【城市印象】之——未来之城 · 深圳City Impressions: Shenzhen, the City of the Future

"What does Shenzhen's future hold? 1) On his first inspection tour after taking office, the boss chose Shenzhen. 2) The boss keeps stressing: empty talk harms the nation, hard work rejuvenates it. Reform and opening up must be upheld; systems and mechanisms must be innovated. Draw your own conclusions."

Talk about Shenzhen and you can't avoid talking about Beijing.

Beijing is the nation's political, economic, and cultural center. It basically concentrates the best resources in every field and industry in the country — schools, hospitals, policy, and the rest. It's the only northern city among all of China's developed cities. I've long joked with friends that if the capital hadn't been placed in Beijing to begin with, the north wouldn't have a single contender.

Beijing isn't as prosperous as Shanghai, as lively as Guangzhou, or as open as Shenzhen. What it has is grandeur and an all-pervading sense of presence. Beijing is truly a place for grinding and striving, not for living (not mere survival).

Shenzhen, meanwhile, is currently the single most suitable city, bar none, for young people to start a business, work, and live. Beijing's environment is too bad, Shanghai is a bit unwelcoming to outsiders, Guangzhou has hit middle age — and Shenzhen is inclusive and open.

(Figure in original: a comparison of Beijing's and Shenzhen's city slogans.)

Shenzhen's Standing

Beijing, the political and cultural center; Shanghai, the economic and financial center; Guangzhou, the commercial and trade center; Shenzhen, the tech and innovation center. This is the core competitiveness that lands Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen among the first-tier cities.

Many people think Shanghai is China's financial center; I personally think China's financial center is still Beijing. That's dictated by our national circumstances.

Shanghai has a strong class consciousness; its rich carry something like the sensibility of British aristocracy, and few would dispute that Shanghai people are refined. That's one reason it's said Shanghai can't produce good internet companies: petit-bourgeois, refined, out of touch with the grassroots. So Shanghai is better suited to finance.

Although many call Shanghai a financial center, industry, not finance, is the bedrock Shanghai stands on. From a century ago to now, Shanghai has been China's largest industrial city. No city can challenge Shanghai's industrial standing.

Shanghai is China's largest heavy-industry base, with a full range of sectors — shipbuilding, marine equipment, port machinery, aerospace, steel, heavy machinery and equipment, thermal/hydro/nuclear power equipment, military equipment, complete plant sets, and more. Many people don't see it as a heavy-industry city and instead think of it as a financial city like New York or Tokyo.

When a people's prosperity springs from light industry, light industry is the easier thing to embrace, but it's the heaviness of heavy industry that we ought to hold in awe, because it's what lets us live with pride.

Phones and PCs naturally connect with ordinary people better than a steel-hulled aircraft carrier does, so the public feels Shanghai isn't very innovative. It's like how Russia, despite a GDP less than a third of Japan's — even less than South Korea's — is still one of the handful of great powers in the world.

If innovation is confined to the internet, the field of view needs to widen a bit more.

Shanghai's industry is led mainly by metallurgy, petrochemicals, machinery, electronics, automobiles, aviation, aerospace, ultra-high-speed supercomputers, shipbuilding, and other sectors. Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze, gathers a vast amount of high-end manufacturing. From the start of the Self-Strengthening Movement, Shanghai has been China's most important industrial base, and the Jiangnan Arsenal was the starting point of Shanghai's heavy industry. In both the Nationalist government era and the planned-economy era, Shanghai's industrial development already led the nation by a wide margin. Thanks to Shanghai's convenient transport and advanced science and culture, the R&D and production bases for many heavy-industry products are located there. In the early days of reform and opening up, central policy drove rapid development in China's southeast, leaving Shanghai's industry facing a crisis of marginalization; but since the mid-1990s, with the development of the Pudong New Area and the reduced share of fiscal transfers, among other factors, Shanghai's industry has found new life again.

And Shenzhen is China's Silicon Valley.

What makes Shenzhen China's Silicon Valley? Shenzhen breaks into many districts: Luohu (Shenzhen's commercial center), Futian (Shenzhen's financial center), Nanshan (Shenzhen's high-tech center), Longgang (Shenzhen's industrial center), Bao'an (Shenzhen's "aircraft center" — a joke; the airport's there).

