Shenzhen’s history didn’t start in 1979 – it goes back hundreds of years, to another golden age
- The dynamic city, as well as what’s now being called the Greater Bay Area, has a far richer past than four decades of development suggest
- Evidence of antiquity, long ignored in the region’s rush towards modernity, can still be found
The fishing-village-turned-metropolis hook thrown out by countless journalists when writing about Shenzhen neatly encapsulates the fact that a relative nowhere became a serious somewhere after Deng Xiaoping earmarked it as ground zero in the spearheading of reforms, in 1978. To this day, 40 years after the Chinese leader unleashed its long-dormant entrepreneurial zeal, there is no better (or more readily applied) metaphor for the transformation of China than the skyscraper-studded cityscape north of the Sham Chun River.
“Shenzhen lets people like me do what we want to do,” explains festival organiser, radio DJ and bookstore owner Tu Fei, who hails from landlocked Hunan province and complains of the localism prevalent in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. If Shenzhen is accused of lacking anything, it is wenhua, which translates as “culture” but which can equally imply “roots”, “heritage” or a “strong sense of identity”.
Shenzhen was officially made a city in March 1979. The 40th birthday celebrations, however, began in earnest last year, with the anniversary of “reform and opening-up” marked by a neon-lit show illuminating the Futian district nightly from September to December with a spectacle to rival Hong Kong’s Symphony of Lights.
The four-decade, rags-to-riches story is a potent one but the notion that there was nothing but a fishing village in the 2,000 sq km Shenzhen now occupies until Deng waved his economic wand must surely sell the area short.
