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Laying Siege to the Villages: The Vernacular Geography of Shenzhen - Mary Ann O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0006
[identity;space;urban village;citizenship]
This chapter explores the social antagonisms that emerged during the transformation of Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality through the urbanization of Shenzhen's original villages. This account draws attention to the ways in which architectural forms have facilitated contingent urbanisms that exclude the poor from desired futures. (pages 107 - 123)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. The Political Architecture of the First and Second Lines - Emma Xin Ma, Adrian Blackwell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0007
[architecture;borders;Hong Kong;migration;space;value;infrastructure]
Through a comparison of the political architecture of the first and second lines, this chapter tracks how Shenzhen has deployed its various borders to produce economic and social value. It examines the planning and construction of the internal boundary separating the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone from the rest of the city, villagers’ negotiations of that construction, and the efforts to solidify the boundary at the moment of its decommissioning. This history of the border places Shenzhen’s migration history in a regional context. (pages 124 - 137)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. “They Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens”: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen - Jonathan Bach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0008
[identity;rural urbanization;Shenzhen speed;space;subjectivity;urban village]
This chapter unpacks the role of urban villages in the making of Shenzhen. The author suggests that the symbolic representation of the village is key to understanding Shenzhen’s emergence because it makes legible discursive distinctions in which the villages appear simultaneously as the city’s condition of existence and the perceived obstacle to progress. (pages 138 - 170)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. Sex Work, Migration, and Mental Health in Shenzhen - Willa Dong, Yu Cheng
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0009
[gender;mental health;migration;sex work;subjectivity]
Sex workers represent an important group of migrants to Shenzhen. This chapter presents a study of female sex workers and their mental health needs, complicating our understanding of how gender has shaped migrant possibilities. (pages 171 - 190)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9. Shenzhen’s Model Bohemia and the Creative China Dream - Winnie Wong
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0010
[art;creative industry;Dafen Village;propaganda;gender;migration;intellectual property]
This chapter challenges Western media accounts of Shenzhen's Dafen Village as a Chinese “assembly line factory” that infringes on Western copyrights. Instead, it details how the village is made up of migrant workers who have trained and fashioned themselves into professional painters, bosses, and artists. Through analysis of policy and propaganda, the chapter shows how local subdistrict governments leveraged gender and creativity to transform Dafen from a production center of “low" cultural value into a “model” cultural industry. (pages 193 - 212)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
10. Preparedness and the Shenzhen Model of Public Health - Katherine A. Mason
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0011
[efficiency;H1N1 virus;public health;SARS;technocratic elites;migration;science;medicine]
This chapter provides an ethnographic account of the emergence of the Shenzhen public health system, highlighting the aspirations of the city’s technocratic migrants. It focuses on Shenzhen’s high-tech, biomedical model of public health that was developed after the SARS outbreak and came of age during the subsequent H1N1 pandemic. (pages 213 - 227)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
11. Simulating Global Mobility at Shenzhen “International” Airport - Max Hirsh
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0012
[Bao'an International airport;urban village;infrastructure;transnational;international;transportation;mobility;design]
This chapter examines the extended and transnational urban infrastructure of the region's airports. It details how different populations navigate this border-crossing infrastructure located in everyday places throughout the city. The author situates the architectural showpiece of Shenzhen's international airport within this regional infrastructure, and demonstrates the relationship between international design and inter-city competition. (pages 228 - 249)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: Learning from Shenzhen - Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, Jonathan Bach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401263.003.0013
[borders;Shenzhen;state building;urbanization;world systems;cities;migrants;agency]
The city of Shenzhen as a case study complicates how urban changes can be theorized for China specifically and elsewhere in the world. This chapter suggests that the ongoing reconfiguration of the urban subject must be understood through its coevolution with the configuration of the city. (pages 250 - 260)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