Shenzhen has China's largest internet company — Tencent.

China's largest telecom equipment makers: Huawei and ZTE.

China's largest new-energy vehicle maker: BYD.

China's largest phone touchscreen maker: O-film.

China's largest medical-device company: Mindray.

China's largest laser-equipment company: Han's Laser.

Shenzhen has the most private tech companies among A-share listed firms.

China's best bank: China Merchants Bank.

Shenzhen has China's best insurance company: Ping An.

Shenzhen has China's most formidable real estate companies: Vanke, Evergrande, Gemdale, China Resources, OCT.

Shenzhen has China's largest theme-park cluster: OCT (Splendid China, the Folk Culture Village, Happy Valley, Window of the World).

Shenzhen has China's largest logistics company: SF Express.

Shenzhen has a few of China's largest TV-set makers: Konka and Skyworth.

Shenzhen has China's largest golf course: Mission Hills.

Shenzhen has China's largest electronics contract manufacturer: Foxconn.

Beijing's internet companies cluster in two areas. First is the PC and phone business represented by Lenovo and Xiaomi, whose core competitiveness is brand, channels, and marketing. Essentially they're a China-boosted version of America's HP and Dell — achieving scale advantages through broad terminal-channel coverage, with nothing exceptional on the technology side. So they carry only the name of tech and can't represent or embody the strength of Beijing's internet companies.

On the other side are Baidu, 360, Sina, Sohu, Youku, iQiyi, JD, Dangdang, Soufun, Autohome, 58.com, Qunar, Mafengwo, Perfect World, Zhaopin, Douban, Zhihu, Meituan, and so on.

Looks like a lot, but apart from JD, Dangdang, and Perfect World, nearly all of them are new-media companies.

Baidu and Qunar are information gateways that stole every media outlet's business; portals stole newspapers' business, video sites stole TV stations' business, travel and auto vertical media stole magazines' business, Zhaopin and 58 stole classified-ad business.

More than 90% of Beijing's internet companies build their business model on advertising, collectively called new-media companies. The reason they're all in Beijing is that Beijing is the political and cultural center, the point from which information emanates, better suited to media companies' growth.

Shenzhen is an entirely different scene. Shenzhen has Tencent, Xunlei, NetEase, YY, UC, and Vipshop, which focus on building the underlying platforms of internet products and realize value innovation through entertainment, e-commerce, value-added service fees, and the like.

Huawei, ZTE, DJI, Teclast, Onda, TP-Link, O-film, BYD (Lens), Sunwoda, Everwin Precision — these are typical smartphone and hardware-tech industries, and they represent China competing globally overseas.

BYD, as a representative new-energy vehicle company, is making a long-term play in the auto industry's upgrade toward new energy and intelligence. In Shenzhen you can see BYD electric cars filling the streets.

The three great fields of modern tech industry: IT-hardware innovation, mobile internet, and new-energy smart vehicles. Whatever Silicon Valley has, Shenzhen has too. Silicon Valley has Apple, Google, Tesla. Shenzhen has Huawei's HiSilicon chips, Tencent's mobile social platform, and BYD's electric cars.

Economy

In 2017 Shenzhen's GDP was 2.2286 trillion yuan, ranking third. Shenzhen's economic output started from 280 million yuan in 1980 and reached 2.2286 trillion by 2017 — nearly 8,000 times the growth in almost 40 years, dubbed the "Shenzhen miracle."

Without a comparison you can't grasp how remarkable the Shenzhen miracle is: in the first thirty years, Shenzhen's economy grew at an average annual rate of 36%, against a national average of 10%. In an era of rapid economic growth, that means limitless opportunity.

By common sense, a megacity, thanks to its many advantages and factors, forms a huge siphoning effect — see the standing of Sichuan and Chongqing, or of Wuhan and Xi'an within their provinces.

