Historical Foundations: Shenzhen Before the Reform Era

In the winter of 1978, as the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee convened in Beijing to set China on a path of “reform and opening up,” a tiny border town of roughly 30,000 people lay largely unnoticed in the southernmost reaches of Guangdong Province. This was Shenzhen—not the glittering megacity of today, but a sleepy agrarian outpost defined by rice paddies, mangrove swamps, and the stark reality of a sealed frontier with British Hong Kong. Understanding this baseline—the profound disconnect between the Shenzhen that was and the Shenzhen that would become—is essential to grasping the sheer scale of the intervention that followed. The transformation that began in 1979 did not emerge from a blank slate; it was built upon a specific historical, geographic, and socioeconomic foundation that made the region both a marginal backwater and, paradoxically, an ideal laboratory for China’s grand experiment. This chapter reconstructs that foundation in detail, drawing on archival maps, population registers, economic statistics, and oral histories to paint a vivid picture of a place where modernity had barely touched, and where the policies of the Mao era had left deep marks of isolation and poverty. We will see how Shenzhen’s very marginality—its position on the geopolitical fault line between socialism and capitalism, its neglect by central planners, its thin industrial base—would become the very attributes that enabled its radical reinvention.

Geographic and Historical Context

The area now known as Shenzhen has been inhabited for millennia, but its historical identity was long subsumed under the larger administrative unit of Bao’an County. Archaeological evidence from the region, including stone tools and pottery shards recovered from sites like the Chiwan Wan (赤湾湾) shell mound, indicates human settlement dating back to the Neolithic period, with continuous habitation through the Tang and Song dynasties. However, it was during the Ming Dynasty that the region first received formal administrative recognition. In 1573, the Ming court established Xin’an County (新安县), carving it out of the larger Dongguan County to better govern the coastal frontier and combat piracy. The county seat was located at Nantou (南头), a walled town that served as the regional administrative and military center. The name “Bao’an” was adopted in 1914, during the Republican era, to avoid confusion with another Xin’an County in Henan Province. This renaming, though administrative, symbolized a continuity of identity that would persist until 1979.

Geographically, Shenzhen occupies the southern bank of the Shenzhen River (深圳河) and the eastern flank of the Pearl River Delta, bordering British Hong Kong to the south and the rest of Guangdong Province to the north and west. The terrain is characterized by low-lying hills and coastal plains, with notable elevations like Wutong Mountain (梧桐山) reaching 944 meters. The region’s hydrology is dominated by the Shenzhen River, which forms the natural boundary with Hong Kong, and a network of smaller streams and estuaries that feed into the Pearl River Estuary. The climate is subtropical monsoon, with long, hot, humid summers and mild, dry winters, averaging 2,000 millimeters of rainfall annually—ideal for rice cultivation but also prone to typhoons and flooding.

The strategic significance of this location shifted dramatically over time. During the imperial era, it was a coastal defense zone against pirates and foreign incursions. In the 19th century, the cession of Hong Kong Island and the New Territories to Britain (1842, 1898) turned the Shenzhen area into an international border. The 1898 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years, establishing the Shenzhen River as the boundary. This created a unique geopolitical situation: a Chinese territory directly abutting one of the world’s most vibrant colonial ports. Yet, for most of the 20th century, this proximity did not translate into economic integration; instead, it hardened into a military and political frontier. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the border became a sealed cordon, with the Shenzhen River lined with barbed wire, minefields, and watchtowers. The area was designated a “frontline” (前线) in the ideological struggle against capitalist Hong Kong, and development was deliberately stifled to prevent “infiltration” and to maintain a clear contrast between the two systems.

The administrative evolution further underscores its marginality. Bao’an County was placed under the jurisdiction of Guangzhou City after 1949, but in 1959 it was transferred to the Huizhou Prefecture (惠阳地区), a move that distanced it further from provincial decision-making centers. Even within Guangdong, Bao’an was considered a remote, impoverished county. The county government itself was located in Nantou, a historic town with crumbling Ming-era walls, far from any major transportation artery. The only significant urban center was Shenzhen Town (深圳镇), a small market settlement around the Luohu (罗湖) border crossing, which served as a customs and immigration point but had no industrial base. Other towns like Gongming (公明), Longhua (龙华), and Shatoujiao (沙头角) were similarly modest, each with populations in the low thousands. This patchwork of agrarian villages and tiny market towns was the physical and administrative substrate upon which the Special Economic Zone would later be superimposed.

The Agrarian Economy and Subsistence Life

The economic life of pre-reform Shenzhen was overwhelmingly agrarian, operating on principles of subsistence farming that had changed little in centuries. The region’s agricultural system can be characterized as intensive rice cultivation interspersed with dryland crops and aquatic products, all labor-intensive and dependent on seasonal rhythms. The primary crop was rice, grown in two annual cycles: early rice (planted in spring, harvested in early summer) and late rice (planted in summer, harvested in autumn). Fields were small and fragmented, averaging less than half a mu (about 333 square meters) per household, and tilled with water buffalo-drawn iron plows. Irrigation relied on a combination of natural rainfall, small ponds (陂塘), and earthen canals, but water control was rudimentary. During dry spells, yields plummeted. The 1978 Ba’an County Statistical Yearbook recorded a total rice sowing area of 210,000 mu, with an average yield of 280 jin per mu (approximately 280 kilograms), translating to a total output of 58,800 tons—barely enough to feed the local population, given that per capita grain consumption was around 300 jin per year.

Alongside rice, farmers cultivated subsidiary crops to diversify income and diet. Sugarcane was a key cash crop, grown on about 80,000 mu, processed locally in small, primitive mills into brown sugar for regional markets. Peanuts and sweet potatoes served as both food and oil sources. Fruit orchards produced lychees, longans, bananas, and citrus, but these were mostly for local consumption or informal trade. In the coastal townships like Yantian (盐田) and Chiwan, fishing and salt production were important. Fishing was done with wooden junks using nets and lines; the catch included shrimp, croaker, and pomfret. Salt pans along the coastline produced crude sea salt, but this industry was small-scale and technically backward.

The agrarian economy was embedded in the People’s Commune system, fully implemented by 1958. All land was collectivized into production teams (生产队), which were grouped into production brigades (生产大队) and ultimately into communes (公社). The commune system eliminated private ownership of land and dictated cropping plans, labor allocation, and distribution of goods. Work points (工分) were the currency of labor, with daily wages determined by age, gender, and physical strength. A typical adult male might earn 10–12 work points per day, tr