The Village Before the Storm

In the summer of 1978, a young cadre named Wang Zhenyi traveled from Beijing to the southernmost edge of Guangdong Province on an inspection tour that would take him through some of the most unremarkable countryside in all of China. Wang, a mid-level official in the State Planning Commission, had been tasked with surveying the border regions—not for any particular strategic importance, but because such surveys were the bureaucratic routine of the People's Republic, a ritual of documentation that transformed every corner of the vast nation into statistics and reports that would gather dust in ministry archives. He traveled by train as far as Guangzhou, then by bus through the flat agricultural lands that stretched northward from that ancient city, and finally by a slower, rattling vehicle that wound its way east toward a place that appeared on no tourist maps and featured in no official histories. When he arrived at the county seat of Bao'an, Wang saw a town of perhaps twenty thousand souls, a modest administrative center surrounded by rice paddies and fish ponds that stretched in every direction until they met the hazy outline of mountains to the north and the gleaming waters of the Pearl River estuary to the south. Across that narrow band of water, so close that on clear days you could see the activity on its streets, lay the British colony of Hong Kong—a world so different from this one that it might as well have existed on another planet.

What Wang Zhenyi witnessed during his brief stay in the summer of 1978 would have confirmed everything that Beijing's planners already believed about this corner of the country: it was poor, it was backward, and it was strategically significant only insofar as it bordered a capitalist enclave that represented everything the Communist revolution had been built to oppose. The local officials who greeted him spoke of hard years—the collectivization campaigns had stripped much of the vitality from the rural economy, and the cultural revolution's disruptions had added layer upon layer of trauma to communities that had already known decades of hardship. The farmers in the surrounding villages still tilled their fields with the same methods their grandparents had used. The market at the county seat offered a limited selection of goods, most of them locally produced: vegetables from nearby farms, dried fish from the coastal settlements, the occasional pig or chicken that a peasant family had managed to raise despite the collectivized system's disincentives. There was no industry to speak of, no modern infrastructure, no signs of the dynamism that characterized other parts of China or the economic miracle taking shape just across the water in Hong Kong. Wang filed his report, gave the region a perfunctory notation in the planning documents he was compiling, and returned to Beijing convinced that he had seen exactly what he had expected to see: an unremarkable stretch of countryside that China would continue to forget.

But Wang Zhenyi was wrong about what he had seen. He was wrong in ways that would come to seem almost comical in retrospect, not because he was a foolish man or a careless observer, but because what he had witnessed was so far outside the frameworks through which Beijing's planners understood the world that it was essentially invisible to them. The land he had surveyed, the communities he had documented, the people he had met in passing—none of these things existed in the categories through which China's centrally planned economy organized reality. There was no box in the planning ministry's documents for a place that would, within a single generation, become the fastest-growing city in human history. There was no category for the transformation that was about to unfold along that thin strip of water called the Shenzhen River, the boundary that separated Mao's China from the colonial capitalism of Hong Kong. Wang saw poverty and concluded he was looking at poverty. He did not see what the economist calling it would become a generation later: the most concentrated burst of wealth creation in the history of civilization, the birthplace of a new model for how human societies could organize production and exchange, the laboratory in which the contours of the twenty-first century world were being sketched in concrete and steel and the hum of assembly lines.

To understand why the old Shenzhen mattered, and why it matters still, we must first reconstruct that vanished world with some care. We must learn to see what Wang Zhenyi saw, and to understand why his vision, however accurate, was also profoundly incomplete. The fishing villages and rice paddies, the single-story houses and dirt paths, the farmers who had never traveled beyond their county and the market women who haggled over the price of vegetables in a dialect that even many Cantonese speakers found difficult to understand—all of these were real, all of them were enduring features of life in the Pearl River Delta, and all of them were about to be swept away in a transformation so total that almost nothing of the old world would survive it. But the old world deserves to be remembered not merely as a prelude to what came after, but as a world with its own coherence, its own logic, and its own forms of beauty that the rushing torrent of modernization would carry off without a backward glance.

The Bao'an County of the 1970s was, by most objective measures, one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest provinces in China. The county had been established in 1954, when the People's Republic reorganized the administrative divisions of the Pearl River Delta, drawing a boundary that included within its limits a strip of territory running from the border with Hong Kong in the south to the mountains of Dongguan in the north, a distance of roughly a hundred kilometers, and from the waters of the Pearl River estuary in the east to the boundary with Hong Kong's New Territories in the west, a narrow band rarely more than forty kilometers wide. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a region that China's leaders had singled out for development. The central government, operating through its series of five-year plans, directed investment toward the industrial heartland of the northeast, toward the emerging cities of the coast that were being built with Soviet assistance, toward the strategic interior where defense industries were being established in the mountains. Guangdong Province, with its subtropical climate and its long history of maritime trade, was considered peripheral to the socialist construction project. The region around Bao'an was considered even more peripheral than the province itself.

The economic structure of the old county was overwhelmingly agricultural, but even within the category of agriculture, Bao'an's economy was distinguished by its diversity—a diversity that reflected both the ecological richness of the Pearl River Delta and the practical wisdom of farmers who had learned over generations to manage the complex interplay of land, water, and climate that characterized this corner of the coast. The most common crop was rice, which grew in the paddies that dominated the low-lying areas, but the agricultural system also included vegetables, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and a variety of other crops suited to the warm, wet conditions of the south. Fish ponds, some natural and some artificially constructed, dotted the landscape between the rice fields, providing both a source of protein and a way of utilizing land that was too wet or too marginal for cultivation. Ducks and chickens wandered through the villages and the fields, tended by women and children who supplemented the collective economy with small private plots where they grew vegetables and raised livestock for their own consumption. Along the coast, fishing communities harvested the rich waters of the estuary, though the catches were smaller than they had been in earlier decade