Back when Wuhan and Xi'an were dead set on becoming directly governed municipalities and lost out to Chongqing, their relations with their provincial governments plunged to freezing. After Chongqing became a municipality, the Sichuan provincial government threw the whole province's weight behind building up Chengdu to counter Chongqing's siphoning effect, which is how Chengdu got to where it is today. Chengdu's GDP is Sichuan's largest, nearly seven times that of second-place Panzhihua.

Very cleverly, the Pearl River Delta manages to host Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen — three megacities — all at once, without forming a siphoning effect. And Guangdong's economic miracle took shape without a single directly governed municipality. At the same time, the PRD has more than three megacities. Look at the national ranking of city GDP: China has over 300 prefecture-level cities, and the PRD has two special administrative regions, two sub-provincial cities, and seven prefecture-level cities.

Although Hong Kong can't be counted as part of Guangdong Province, it overall belongs to the PRD and the Greater Bay Area economic zone. Three megacities coexisting at once is a topic well worth studying.

Of the three megacities, Guangzhou is the one that truly formed through natural development. Since antiquity, Guangzhou has been a major hub of China's foreign trade. On the Maritime Silk Road, merchants could set out from Guangzhou, west to Europe and east to Japan — a rare trade hub in ancient China (savor that word). Shenzhen owes much to being one of the most advanced cities in China's governance-system building; it's also China's reform test bed and open-door vanguard, with the best policies all trialed in Shenzhen first. Policy support offsets most of the siphoning effect from Guangzhou — it even siphons Guangzhou in return. Hong Kong needs no explaining.

From the angle of professional division of labor, the complementary economic models of the three also let the three megacities coexist. Guangzhou is trade-oriented, Shenzhen is innovation, Hong Kong is finance. On the gathering of goods: Guangzhou is a distribution center for all manner of goods, Shenzhen for electronics and digital products; Hong Kong is for imported goods and watches.

On complementarity: Guangzhou has healthcare and education; Shenzhen has innovation and high-tech companies; Hong Kong is a free port and Asia's financial center (yes, Asia — second only to New York and London).

On historical standing: Guangzhou has been an important trading port of China since the Song dynasty; Hong Kong developed rapidly by serving as a window during a period when China was temporarily closed off domestically; Shenzhen first took over Hong Kong's manufacturing as it moved out, then leveraged its lack of historical baggage and its favorable test-bed policies to rapidly transform into an innovative, high-tech city.

In sum, the existence of the three cities is shaped by historical and political factors, and together with the march of the times, each plays to its strengths, forming its own character while complementing the others.

China's urban-cluster landscape is increasingly taking on the shadow of America's: the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region maps to the US East (Boston–New York–Philadelphia), Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei to the Chicago area, the PRD to California — and, amusingly, right next to California is the gambling city Las Vegas, while China's gambling city is Macau.

China's 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 directly governed municipalities, and 2 special administrative regions; America's 50 states and 1 federal district; Japan's 1 metropolis, 1 circuit, 2 urban prefectures, and 43 prefectures; South Korea's 1 special city, 9 provinces, and 6 metropolitan cities — these are all first-level administrative divisions.

Let's look at the ranking of first-level administrative divisions by total economic output worldwide:

(Figure in original: a global ranking of first-level administrative divisions by total economic output.)

Though both are in the world's top ten, Guangdong and California are still a tier apart. California's GDP is higher than France's (world No. 6), while Guangdong's GDP is roughly equal to Spain's (world No. 14).

Thirty years, for a person, is barely coming into the "age of standing firm." Thirty years, for a city, counts only as its infancy. Never mind comparing it with millennia-old cities like Paris — even next to Hong Kong, which doesn't have a long history, Shenzhen is a young-as-young-can-be city.

Yet thirty-plus years of wild growth have also drained Shenzhen's land, environment, and other resources. Shenzhen's total land area is under 2,000 square kilometers, with roughly 1,000 available for construction. With land resources scarce, both individuals' living costs and firms' operating costs keep rising. And the group hurt most by rising costs is the young.

