Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. xiv, 283 pp., [16] pp. of plates. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-40112-6.
The city of Shenzhen is an iconic part of the story of the transformation of China that has unfolded over the past forty years. A bold experiment in reform and openness to the world, the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Shenzhen turned a rural area with a small market town into one of the wealthiest and most dynamic cities in China. Moreover, Shenzhen has served as a model and inspiration for national and local leaders who have sought to promote socioeconomic transformation through engagement with the global economy. Learning From Shenzhen offers a rich set of studies that explore “processes of transformation across multiple scales and sites within the city, demonstrating how the Chinese party-state converted a zone of highly localized and controversial economic and political experimentation into…a national and global model” (2). Contributors employ the tools of ethnographic research, spatial and geographic history, and discourse analysis to shed light on “the slippery, messy, and often counterintuitive process by which Shenzhen was produced” (258). The result is a volume that 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.
The volume is organized into three sections: Experimentation (1979–1992), Exceptions (1992–2004), and Extensions (2004–present). While the division into three time periods does not fully work, the framework usefully highlights how the dynamics of development did shift over time. In the early years, the creation of the SEZ was a gambit to promote relatively radical reform in a strictly defined area. As Mary O’Donnell explains in chapter 2, this created “a venue where certain reformist leaders and cadres conducted bold political experiments” (39). O’Donnell’s excellent contribution highlights the interaction between local Shenzhen officials and reformers at the top and the roles played by local “heroes” of reform in getting the experiment off the ground. A second notable chapter in the first section explores in rich detail the construction of the “model rural migrant” in Shenzhen and the contradictions between official representations of “how to be a Shenzhener” and the realities on the ground. The author, Eric Florence, argues persuasively that the “figure of the migrant worker as it was constructed” was an early sign of the move towards the “vast commodification of labor that would touch almost all categories of the population” (99).
Lest the reader begin to think that Shenzhen was rapidly coalescing into a coherent model, the second section of the book focuses on the “exceptional spaces” that came to define life in the city and on the struggles to demarcate and define the various types of spaces. In separate chapters, O’Donnell and Jonathan Bach hone in on how “urban villages” emerged as significant sites for the dialogue and conflict between rural and urban, and poor and rich, that has featured prominently in Shenzhen. As the new Shenzhen developed, previously existing villages were incorporated into new administrative jurisdictions, and these urban villages became home to migrants and other low-status citizens. However, Bach’s chapter demonstrates that the story is much more complex than this, with neighbourhoods of various origins performing diverse roles in the ecosystem that is Shenzhen. In assessing the politics surrounding urban villages, O’Donnell argues that what we see is a rural urbanization process through which “the wealthy lay siege to poor neighbourhoods” (121). A third chapter in this section, by Emma Xin Ma and Adrian Blackwell, steps back to examine the political architecture of the two borders that defined Shenzhen from 1982 to 2010: the one with Hong Kong and the one (the “second line”) that separated Shenzhen from the remainder of the PRC. This fascinating chapter shows how the Second Line “continuously generated the production of exceptional spaces” (124), a patchwork of overlapping spaces in which all kinds of activities and negotiations occurred.
The final section contains three case studies of how, in more recent years, Shenzhen has attempted to produce models appropriate for emulation by others around the world. A chapter by Winnie Wong, “Shenzhen’s Model Bohemia and China’s Creative Dream,” is a richly detailed examination of the rise of Dafen Village as a global centre for the mass production of paintings and how Shenzhen officials embraced Dafen as a new model for creative industries. The second case study explores the high-tech, biomedical model of public health that was developed in Shenzhen in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Katherine Mason shows how “Shenzhen speed” enabled the rapid building of a new model that worked well when tested by the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Yet, Mason finds that doubts about the sustainability of the model quickly set in, raising questions about the effectiveness of the Shenzhen style of governance. The third case study, by Max Hirsh, focuses on the disjunct between the grand aspirations of the Shenzhen International Airport (SZIA) and the reality that the airport primarily serves domestic flights. The chapter shows how constraints on the SZIA led to the development of new transport and border arrangements that “fundamentally reordered the way in which Shenzhen is connected to the outside world” (230).
Overall, Learning From Shenzhen offers some insightful windows onto the historical development of Shenzhen. A number of the chapters are outstanding. This volume, however, does not provide a comprehensive picture of Shenzhen’s political, economic, and social history. There is no systematic analysis of how the political system evolved over time, of the changing structure of the economy, or of how local media and social organizations have shaped life in the city. The book sits squarely within the field of urban studies, anchored in the disciplines of anthropology and geography. Parts of it display an overload of jargon and abstractions, leaving this reader wishing for more concrete descriptions of life in Shenzhen. Nevertheless, the book is 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.
Kenneth W. Foster
Concordia College, Moorhead, USA