Shenzhen: The city that rewrote China’s future

A city of contrasts

Shenzhen is a place where extremes collide. A swirl of pedestrians and electric scooters weave through traffic. Amid the chaos, a split-screen image of the city can be seen.

In one direction, dense clusters of aging high-rise apartment buildings are bursting at their seams. Laundry is strung along balconies over narrow alleyways, with just a sliver of space between the buildings. In the other direction, a glittering forest of pristine, hypermodern skyscrapers — many illuminated in a synchronized LED light show — as a swarm of delivery drones buzz overhead.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Jinfan Zhang, a professor of finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen. From his office on the 14th floor of one of those impressive towers, he pointed out the collision of old and new: the towering glass structures and, behind them, the dense apartment buildings. Zhang said that these are “urban villages” — home to low-wage migrants — that have held out in the shadow of the city’s modern image.

Like most people in Shenzhen, Zhang isn’t originally from the city, but he speaks about it with immense pride. He moved there for work, part of the city’s distinct culture of migration. China’s hukou household registration system has long tethered citizens to their birthplaces, restricting their mobility. Shenzhen, though, is different. Its rules are more flexible, and the city has become a magnet for young people seeking opportunity. 

“It really is an amazing place,” Zhang said with a sense of awe, recalling that just decades ago, the area was little more than a landscape of rural towns. “At the very beginning, it’s a very small village,” he said. “Not a lot of people living here.”

Today, Shenzhen covers an area one-seventh the size of Beijing but hosts a comparable population — nearly 20 million people.

A grand experiment in opening up

Shenzhen’s transformation began after the death of Mao Zedong, the communist revolutionary and founder of The People’s Republic of China. Under Mao, China was largely isolated, and the region that would become Shenzhen remained a cluster of small, poor towns along the nation’s southern coast. They sat near the border with British-controlled Hong Kong but were cut off from global commerce.

That changed when Deng Xiaoping took power two years after Mao’s death. Determined to “open up” China to the world, Deng chose Shenzhen as the site of a bold experiment. He designated it as the country’s first Special Economic Zone, allowing it to circumvent strict socialist policies and invite market reforms and foreign investment. It was a move that angered hardline communists who doubted that capitalism could coexist within a communist state.

“Actually, at the very beginning, no one expected the city could be so successful,” Zhang said. “And then, step by step, the city became very successful.”

Shenzhen’s proximity to Hong Kong proved invaluable. Businesses poured across the border. Foreign companies arrived, lured by tax incentives. Waves of migrants filled factories that seemingly sprang up overnight. Money and construction followed. The transformation was so dramatic that it inspired the hit song in the early 1990s, “Story of Spring,” which helped cement the city’s place in the national imagination as the embodiment of Deng’s reforms.

The myth of the ‘Shenzhen miracle’

Today, Shenzhen promotes its origin story with pride. It’s hard to walk around the city and not see some sort of monument to what’s now referred to as the “Shenzhen miracle.” At the city’s museum, located next to a grand central government building, massive displays and looping patriotic videos present a dramatic narrative: a tiny fishing village transformed almost overnight into a sprawling, world-class metropolis at the snap of a government finger.

But ethnographer Mary Ann O’Donnell, who has spent decades documenting life in Shenzhen’s urban villages, said the official version leaves out essential details.

“They want to tell one story about Shenzhen,” she said. “One story.”

The reality, she argues, is far more complex. The area’s population before the economic boom was much larger than reported, and it was the collective labor of longtime residents and incoming migrants — not just government decree — that built the modern city.

The dense, informal “urban villages” that once housed migrants and fueled Shenzhen’s ascent are increasingly being demolished in favor of high-end developments, O’Donnell added.

“They think Shenzhen could be better,” she said. “More upscale.”

On the street, the tension between past and future is palpable. At a metro station on the edge of one of the city’s urban villages, a small group of street vendors sat on plastic stools selling fruit and vegetables. One rang a bell to catch the attention of commuters. When a police officer told her to move away from the station entrance — perhaps because small-time street vendors don’t mesh with the upscale image the city is working to maintain — the vendor packed up.But as soon as the officer disappeared, she unfolded her table again, arranged the fruit and resumed ringing the bell.

There, in the shadow of glimmering skyscrapers, the miracle city’s heart kept beating.