The young are precisely what has propped Shenzhen up all along. The average age of Shenzhen's urban population is under 29, with over 80% between 18 and 26. Precisely because the overwhelming majority are young, Shenzhen has enjoyed the demographic dividend most fully of any city over the past thirty years. Nearly everyone is prime-age labor, with no burden of elder care and even no burden of raising minors. Everyone is working to create wealth. But today's Shenzhen is no longer the Shenzhen of before.

Those who came to Shenzhen relatively early have now entered middle and old age; they've already enjoyed the dividends of the early development phase, taken hold of a certain amount of resources, and long since sorted out housing and cars. They've begun to enjoy their lives, and bearing Shenzhen's ever-rising cost of living is no problem for them at all. But the pressure on the college grads who've just arrived in Shenzhen is easy to imagine. Even the young people at Huawei and Tencent are starting to worry about buying a home. Shenzhen can't help but reflect: if the young no longer cling to this city, if they leave one after another, where will the city's future vitality lie? Where will its future creativity lie?

To secure Shenzhen's continued development, it has to attract the young to Shenzhen and retain those young people already hustling there. That's why Shenzhen is currently sharply loosening its household-registration rules and offering rental subsidies.

Shenzhen's own land is extremely limited — an unchangeable fact. But Shenzhen's two neighbors, Dongguan and Huizhou, are richly endowed with land. If Shenzhen can pull off the integration of Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou and become the regional leader of the east bank of the Pearl River, driving shared prosperity, then it still has plenty of room to grow.

The national leadership recognized this problem long ago. In the 2008 Outline of the Reform and Development Plan for the Pearl River Delta, the PRD was for the first time divided into the east and west banks of the Pearl River estuary (thereby sidestepping the question of who between Guangzhou and Shenzhen is the regional boss), and one key focus was advancing Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou integration on the east bank. On the east bank, Shenzhen is unquestionably the boss and the engine. Around Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou, re-plotting economy, industry, transport, and residential distribution strategically to form an internationalized city cluster — what a beautiful blueprint that is. But because of the varying degrees of attention paid by the three localities' leaders, and problems with the existing administrative system, Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou integration has lagged badly.

Population

My first feeling on arriving in Shenzhen was comfort — a comfort that hits you head-on, the pleasant kind. The second most immediate impression: few people, few cars. That "few" is relative to Beijing and Shanghai. On weekdays, riding the subway, going without a seat basically doesn't happen. The image below is a real shot of Shenzhen's subway around 8 p.m.

(Figure in original: a real shot of the Shenzhen subway at 8 p.m.)

People are a city's cells. Beijing and Shanghai are both super-metropolises of the 25-million-population class. Someone once joked: take a map of Beijing, stick a pin in anywhere, and you might hit a division-level official. So in Beijing and Shanghai you wander the streets and any building you bump into is some so-called "national-level" or "Asia-/world-first" this or that, and anyone you casually run into is a "titan among men." All manner of celebrities live packed together, and, with China's top four universities — Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, Jiao Tong — Beijing and Shanghai hold advantages and standing in drawing hearts and talent that Guangzhou and Shenzhen simply can't match by nature.

According to the latest data from Shenzhen's statistics bureau, at the end of 2017 the city's resident population was 12.5283 million. The resident-population increase reached 620,000, a peak in recent years.

Going back, since 2011 Shenzhen's annual resident-population increase had run around 90,000; in 2014 it hit 150,000, and over the following three years it soared, with resident-population increases each topping 500,000.

Of the four first-tier cities, Shenzhen is the one with net population inflow. Beijing is pushing people out, Shanghai is also controlling its population, while Guangzhou and Shenzhen are still attracting people — and Shenzhen is flinging its doors wide open to bring in high-end talent. The population added in 2015 and 2016 was 1.13 million.

Data from mid-2017 shows Shenzhen has the youngest population structure, with a resident-population average age of 32.5. Among the four first-tier cities, Shenzhen is the youngest. Only the young have the ability and the need to buy homes, so by the coefficient of potential home-buyers within the population, Shenzhen is the city with the strongest home-buying demand.

Culture

When many people talk about Shenzhen, or to anyone about to go live there, they bring up four words: cultural desert. Sometimes they even use them for Guangzhou and Shenzhen together.

