Shenzhen, from thirty thousand people

At the end of 2017 Shenzhen became the first city in the world to run its entire bus fleet on electricity, more than 16,000 buses, most of them built by BYD, a local company that started out making batteries. The city installed some 8,000 charging points at around 500 bus depots so the fleet could charge overnight.

The taxis followed. By the early 2020s Shenzhen had more than 20,000 electric taxis, close to all of them, and electric cars, recognizable by their green license plates, make up a growing share of everything else on the road.

It was a deliberate policy, paid for with heavy national and city subsidies, and it turned Shenzhen into a showroom for the electric vehicle industry that China now leads.

In the 1980s this was an industrial zone for state-owned electronics factories. As the factories moved out to cheaper land, their buildings filled up with traders, and the district turned into a market for everything from single components to finished products. By 2020 there were around 38,000 businesses here.

In the 2000s Huaqiangbei was the capital of shanzhai, the Chinese word for knock-off phones. Small firms bought a cheap chipset, usually from the Taiwanese company MediaTek, designed a case around it and had phones on the counters within weeks, often under brand names one letter away from the real thing, sometimes with features the real thing lacked, such as two SIM card slots. At the peak, around 2008, they were selling all over Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The knock-off trade faded as genuine Chinese brands became cheap and good, but it left behind the ability to go from an idea to a product in a few weeks, with every part for sale within walking distance. That is why so many hardware companies grew up in Shenzhen. Huawei was founded here in 1987, BYD in 1995 as a battery maker, Tencent, the company behind WeChat, in 1998, and DJI, now the world’s largest drone maker, in 2006. Engineers still come to Huaqiangbei to buy parts for prototypes, and the district is sometimes called the Silicon Valley of hardware.

After Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s leader, and he wanted to find out whether foreign capital, private business and market prices could work inside a socialist country, in a place where they could be tested before they spread. The answer was the special economic zone. Four were set up in 1980, each chosen for its links to the outside world: Shenzhen next to Hong Kong, Zhuhai next to Macau, Xiamen across the strait from Taiwan, and Shantou, home region of a large overseas Chinese community.

The zone was fenced off from the rest of China by an internal border, known as the second line, and Chinese citizens needed a permit to enter. Inside it, land could be leased to foreign companies, prices and wages could be set by the market, and Hong Kong factory owners could move production across the river. The internal checkpoints were not removed until 2018.

The experiment nearly stalled. After the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, conservatives in Beijing pushed back against the reforms. In early 1992 Deng, 87 years old and without any formal post, made a tour of the south. In Shenzhen he told local officials to be bolder and to stop worrying about whether the zones were capitalist or socialist. The trip became known as the Southern Tour, and it restarted the reforms. Growth over the next two years ran at around 13 percent a year.

A few months later a giant hand-painted portrait of Deng went up beside Lizhi Park in Futian. It has been redone several times since and is still there. A popular song from the 1990s remembers him as the old man who drew a circle on the southern coast of China.

From the 1950s to 1980, hundreds of thousands of people fled Guangdong for Hong Kong, driven out by famine, political campaigns and poverty. Official estimates run from about 560,000 to 700,000, and some researchers believe the real number was two or three times higher. The big waves came in 1957, 1962, 1972 and 1979.

Some climbed over Wutong Mountain or waded the Shenzhen River. The most common route was a swim of about four kilometers from Shekou, on the western edge of what is now Shenzhen, across Shenzhen Bay to the New Territories. Many drowned, others were shot by border guards, and collecting and burying the bodies was part of the work of local officials.

Hong Kong’s response changed over time. From 1974, anyone who got past the border area, reached the city and found relatives was allowed to stay, under what was called the touch base policy, while those caught near the border were sent back. The policy ended in October 1980, two months after the Shenzhen special economic zone was formally established.

There is a direct line from one to the other. Many of those who escaped built businesses in Hong Kong, and when the zone opened they were among the first to bring factories and money back across the border. Today the traffic runs the other way, with Hong Kong people crossing into Shenzhen for dinners, shopping and weekends.