Path Breaking: Constructing Gendered Nationalism in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone

Constructing a theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics is contemporary China’s Marxism.

—Deng Xiaoping

Shenzhen’s past fifteen years of high-speed economic and social development prove that by following Deng Xiaoping’s guiding principle of constructing socialism with Chinese characteristics, socialist production can be greatly liberated and developed.

—Li Youwei, former Shenzhen Communist Party secretary

Rural-Urban Relations in Shenzhen

Since its founding, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been represented both domestically and internationally as evidence of the (potential) success of the policies of reform and opening in integrating the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into the world capitalist system. ¹ These representations vary: Shenzhen sometimes is portrayed as a means for rectifying the sins of a Maoist past and a sign of the necessity for extending reform to the rest of China; recently, it has been portrayed as a token of China’s commitment to capitalist globalization. Practically, these various representations have legitimated the hegemony of the Dengist Communist Party and encouraged foreign direct investment (primarily from Hong Kong and Taiwan) in the PRC. Despite the changing representations of the Shenzhen SEZ, however, each version of “Shenzhen” has been vexed by material contradictions—within Shenzhen itself, between Shenzhen and the rest of China, and between China and the outside world. Specifically, practices associated with Shenzhen legal residence (hukou) created fundamental distinctions between Shenzheners and rural workers, distinctions that predicated a Chinese “competitive advantage” in the world capitalist system. ² Consequently, the material interests of Shenzheners overlapped with those of the Chinese state and global capital in ways that facilitated an alliance between the state apparatus and international capital. In contrast, the experience of temporary residents, especially rural workers, reminds us of Aijaz Ahmad’s formulation that “[the] structural inability of capitalism to provide for the vast majority of the populations which it has sucked into its own dominion constitutes the basic, incurable flaw in the system as a whole.” ³ By opposing state representations of immigration to Shenzhen with the institutional process for obtaining Shenzhen legal residence, this essay maps the geotectonic inequality—the institutionalization of the rural-urban division of labor—on which the integration of the PRC into the world capitalist system has been constructed.

Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the PRC experimented with various forms of industrial urbanization, all of which had as a goal the country’s modernization. For the purposes of this essay, I read modernization selectively, emphasizing two of its many meanings. The first involves increased productivity and an improved standard of living for citizens. The second is the gradual integration of the PRC into the global economy. The actualization of these two goals necessitated the selective dismantling of the planned economy and the use of cities as the nexuses for integrating the PRC into global capitalist production. Reform was implemented in experimental stages that also increased the land area designated for urbanization projects. During the first five-year experiment (1979–1984), four SEZs were established, of which Shenzhen was the largest and most successful. Shenzhen’s ideological and economic importance derived from this success, and, indeed, Deng Xiaoping’s first visit to the Shenzhen SEZ in 1984 both confirmed the validity of reform and opening and prefigured the opening of fourteen coastal cities and three delta regions (in Guangdong, Shanghai, and Tianjin).

The Chinese leaders’ decision to build cities to attract capital reflected the structure of global capitalism at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, just as their policies of self-reliance had arisen in response to the isolation imposed by the Western powers after the success of the revolution in 1949. The world capitalist system that the Deng leadership aspired to break into functioned as an integrated set of hierarchically ranked nation-states that were spatially articulated through a system of correspondingly ranked world cities. ⁴ Within the first ten years of reform and opening, the PRC reproduced the geographic inequality necessary to stimulate capitalist growth. ⁵ The primary means of creating this inequality was legislation, and, I...