Personally, I feel the cultural facilities and cultural atmosphere of the four first-tier cities are more than enough for a great many people. The Summer Palace and Forbidden City are in Beijing, and I don't see you strolling through them every week. Beijing really does have everything you could want — food, drink, and fun all in abundance. The rich have their way of living, the poor have their way of playing, strivers grind hard, the artsy dogs entertain themselves, Wangfujing sits right next to the CBD, and Sanlitun is nightly revelry and neon lights.

It's not that Shenzhen has no history — it has no long history. It's not that Shenzhen has no culture — it has no such diverse culture. It's not that Shenzhen lacks cultural depth, but that many people don't know how to go looking for it.

Shenzhen has culture but no history — two different things. By their logic, America has no culture either, and yet America is now the world's foremost exporter of culture.

Shenzhen's cultural and sports activities and facilities rank among the very best in the country in both quantity and quality. Shenzhen doesn't have Shanghai's endless galleries and art shows, and it rarely has century-old historic buildings, but every Sunday you can hear a free concert at the concert hall, and every Thursday you can go to the library's South Study to hear Professor Sun Liping discuss aesthetics and philosophy — activities like these are all there. If you show up at 9:05 on a weekend at a library that opens at 9, you'll find no seats all the same.

Shenzhen likewise has a great number of arts workers: designers, writers, and practitioners in animation, film and TV, and music. Shenzhen's cultural-creative industry development can flatten most inland cities too.

At the same time, Shenzhen is becoming one of the homes of entertainment galas.

China's two hottest satellite channels — Hunan TV and Zhejiang TV — both held their 2016 and 2017 New Year's Eve concerts in Shenzhen. Luo Zhenyu moved his New Year's Eve talk from Beijing to Shenzhen. China's flashiest company held its "Double 11 Gala" in Shenzhen too. On top of that, hit TV series and films are frequently shot on location in Shenzhen — for instance The Mermaid, Guilty of Mind, City of Rock, Special Identity, An Affair of Wind, Flowers, Snow, Moon, and Youthful Recklessness.

Shenzhen has a pleasant climate and a uniquely styled urban spatial layout. Beijing has no water, Shanghai no mountains, Guangzhou (the main city) no sea — Shenzhen sits between mountains and sea, gracefully arranged, with grasslands and even sand dunes, large stretches of open natural ground perfect for building outdoor sets and staging large-scale action shots. It has the most watchable mountain-and-water scenery of any first-tier city, able to satisfy the widest range of filming needs.

Shenzhen has no native culture, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. A culture with vitality is culture too. Culture isn't only Tang poems and Song lyrics, palaces and buildings. Reading and listening to music are culture. Compared with those cultural symbols lying in the dusty stacks, Shenzhen is generating and building a fresher, more inclusive culture. Shenzhen isn't the so-called cultural desert — it's an oasis watered by the dew of culture.

Many say Shenzhen people are utilitarian, single-mindedly after money, treating efficiency as life itself. That's not wrong, but it's not as if people in Beijing and Shanghai aren't single-mindedly after money either. Shenzhen also has Shenzheners who hold fast to the higher ground of the spirit, who resist utilitarianism through their own actions.

A first-tier city is fundamentally a black hole, taking everything in while devouring everything all at once. If you can't hold on to your own way of living, it's easy to be assimilated by the so-called "utilitarian" value system.

Beijing is the mecca of the artsy, the high ground of information, the hall of knowledge, the temple of politics. At the foot of the imperial city, even the old man selling newspapers has a voice eight octaves louder than yours.

Shanghai is capital's playground. Petit-bourgeois heaven. Returnee elites flaunting every ounce of prestige.

Shenzhen has the most passion, is the most inclusive, the youngest, the least burdened. With no historical baggage, all it can do is keep looking forward. And on closer inspection, "not giving you a sense of belonging" and "having no deep social-cultural roots" aren't necessarily bad things either.

So-called "traditional morality" and "cultural depth" are often not such great things. "Come and you're a Shenzhener" — so there are no tangled webs of social relations, no inefficient and off-putting bureaucracy, no neighborhood-committee auntie gossiping about who you bring home every day, no overly extreme conservative-culture constraints, and so on.

