A Fishing Village on the Edge: Shenzhen Before 1979

In the sweltering summer of 1978, the air over Bao’an County hung thick and still, heavy with the brine of the Shenzhen River and the sweet, rotting scent of overripe mangoes from village groves. From a low hillock just north of the border, an old fisherman named Chen Weiming squinted against the glare, his gaze fixed on a distant, flickering constellation that was not made of stars. That glow was Hong Kong—a sprawling, electrified maze of apartment blocks, neon signs, and the constant, humming pulse of a city that never slept. To his left, the patchwork quilt of his own world: water-logged rice paddies reflecting a leaden sky, clusters of grey-tiled roofs huddled around ancestral halls, and the slow, brown ribbon of the Shenzhen River separating two universes. For Chen, and for the roughly 300,000 others scattered across this 2,000-square-kilometer swath of southern China, the border was not a mere line on a map; it was a chasm of ideology, economy, and sheer, unimaginable possibility. This was Shenzhen before 1979: a place defined by what it was not, a quiet, impoverished afterthought on the edge of the world’s most dynamic capitalist colony, its fate about to be irrevocably altered by a decision made hundreds of miles away in the rarefied air of Beijing’s conference halls. The story of its transformation from a cluster of forgotten villages into a megacity of 17 million begins not with a master plan, but with this stark, visceral contrast—a living, breathing borderland poised on a knife’s edge between two irreconcilable systems.

The physical landscape of pre-1979 Shenzhen was one of gentle, forgotten beauty and profound rural poverty. Geographically, it was a transitional zone, where the Pearl River Delta’s alluvial plains met the rocky, forested foothills of the Wutong Mountains. The territory was crisscrossed by a network of rivers and streams—the Shenzhen, the Maozhou, the Longgang—all sluggish and silt-laden, feeding into the deep-water harbor of Mirs Bay. This intricate hydrology made the land exceptionally fertile but also prone to flooding, dictating a lifestyle intimately tied to the rhythms of water and weather. Settlement patterns followed this logic: villages were almost always built on slightly elevated ground, known as *long* (垄) or *tai* (台), natural ridges formed centuries ago to escape the annual inundations. Names like Luohu (罗湖, “Lotus Lake”), Caiwuwei (蔡屋围, “Cai Family Enclosure”), and Shekou (蛇口, “Snake Mouth”) were not poetic inventions but literal descriptions of terrain—a lake, a walled clan compound, a river mouth teeming with reptiles.

A typical village, such as the one where Chen Weiming lived in what is now the Luohu district, was a self-contained universe of dirt paths, ancestral halls, and communal wells. Houses were single-story structures of grey brick or rammed earth, topped with tiles of rusted red or, for the slightly better-off, black-glazed ceramic. Roofs were lined with sharp, decorative *ling* (脊) guards to ward off evil spirits, but they did little to keep out the summer monsoon rains or the winter chills. Inside, families of five or more might share a single room, partitioned by hanging cloths. Furniture was sparse: a wooden bed platform (*kang*), a low table, and perhaps a chest for storing the few precious possessions—a radio, a sewing machine, a set of silk robes for weddings. Electricity was a luxury, arriving sporadically if at all; most evenings were illuminated by the flickering, smoky glow of a peanut-oil lamp. Running water was nonexistent; women and children would trek to the village well or riverbank, heavy buckets balanced on shoulder poles, their daily conversation as rhythmic as the walk itself.

Life was governed by the collective. Shenzhen was then the northern part of Bao’an County, under the jurisdiction of Huizhou Prefecture, itself a subordinate part of Guangdong Province. The fundamental unit was the production team (*shengchan dui*), a subdivision of the people’s commune system that had been imposed during the Great Leap Forward. Each family was assigned a plot of land for private use—a tiny *ziliu tian* (自留地)—where they might grow some vegetables or raise a few chickens, but the bulk of their labor and the harvest from the main fields belonged to the collective. Chen’s day, like that of every able-bodied adult, began before dawn with the blast of a conch shell or a clanging metal gong. He would join the other men of the team, their backs bent under the conical *douli* (斗笠) hats, to work the paddy fields—transplanting seedlings, weeding, draining, and harvesting. A workday was measured in *gongfen* (工分), points awarded for labor intensity and completed tasks. At the end of the year, the collective’s meager yield—mostly rice, some sweet potatoes, and a quota of sugarcane for the state purchasing stations—would be divided, with a significant portion requisitioned as agricultural tax (*nongye shui*) to feed the cities and the state granaries. What remained was converted into grain rations and a tiny cash dividend, often just a few dozen yuan per family for the entire year. The average annual income for a rural resident in Guangdong in 1978 was a paltry 100 yuan (about $25 USD), barely enough to buy a few bolts of cloth with the required *piaopiao* (票证) coupons. A new set of clothes was a major event; meat was a luxury reserved for the Spring Festival.

The sea offered a marginally better, though still precarious, livelihood. In villages along the coast and riverbanks—like those in what is now Nanshan and Yantian—fishermen like Chen owned or rented small, wooden *jiaochuan* (渔船) junks, powered by sail or a sputtering diesel engine. They fished the rich, brackish waters of the Pearl River Estuary for shrimp, pomfret, and the humble but vital grass carp. But their catch was also subject to state planning. A mandatory quota had to be sold to the state-owned fisheries company at fixed, low prices. Only the surplus could be bartered or sold at the local market, where prices were controlled. The fishermen’s world was one of constant negotiation with the elements and the bureaucracy. Their boats, often painted with eyes on the prow to ward off sea spirits, were also their homes for days at a time, a floating extension of the village. They knew every bend of the river, every hidden sandbar, every place where the border patrols on the Hong Kong side were laxest. That knowledge was a form of capital, one that would soon be traded for a different kind of fortune.

The true measure of Shenzhen’s poverty, however, was not in its statistics but in the view eastward. From the ridges of the Wutong Mountains or the rooftops of border villages, Hong Kong was a visible, taunting paradise. In 1978, the British colony was a manufacturing and financial powerhouse, its per capita GDP exceeding $3,000—over fifty times that of a Bao’an peasant. Its skyline, even then, was a forest of high-rises in Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, its harbors choked with container ships and junks, its streets choked with double-decker buses and private cars. Its department stores—Sogo, Lane Crawford—were Aladdin’s caves of goods unimaginable on the mainland: Swiss watches, Japanese stereos, Italian shoes, Australian canned milk. Its cinemas showed Hollywood blockbusters and Shaw Brothers kung fu epics. Its radio stations—commercial broadcasters like Radio Television Hong Kong—played pop music and news from the outside world, a stark contrast to the tightly controlled, ideological broadcasts from Guangzhou.

This contrast was not abstract; it was a daily, sensory assault. The sounds carried across the water: the distant wail of police sirens, the roar of jet engines from Kai Tak Airport, the tinny melodies of Cantopop drifting from open windows. Smells sometimes wafted over the border too—the exhaust from buses, the scent of roasting chestnuts from street vendors, even, on a good wind, the faint, oily aroma of cooking from a kitchen us