Last week during our trip to Southern China, we had the opportunity to visit a very unique city. If you have never heard of it, do not worry because most Americans haven’t. In fact, merely trying to pronounce it correctly would be enough of a task to deter someone from learning more about it. This is where I can come in and, amidst my random thoughts and photos, possibly offer a brief glimpse of it. The city is called “Shenzhen”, and it pronounced “shun jun” where the “j” sounds like the j in “just” and the –un’s rhyme with “sun”, as in the bright thing up in the sky.
Now, ugly introduction aside, Shenzhen really is a fascinating place. It’s not fascinating in the same way that Beijing, Shanghai, or Xi’an are fascinating. Those places each have an incredibly rich history and culture. Shenzhen is fascinating for exactly the opposite reason. It has almost no history because the city is literally about 30 years old, as opposed to being 3,000 years old or even older. Its culture is almost completely eclipsed by what has been happening there over the same period of time.
Okay, now I am going to offer a comparison by which we can benchmark the growth of Shenzhen. I was born and raised in a quiet city in Colorado called Loveland. If you go there and ask people if they think Loveland is growing fast, they will almost all unanimously agree that it is. Some think it is growing way too fast, and they are tirelessly striving to bring its growth to a standstill. There is good reason for it to be growing so quickly. It’s a close neighbor of Fort Collins, which was named as Money Magazine’s best place to live in all of the United States for the year 2006. Both cities regularly draw in people, and have grown relatively fast compared to other places in the country. Loveland currently has somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 residents. If you rewind to 1979, it was considerably smaller. I don’t have an official number, but it probably had 30,000 residents at most. At the exact same moment, on the other side of the Northern hemisphere, there was a sleepy little fishing village near the Hong Kong-China border. Its population was a mere 20,000, which is extremely tiny by Chinese standards. At this point in time, Loveland was about 50% bigger than this small Chinese village.
In 1979, China was going through the initial phases of economic reform as it turned away from a fully planned and controlled economy and began to experiment with market economics. Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the nation decided to setup a small area in which they could be tested, monitored, and contained. They decided on this small little fishing village because of its ideal location on the coast and in close proximity to Hong Kong. They declared it the first “Special Economic Zone” (SEZ), and Shenzhen was born.
This SEZ was able to attract businesses in a way that the rest of China and much of the world were unable. They generally offer incentives such as free trade zones, export processing zones, industrial estates, etc. If you don’t understand the allure of this, think of it as offering delicious zero-calorie ice cream that sacrifices no flavor to a bunch of people dieting and anxiously sweating away on treadmills and stationary bikes in a hot, non-air conditioned gym in Phoenix in the middle of the summer. That’s the kind of allure Shenzhen had for businesses.
Our little fishing village of 20,000 people began to grow. And grow. And grow. And grow. It basically exploded, but rather than the typical explosion that features chaos, disorder, destruction, and death, this was an explosion of growth. During the 1990s, people would refer to it as the city where they would finish one high rise building every day and one boulevard every three days. The city was well planned, though the actual construction of some buildings may have been a bit hasty as there was so much incentive to complete construction. Some already began to look old by the time they were completed. Others have been built to high standards and still stand glistening and tall today.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a modern city wall of iron and barbed wire that encircled the city – a vain attempt to contain the experimental capitalist economics that had such a powerful effect on the region. People had to pass through gates to get into the city where they could work, and if they didn’t have the documentation, they tried to find other options. All around the country stories were whispered of people making millions in this new, amazing place. Shenzhen was the modern day Pied Piper of China, drawing people in with a comforting melody of offering hope to millions who were stuck in poverty, unemployment, or starvation in the rural countryside.
Shenzhen’s growth was too much to contain. Businesses and high rises sprang up all along the outside perimeter of the city. Many factories would also build on-site housing where their workers could also reside and eat. This agglomeration made it challenging to get an accurate count of the population, and so the actual population of the city is higher than official figures.
Okay, now it is time to make use of our American benchmark city of Loveland. As stated before, Loveland’s population was probably about 30,000 in 1979, whereas the small fishing village of Shenzhen was 20,000. About 30 years later, Loveland has a population of between 55,000 and 60,000. Shenzhen, however, now has about 9 million. That amounts to a 24.38% annual growth rate, compared to 2.51% for Loveland.
Think about that for a moment.
Suddenly Loveland, this “rapidly growing city,” looks like a snail in a drag race against a Ferrari. This is basically like another Chicago being built in just 30 years. If Loveland had grown at the same rate at Shenzhen, it would currently have about 13.5 million people, but it has 60,000 instead. This doesn’t even come close to a rounding error in the population of Shenzhen.
If you want to see some actual pictures of Shenzhen over the past 30 years, here is a great compilation that shows what a tremendous transformation it has undergone.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=330015&highlight=shenzhen
We also happened to be in Shenzhen on October 1st, which is China’s national holiday. There were some pretty crowded areas and some other cool sights we passed while on the bus. I was able to take a few pictures, but not too many because we only had a few hours of free time to experience the city on our own. Most of the time we were visiting companies and factories to see them first hand.
It’s amazing how fascinating it can be to look at life, things, and places outside of the United States. It helps put them into perspective, and suddenly trivial little things can be seen for what they truly are. A good example of this that was going on while I was on this trip was illustrated when I was watching an American news station while in Hong Kong. People on the news were having a very lively debate about the meaning of two measly words that were mentioned on an AM radio talk show. The words were “phony soldiers”. People (Americans) were up in arms over it, some saying that the man who said them (Rush Limbaugh) needs to offer a formal apology because he was insulting all soldiers, while others were saying that it was not at all what he meant. I won’t take sides because, (1) I think that people are entitled to their own opinions and that America does have something called “free speech” and maybe people should turn off the TV and actually read about it and find out what it means, (2) I hate the petty, immature bickering that is so prominent in politics. A bunch of supposedly mature adults are acting like pre-pubescent teens with their mud slinging and immature bickering. And don’t even get me started on the logical fallacies that are too often used to support arguments.
The main reason I am bringing this up is because something else was going on that, in my opinion, was much more important. They didn’t mention anything about it while I was watching the news for two hours, though it did pass as a small headline on the bottom of the screen. The leaders of North and South Korea were meeting together and finally talking about a peace agreement that could finally bring the half-century Korean War to an end. Now, a considerable amount of the population of the United States couldn’t even point out Korea on the map, let alone understand how great of a development this would be. Korea has a very painful history of constantly being influenced by or subjected to other countries’ wishes. If it wasn’t China, it was Japan, or Russia, or the United States, or some other country. They are basically the skinny kid that was always picked on and pushed around by those who were bigger than him. They have had very little time, especially in the past several centuries, where they have been free to be united, autonomous, and truly at peace. Even now, the Koreans see themselves as one people, but politics keep them from being with family who may just have happened to be on the other side of the line that was drawn through the peninsula in the beginning of the cold war. I hope things work out so that they can actually finally have their own united (and hopefully free) country. I also hope, probably in vain, that more Americans will open their eyes and become more aware of things outside of the borders of the United States and stop bickering about such trivial things as what is meant by the term “phony soldiers”.
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