The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City by Juan Du (review)

With her equally instructive and highly readable monograph on the urban evolution of Shenzhen, Princeton-educated and Hong Kong-based architect Juan Du aims to dispel a powerful, multilayered myth at the heart of most "rise of China" narratives on the recent past. As the People's Republic of China's original and most prestigious Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and first major window to the outside world after three decades of increasing political and economic self-isolation, Shenzhen has long been stylized as the epitome of the economic reform policies initiated after 1978 by the central leadership under Deng Xiao-ping (1904–97); more recently, it has come to symbolize China's ascent to global power at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Forty years after Shenzhen's inception as socioeconomic experimental zone, most of us are still ignorant of the city's complex developments beyond the legendary tale of "former fishing village turned megacity." That is why Du's multifaceted history, written for a "broad intellectual audience," is a welcome addition to existing scholarship on Shenzhen's urban and social landscape (p. 359). By exposing and contextualizing common misconceptions about Shenzhen perpetuated in official versions of the familiar success story, she strives to deliver a "factual account of the city's evolution" (p. 8). This encompasses a thorough reconsideration of Shenzhen's reinvention as SEZ; its purpose and location, neither capitalist enclave nor tabula rasa; the time needed for its development, refuting the notion of an "instant city" founded in 1979; and the various groups and people involved, ranging from Chinese Communist Party leaders, central planners, outside investors, and infrastructure regiments of the People's Liberation Army, to local governments, villagers, and millions of migrants.

The four sections in Du's book represent the different scales and foci of her analysis, proceeding from Shenzhen's National Relevance and Regional History down to the local City Construction and District Transformation levels. In each section the author centers on different (historical) individuals and artifacts entangled with the urban and economic evolution of today's Shenzhen. Drawing on various academic contributions, newspaper articles, local gazetteers, official documents, and her own field research, Du ties the threads of personal histories, experiences, and anecdotes with general developments in the emerging metropolis. Her descriptions are meticulously documented and well-illustrated with relevant maps, photographs, and architectural diagrams. Some readers might wish for a comprehensive theoretical framing of the narratives, including a critical discussion on the sources—as well as their limitations—and a proper bibliography providing easy access to Chinese and Western reference materials alike.

Complementing earlier research by Stefan Ai (2014) and Linda Vlassenrood (2016), Du argues that "Shenzhen's growth and development after 1979 should not be attributed solely to the national government's centralized economic policies," but is equally, if not more importantly, rooted in the geography, history, and culture of the Shenzhen region, especially the city's urban form and spatial organization (p. 8). This is a topic she unfolds in her third and fourth sections. Historians of technology, migration, and land use change will be particularly interested in her illuminating sketches of the history of salt and oyster production and the long-term impact of these trades on local infrastructure, architecture, and the natural environment.

Du's book also resonates with O'Donnell, Wong, and Bach's (2017) collection on Shenzhen's urban transformation and, more generally, with Peter Herrle, Josefine Fokdal, and Detlev Ipsen's (2015) study on urban(izing) villages in the Pearl River Delta regarding the significance of local negotiations and informal practices alongside national development policies.

For planning historians and urban anthropologists, several of Du's observations on the discrepancies between central planning targets and the actual situation may seem prosaic; however, she turns them into a compelling argument against promoting Shenzhen as a "replicable model of city planning and economic development," at home or abroad (p. 9). Du effectively demonstrates that Shenzhen...