Before the Boom: A Village Called Shenzhen

On a gray morning in November 1979, an old man named Wei Chenguang walked down a dirt path that wound through the rice paddies on the edge of what most of the world would have called nowhere. His worn rubber boots squelched in the mud left behind by yesterday's rain, and the mist rising from the paddies caught the first weak light of dawn. In his basket were three carp he'd caught before sunrise—his family's breakfast and, if he was lucky, maybe part of their dinner too. He was sixty-three years old, and he had walked this same path, through these same paddies, more times than he could count. His father had walked it before him, and his grandfather before that. The land was ancient, and life here had changed very little over centuries.

Wei Chenguang didn't know it, but in Beijing, just three days earlier, a law had been signed that would change everything. That November 8, 1979, the National People's Congress approved the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone—the first of its kind in China. For most people in Wei's village, the news wouldn't matter for months, maybe years. They had no radio, no television, and newspapers were rare luxuries. Besides, what could it mean to them? They were farmers. They fished. They lived as their ancestors had lived, growing rice and vegetables, raising chickens and pigs, struggling through each year to put enough food on the table. The great currents of history that swept through distant cities—Moscow, Washington, Beijing—had never touched their lives. Why would this be any different?

But something was different. Something had been different for the past several months, actually, though Wei Chenguang and his neighbors hadn't recognized it. Surveyors had been seen walking the flatlands with strange instruments. Men in suits had visited, asking questions about land and water and local conditions. The collective farm administrator, a man named Zhou who had never been particularly ambitious, had suddenly become very busy and very secretive. The air itself seemed to carry an electric charge, like the moments before a summer thunderstorm.

In the village that Wei called home—a settlement so small it didn't appear on most maps, nestled against the border with British Hong Kong—there were perhaps two hundred families living in low brick houses and bamboo-and-thatch structures. The village had no name that appeared on any official document. On their own maps, the British colonial authorities had labeled it simply as a cluster of buildings near the Sham Chun River, a tributary of the great Pearl River that flowed through southern China to the South China Sea. The Chinese government didn't officially acknowledge it either, because officially, no such place existed. It was just a village, one of hundreds of thousands of villages scattered across this vast nation, invisible and insignificant in the eyes of the outside world.

Wei Chenguang's family lived in a two-room brick house that his father had built forty years earlier. The walls were thick, meant to keep out the summer heat and the occasional winter chill, and the roof was tiled with traditional clay shingles that leaked during the autumn rains. The family's possessions were few: two wooden beds, a stone cooking platform, a few ceramic bowls and plates, some farming tools, and a small shrine to their ancestors in the corner of the main room. This was wealth by local standards. Some families in the village still lived in bamboo houses with dirt floors.

Each morning began the same way. Wei would wake before dawn to the sound of his neighbor's rooster—a bird that seemed determined to announce the sunrise whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. His wife, Lianhua, would already be up, coaxing the cooking fire back to life with dried grass and kindling. They would eat a simple breakfast of rice porridge with pickled vegetables, sometimes supplemented with a few pieces of salted fish if they could afford it. Then Wei would head to the fields, or to the river, depending on the season and the day's needs.

The rhythm of life in this village, and in Shenzhen as a whole, was governed by the agricultural calendar that had been followed in this region for millennia. In spring, the rice paddies were flooded and the young seedlings transplanted by hand—a backbreaking process that required workers to bend for hours in the muddy water. Summer brought the relentless heat and the constant battle against weeds, insects, and disease. Autumn was harvest time, when the golden grain was cut and threshed, then carried home on the shoulders of exhausted workers. Winter offered a brief respite, a time for repairs and rest and the few festivals that punctuated the agricultural year.

This was the Pearl River Delta, one of the most fertile regions in all of China. The delta's rich soil, fed by the silt of the great river and blessed with abundant water, had supported human settlement for thousands of years.Archaeologists had found evidence of organized rice cultivation here dating back to the Neolithic period, more than five thousand years ago. The Cantonese people who lived in this region—Wei Chenguang and his neighbors were Cantonese, speakers of a dialect as different from the national language of Mandarin as Spanish is from Italian—had developed sophisticated farming techniques, intricate irrigation systems, and a culture rich in art, music, and cuisine. For most of recorded history, the Pearl River Delta had been one of the most prosperous regions on Earth.

And yet, in 1979, Wei Chenguang and his fellow villagers lived in poverty that their ancestors would have found unimaginable. Their average annual income was less than two hundred yuan—about one hundred US dollars at the official exchange rate. Most families could afford meat only a few times a month. Shoes were a luxury; many children went barefoot year-round. Disease was common, life expectancy was short, and education beyond a few years of basic schooling was a dream reserved for the children of wealthy families in distant cities. The gap between the promise of this land—its fertile soil, its strategic location, its long history of commerce—and the reality of life here was almost too painful to contemplate.

To understand why the Pearl River Delta had fallen so far, why the village where Wei Chenguang lived was poor while across a narrow strip of water lay a gleaming metropolis of neon lights and luxury cars, you have to understand the story of modern China. And that story begins, not in 1979, but decades earlier—in the cataclysmic events that had reshaped the Chinese nation in the twentieth century.

In 1800, China was the world's largest economy, accounting for roughly a third of global GDP. The Middle Kingdom, as the Chinese called their nation, was a civilization of unparalleled sophistication and wealth. Its manufactured goods—silks, porcelain, tea, lacquerware—were prized across the globe. Its cities were the largest in the world. Its population of three hundred million was the largest of any nation on Earth. The emperors who ruled from the Forbidden City in Beijing were accustomed to viewing their realm as the center of the civilized world, with all other nations as mere tributary states that existed at China's pleasure.

But over the next century and a half, everything changed. A combination of internal stagnation and external pressure transformed China from the world's greatest economic power into what scholars would later call the "sick man of Asia." The Opium Wars of the 1830s and 1840s, in which Britain forced China to open its markets to the British trade in Indian opium, marked the beginning of the "Century of Humiliation"—a period of foreign encroachment, civil war, and political chaos that would last until the middle of the twentieth century. China was carved up into spheres of influence by European powers, Japan, and the United States. Treaty ports along the coast were turned into foreign enclaves where