Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City

by Mary Ann O'Donnell (Editor), Winnie Won Yin Wong (Editor), Jonathan Bach (Editor)

This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries.

Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

Genres: China

360 pages, Paperback

Published February 7, 2017

Reviews

[Jesse Field · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite its incredibly young age, the city of Shenzhen deserves a rich and complete narrative history from a sensitive researcher who can investigate and synthesize many different avenues. This volume is not that, but a crucial step along the way. It begins with Ezra Vogel's valuable memory of the place as the backwater communist station north of Hong Kong, in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution, and then slams forward to brief, vivid examinations of the city through the lenses of biographies of founding figures like Yuan Geng, urban planning, rhetoric and discourse, public health, the culture industry, and even an article on the airport. More than one essay takes up the subject of 'urban villages,' those oddly mixed zones of development, full of 'handshake buildings' and ramshackle old Hakka structures that one finds snuggled right up against the gleaming skyscrapers of the new Shenzhen.

The result is an odd assemblage of ideas, somewhat hastily assembled and in many places patchy and unsatisfactory. Evidently young scholars write about sex workers, the events surrounding H1N1, and the building of the international airport without robust theses, giving us something more like notes, full of hints of the larger significance continued research might have. A noble enough purpose, perhaps. More seasoned scholars like Mary Ann O'Donnell evidently lead the younger ones, and outsiders like Jonathan Bach, into this project, but write so much more sensitively and with historical background material that we want her to take on the single-volume work the city is crying for. (Bach, meanwhile, only offers extremely forgettable notes full of that discourse of semiotics and post-modernity, which now lack even trendiness to support their value for the reading.)

Read with my students -- the volume is perfect for young undergraduate minds already familiar with Shenzhen but who have not undertaken research themselves, nor have they looked at their own city in critical terms.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book :) Very very interesting ... I found the third section most interesting but enjoyed it all. A couple chapters seemed a little overly theoretical but generally I loved it :)

[Yisu Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

一般，更偏观念一点，干货不多（不管是案例还是历史）。