Food

Because Shenzhen is a city of immigrants, you can basically eat flavors from everywhere, so there's no need to worry about missing familiar tastes. As for the makeup, it feels like Jiangsu-Zhejiang cuisine, the Hunan-food crowd, and Sichuan food make up the majority. But overall, on food, Shenzhen basically ranks last among the four first-tier cities; in Guangdong, it's still "for food, go to Guangzhou."

Education

As one of the four first-tier cities, Shenzhen gets flattened and thrashed by the other three on education.

In basic education, Shenzhen's gaokao performance isn't outstanding, but its all-round quality holds its own. It's just that Guangdong's commercial civilization is so overwhelmingly strong that it creates the impression that, "on paper," Guangdong's gaokao college-admission rate isn't high.

In higher education there's just one comprehensive university, Shenzhen University. To solve this, the Shenzhen government keeps opening graduate schools. There's a university town over by Xili Lake in Nanshan, where the graduate schools of Tsinghua, Peking, and Harbin Institute of Technology sit "seamlessly together." At the same time, the Houhai area has research institutes of Hong Kong's major universities.

Healthcare

On healthcare, Shenzhen's resources are also very poor. Shenzhen has only 16 tertiary-A hospitals, five of them added in 2017. 2017 was a bumper year for Shenzhen's tertiary-A hospitals, adding five in one year: Shenzhen Children's Hospital, Luohu District People's Hospital, the University of Hong Kong–Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen Longcheng Hospital, and Shenzhen Third People's Hospital successively made "tertiary-A." Among them, HKU-Shenzhen Hospital is Guangdong's youngest tertiary-A hospital (open just five years). Shenzhen Longcheng Hospital is Guangdong's first tertiary-A rehabilitation hospital and currently Shenzhen's only privately run tertiary-A hospital. The two newest hospitals on the list are both in Longgang District.

Where to Settle in the Future

If you're fleeing Beijing or Shanghai because of the smog, then Shenzhen is the ideal place. If it's because the survival pressure is too great, then Shenzhen, being a first-tier city too, has pressure not much less than Beijing's or Shanghai's. Aside from rent, the outlays for transport and everyday food and drink won't be any lower than in the capital. As a first-tier city, Shenzhen is bound to be measured against other first-tier cities.

Though I've praised Shenzhen a lot, the gap on every front compared with Beijing and Shanghai is more than a little. China's finest young people are nearly all concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai — that's a fact, and one to acknowledge.

There are countless ways Shenzhen can't match Beijing, but its air absolutely crushes Beijing's — it's blue skies most of the time. There are just two seasons a year: summer, and heading toward summer.

Tips

1: Shenzhen has the country's most formidable animation industry.

2: Shenzhen was the earliest region in the country to let non-locals apply for passports and Hong Kong-Macau travel permits on a residence permit and social security.

3: Shenzhen's total import-export value exceeds US$440 billion, first in the country for 23 straight years. A foreign outlet once joked that if the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Expressway got jammed, prices for electronic components on the international market would rise.

4: Shenzhen is the city with the most parks in the country.

5: The mainland's first McDonald's was Shenzhen's Dongmen store.

6: China's first Walmart was Shenzhen's Honghu store.

7: Asia's first Sam's Club was Shenzhen's Futian store, which is also the highest-grossing Sam's Club in the world.

8: Shennan Boulevard is Shenzhen's busiest street, but the priciest homes Shenzhen sells aren't the ones along Shennan Boulevard.

9: Shenzhen's housing prices are among the highest, yet its public finances are the least dependent on land revenue of any city in the country.

10: Shenzhen has a 64% urban greening rate, second in China only to Sanya, Hainan.

11: Shenzhen's resident population has an average age of 29, the youngest of any city in China.

12: Shenzhen people sleep an average of 5.8 hours, the shortest sleep time of any Chinese city.

In a sentence: Shenzhen isn't unwelcoming to outsiders. Leisure and holidays, three stars; schooling and healthcare, two and a half stars; livability, four stars; economic development, four stars; career-grind index, three and a half stars.