What the Fox Might Have Said About Inhabiting Shenzhen: The Ambiguous Possibilities of Social- and Self-Transformation in Late Socialist Worlds

Figure 1.

(facing page) The impressive urban landscape of downtown Shenzhen, July 2005. Located in Guangdong Province, the city was built in 1980 as China's largest "Special Economic Zone," designed to make the national economy a competitive force in the global market. (Photo by Mary Ann O'Donnell)

A group of performers in Shenzhen, China, came together in the late spring and early summer of 2003 to produce the experimental work Hushuo, which means "Fox Speaks" and puns the Mandarin expression hushuo, "to speak nonsense." My discussion of Hushuo examines the valorization of self-expression as a mode of transformation, which both sutures personal experience to late socialist urbanization and filters it through the lens of personal challenges, rewards, and morality. My larger purpose is to consider how the kinds of practices that socially constitute an individual's "transformation" and "self-expression" in Shenzhen speak to current debates on neoliberal cultures.

Adapting in and to Shenzhen

Moral Worlds

Located in Guangdong Province in the southern Mainland, Shenzhen is the oldest and largest of the People's Republic of China's "Special Economic Zones." Shenzhen was established in 1980 to begin and to promote the integration of the Mainland Chinese economy with the global economy. This social transformation is known as gaige kaifang (reform and opening). Shenzhen has been described as a chuanghu (window) to the outside world, a shiyanshi (laboratory) for experimenting with new forms of socialism, and the zhengju (evidence) that Deng Xiaoping's decision to reform and open the Chinese economy was correct. The municipality's territorial precursor, Baoan Commune/County, had one-lane roads, partial electrification, and only a few three-story buildings. By 2000, there were three six-lane highways that connected the eastern and western portions of the city, the highest percentage of online wangchong (netbugs) in the PRC, and the number of 30-story and higher office and residential buildings had surpassed 200. The expression Shenzhen sudu (Shenzhen speed) not only refers to the pace of these transformations, but also connotes the moral injunction to urbanize rapidly. In other words, Shenzhen has been a city defined by hyperbolic transformations, and in its role as a model city, it has served as the emblem of economic change in the PRC. In this formulation, "transformation" as a value is indistinguishable from the modern norm of jinbu—progress.

The construction of Shenzhen has privileged a particular kind of individual as the prototypical human—a person able to transform both her- or himself and the socialist world. Specifically, immigrants have transformed rural Baoan into urban Shenzhen. In 1980, the population of Baoan was estimated at 300,000. By 2000, estimates for Shenzhen hovered between five and seven million, depending on whom you asked and how they counted.¹ Official and popular accounts of this history use the expression chuang Shenzhen, to "path break Shenzhen," to describe the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for succeeding in the municipality. "Path breaking" evokes the moral virtue of workers in of any capitalist boomtown—a willingness to work any job, at any wage, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Immigrating to Shenzhen thus presupposes the individual selling her labor on a market, even as this path breaking ideology normalizes exploitation. On the one hand, wage labor is presented as a moral test, insofar as overcoming obstacles is seen as character building. On the other hand, most of Shenzhen's wealthiest residents embody this path breaking ethic in that they did come to work better jobs, eventually riding the wave of economic expansion into a familiar and desirable bailing (middle-class, literally "white-collar")—if not baofahu (nouveau-riche) life. In other words, path breaking, as both ideology and practice, makes the individual the hegemonic site for registering both the legitimacy and the problems associated with reform and opening. This becomes clear in the path breaker's moral foil: sanwu renyuan, "the three-withouts person."

In shanties throughout the city, the three-withouts...