The Pre-Reform Context: Bao'an County as a Tabula Rasa

Before the seismic shifts of 1979, Bao'an County existed as a spatial and administrative periphery—a marginal zone defined more by its relationship to the adjacent British colony of Hong Kong than by any intrinsic developmental momentum. This chapter argues that this very peripherality, encapsulated in the concept of *tabula rasa*, was not merely a condition of underdevelopment but a constitutive feature that rendered Shenzhen uniquely legible to the experimental logics of post-Mao reform. The area’s relative emptiness—characterized by a sparse population, an underdeveloped agrarian economy, minimal industrial infrastructure, and fluid administrative boundaries—created a practical and symbolic canvas upon which the Chinese state could project its ambitions for modernization and global integration. Primary source material from local gazetteers (*fangzhi*), early planning documents, and demographic records reveals a region whose very lack of historical and institutional weight made it simultaneously a site of urgent necessity (for relieving pressure from Hong Kong’s economic pull) and a tabula rasa for national experimentation. The analysis that follows reconstructs this pre-reform baseline across four interlocking dimensions: administrative status and geographic positioning, agrarian economic structure, population dynamics, and physical-geographic constraints. Together, these elements coalesced into a distinctive “blank slate” condition—a space emptied of entrenched interests, legacy systems, and urban form, yet charged with strategic symbolism as the putative “front line” of socialist modernization.

Administrative and Geographic Context: The Periphery as a Strategic Frontier

Bao'an County’s administrative history is a testament to its longstanding marginality within the imperial and republican hierarchies of Guangdong Province. Established as a county during the Qing Dynasty under the jurisdiction of Dongguan Prefecture, Bao'an was consistently positioned on the empire’s southeastern frontier, bordering the Qing-era “New Territories” ceded to Britain in 1898. This colonial partition fundamentally redefined Bao'an’s geographic and administrative identity: suddenly, a county that had previously formed a cohesive cultural and economic region with the Pearl River Delta was split by an arbitrary boundary. The 1898 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory leased the New Territories—including the area north of the Shenzhen River and encompassing the mainland-facing bays of Mirs and Deep Water—to Britain for 99 years, effectively carving Bao'an in two. The remaining mainland portion, reduced to approximately 900 square kilometers (compared to its pre-1898 area of over 3,000 sq km), was relegated to a secondary administrative tier. This partition was not merely cartographic; it severed traditional trade routes, kinship networks, and agricultural markets that had long bound the region together. The county seat, initially located at Nantou (a historic coastal fort town), was later moved eastward to Xin'an (present-day Shenzhen’s Nanshan District) in 1953, partly to distance the administrative center from the volatile border and partly to align with new transportation corridors. However, this relocation did little to elevate Bao'an’s provincial standing; it remained a “rural county” (*nongxian*) under the direct administration of the Huiyang Prefecture (later Dongguan and then Huizhou) until 1979, never achieving the urban status (*shixian*) of core delta counties like Guangzhou or Foshan.

The county’s administrative peripherality was compounded by its ambiguous strategic role during the Mao era (1949–1976). Ideologically, Bao'an was positioned as a “front-line” (*zhenxian*) county in the struggle against capitalist encirclement, sharing a 105-kilometer border with British Hong Kong. This geopolitical framing resulted in heightened securitization: the border was heavily militarized, with patrols, watchtowers, and a “buffer zone” (*hongwei*), restricting cross-border movement except under strict official permits. Paradoxically, this very securitization stifled local economic integration with Hong Kong, which by the 1970s was undergoing rapid industrialization. While neighboring Guangdong counties like Dongguan and Zhongshan began experimenting with “outside processing” (*laozai laozuo*) arrangements—importing raw materials from Hong Kong for assembly and re-export—Bao'an’s border restrictions made such activities risky and limited. The state’s priority was political reliability over economic experimentation; thus, Bao'an was excluded from the limited, controlled openings permitted elsewhere in the delta. Administrative documents from the 1970s, such as the *Bao'an County Gazetteer* (draft editions compiled in the 1970s but unpublished until 1996), repeatedly emphasize the county’s “special responsibility for national defense” (*guofang teyou zeren*) and “need for heightened vigilance” (*genggao de jingti*), reflecting a governance logic that prioritized security over development. This administrative marginality—being both physically close to Hong Kong yet institutionally isolated from its economic dynamism—created a unique condition: a county with intense external pressure (the gravitational pull of Hong Kong’s wages) but minimal internal institutional capacity to channel that pressure into productive development. The state’s own policies had thus produced a “development vacuum,” a space where formal institutions were weak but informal pressures (mass emigration attempts) were immense. This vacuum would later prove crucial: when the central government decided to establish a special economic zone, Bao'an’s low institutional density meant fewer entrenched bureaucracies or state-owned enterprises to resist radical policy shifts. The county could be “re-founded” with minimal bureaucratic friction—a practical advantage that would have been unthinkable in more developed, institutionally thick locales.

The Agrarian Economy: Subsistence, Collective Constraints, and the “Push” of Underdevelopment

The economic foundation of pre-reform Bao'an was overwhelmingly agrarian, operating within the institutional framework of the people’s commune system (*renmin gongshe*) established in 1958. Agriculture accounted for over 80% of the county’s gross output value in the 1970s, with industrial output hovering below 15%, mostly comprising small-scale rural enterprises (*xiangzhen qiye*) processing agricultural products. The agrarian structure was characterized by small, fragmented landholdings rendered collective through successive cooperativization campaigns. By the early 1960s, all farmland was consolidated into production teams (*shengchan dui*) under the three-tier commune system (commune–production brigade–production team). This collectivization, while achieving social equity in land distribution, severely constrained productivity. The *Bao'an County Gazetteer* (1996) records that per-hectare grain yields in the 1970s averaged around 4.5–5 tons, significantly below the delta average of 6–7 tons in more developed counties like Shunde or Nanhai. Several factors explain this lag: first, the topography—approximately 70% of Bao'an’s land area is hilly or mountainous, with only narrow alluvial plains along the Shenzhen River and coastal bays—limited available arable land to roughly 200,000 mu (about 133 sq km) by 1978, yielding a per-capita arable land ratio of just 0.4 mu, well below the provincial average of 0.6 mu. Second, irrigation infrastructure was rudimentary; reliance on monsoon rains and small-scale ponds made production vulnerable to droughts and floods. Third, the collective incentive structure—with work points (*gongfen*) distributed based on labor contribution regardless of output—dampened individual initiative. The *gongzhi* (fixed quota) system required production teams to deliver grain to the state at low, planned prices, after which surplus coul