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| 1n 1970 a village. In 2018 highest office rents in the world |
There is a dreamlike unreality in comparing today's Shenzhen with the ramshackle township I first saw in the late 1970s.
There was little to attract notice. Shenzhen may not quite have been the fishing village of urban mythology - local accounts say the hamlets and towns of Bao'an County amounted to around 58,000 people - but it was hardly going to stir the adrenaline of the occasional sleepy visitor.
So speaks David Dodwell in today's South China Morning Post.
I've been critical of Dodwell, in a letter the paper published. Gotta give him this, though : he's prolific!
And here in this article, he's spot on. He could be describing my own feelings on my first visit to Shenzhen, in September 1976.
And the rest of the article is also spot on. About the extraordinary — historically unprecedented — growth of the city, from a tiny hamlet to a city of over 12 million. In four decades. And of its office space now in the ten most expensive in the world. And of its civic society shallowness because of that very speed of growth.
And now Shenzhen is on the cusp of a new Beijing grand plan, as the centre of a "Greater Bay Area" super city of 65 million. And if which we here in Hong Kong will be a part. Dodwell compares it to the opening of China and its SEZs in the early eighties, which Deng mocked into high gear in 1992, his famous "Southern Tour" which I remember so clearly.
I'll add this: that whenever I visit Shenzhen, which I do from time to time as it's just over the border under an hour away, I find it pretty thoroughly charmless. Hong Kong remains the city for me. It's the city for us, dogs 🐕 and all.
