Hong Kong’s relentless consumerism is reflected here in a funhouse mirror kind of way, with Hong Kong’s small, elegant boutiques and narrow streets replaced in Shenzhen by suburban big-box retailing on Brobdingnagian avenues. The sidewalks on Shenzhen’s Renminnan Road are incredibly wide and double-lined with trees, and the stores are massive, divided into blunt categories: Men’s World, Women’s World, Children’s World, Technology World. The fringes, as in Hong Kong, are filled with small business: kiosks selling grilled meat, postcards, stuffed animals, underwear; an elderly man in a brown suit selling pornographic dvds out of a gym bag. Mountains loom in the haze at the north end of the street, and people flow into and out of the stores, weighing the authenticity of the wares. Like Hong Kong before it, Shenzhen specializes in knock-offs. Technology and fashion are copied before the original products even hit the stores, and pirated dvds surface before a film’s premiere. There is a whole mall dedicated to copies. The civic catchphrase, captured on a banner in the Shenzhen Museum, is, “Pioneering Initiation for the Second Time.” Shenzhen celebrates imitation.
The city was built quickly and cheaply, giving it a sense of being both ephemeral and artificial. Within a decade, there were 300 skyscrapers. Architects finished the designs and drawings for some high-rises in seven days. Blueprints were sold or pirated, and buildings were knocked off like Calvin Klein jeans, with a few new details to distinguish them. Why pay for celebrity when you can recreate it for a fraction of the price?
Many of the surrounding residential buildings already appear worn and dated. The facades are rust-stained from the air conditioners that perch at every window on steel struts. On the sides of some buildings banners are hung with a pouting ten-storey face selling lipstick or an unshaven cowboy selling jeans. There is protective metal grille work over the windows, even twenty storeys up, as a hedge against thieves.
Architecture in Shenzhen has become something that is less concerned with the notional ideas of shelter and aesthetics and more closely resembles pork belly futures. It is a commodity that is bought, traded, and stolen, one whose primary function is a return on investment. The downtown, which was centred around the original village of Luohu, is now being moved by government dictate. The result is a fevered cycle of investment and construction at the new site and a languishing of the existing downtown. Urban cycles of decay and resurrection that take generations to play out in North American cities accelerate to a few years here. Like Los Angeles, Shenzhen seems to have no centre. High-rises have been razed after barely a decade to make way for more promising investments. In some ways, the city is trying to knock off Hong Kong, and it is Hong Kong money that is largely financing it.
I was staying in Overseas Chinese Town, conceived as a showpiece bloc within the showpiece city. It was designed for returning Chinese nationals to be both a model residential area and the city’s official tourist district. In my business hotel, a dozen nationalities sat restlessly in the restaurant each night eating the delicacies — “traditional sliced ham spaghetti soup” to name one — that had been created to make foreigners feel at home. They nursed their expensive scotches and looked out at the vast awakening market, staring with the slack, anxious faces of men watching pornography. Here was a consumer Frankenstein, teeming millions waking up to the promise of Buicks and McDonald’s, lurching through the marketplace, sucking up the latest technology and fashions. Behind them the global villagers run, bearing torches and co-production deals. Every morning chartered buses pulled up to the hotel and the dark-suited salespeople were taken away, returning at nightfall. A Hong Kong businesswoman told me that insurance was one of the fastest growth industries in Shenzhen. A foreign concept, it now struck a chord, mitigating the dangers of urban life.
On a blue morning, the air soft and still unladen with the day’s particulates, you could glimpse the utopian city that planners had imagined. On each side of busy Shennan Road, there are broad, graceful promenades that are lined with trees and filled with students walking arm in arm. A huge contiguous park features large plazas, serene Oriental pools, raw forest, and sculpted gardens. It sits in the shade of a monolithic Wal-Mart, a company that grows at the same rapacious rate as the city, which has embraced it as kin. (The first Wal-Mart in China was built in Shenzhen, a beachhead established in 1996.) A group of fifty women are exercising in the park, moving rhythmically to upbeat music. Behind them is a concrete cube with a small hole in it. A discreet sign reads, “If you are not well, just shout at me.” It is an art installation titled Comfort Hole; the idea is that you shout your demons into the hole and they become imprisoned in the cube. Beside it is a large smooth slate plaza where a small army of men wearing bright green grocer smocks perform Tai Chi. A ballroom dance class is underway in another plaza. It is 7:45 a.m.
Across the road are two massive theme parks, Window of the World and Splendid China. The former features miniatures of the world’s great monuments. The first park had a certain appeal when no one could leave China, but it has diminishing currency as the border becomes more porous. Splendid China has most of the country’s wonders reduced to scale and it too is sparsely populated. The Chinese government opened a second version of Splendid China in Florida, near Disney World in 1993, but it closed ten years later when attendance dwindled to a few hundred visitors a day. There is an unwanted earnestness to their theme parks (among Shenzhen’s other theme parks is Minsk World, dedicated to a decommissioned Russian aircraft carrier). Rather than creating fantasy, they are knocking off reality.
An hour away, near the Hong Kong airport, Disney’s newest theme park is finished, and the shadow of that threatening mouse hangs over the land. A monorail runs through Overseas Chinese Town, and from its perch I could look down to the midway of Happy Valley, a children’s amusement park, where I was reminded that this is a nation defined by the only child.
The group that built Overseas Chinese Town is planning another version on the opposite side of the city, on the east coast near Yantian. Above the beautifully groomed beach there, beyond the McDonald’s, the kfc, and the Feeling Party Bar, hundreds of expensive condos have been carved into the mountains. An official told me that the new Overseas Chinese Town is going to be a “major international city, a beautiful seashore resort.” It will have beaches and a marina; it will be a showcase to the world. And what of the old Overseas Chinese Town? Presumably it will quietly wither, its theme parks eventually razed to make something fresher and more profitable. Another decade, another showcase.
The Diwang (King of Land) Mansion is Shenzhen’s tallest building at 384 metres — negligible by Hong Kong standards, but with claims to being the fastest high-rise ever built. (A new storey was added every two-and-a-half days.) On the top floor there is an observation area with video games and life-sized wax statues of Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher sitting down to tea. Looking south, I could see Hong Kong’s New Territories, a quilt of what were once rice paddies and are now mostly fish farms. There are some hills to the south, denuded of foliage, which was burned off to spot Chinese nationals illegally fleeing to Hong Kong. Now there are daily commuters, people who work in Hong Kong but live in Shenzhen, where housing is a fraction of the cost.
