Pre-1979 Shenzhen: The Historical and Socioeconomic Baseline of a Border Town

The conventional narrative of Shenzhen’s meteoric rise from a sleepy border village to a global manufacturing and technological hub often frames its 1979 designation as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) as a tabula rasa moment, as if the city’s transformation emerged ex nihilo from a blank slate of rural backwardness. This framing, while useful for highlighting the radicalism of China’s reform-era policy experiments, obscures the deep historical, socioeconomic, and institutional baselines that shaped Shenzhen’s trajectory long before the central government’s 1979 decree. Long before the arrival of foreign direct investment (FDI), export-oriented manufacturing, and the migrant worker flows that would come to define the city, the territory that is now Shenzhen was a densely networked borderland deeply integrated into the Pearl River Delta (PRD) agrarian economy, the Hong Kong-led cross-border trade ecosystem, and the state’s border management regime. This chapter excavates these pre-1979 baseline conditions, examining Shenzhen’s administrative evolution, agrarian economic structure, cross-border institutional frameworks, and population composition in the late 1970s to demonstrate that the city’s subsequent rise was not a random occurrence, but the logical outcome of pre-existing structural advantages and path-dependent institutional legacies.

Administrative Evolution and Geopolitical Positioning of the Shenzhen Borderland, 1644–1978

From Bao’an County to Shenzhen Town: The Layered History of Border Governance

The administrative history of the Shenzhen area is inseparable from the evolution of China’s southern border governance, a process shaped by both domestic administrative reorganization and imperialist incursion in the modern era. Under the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties, the area was part of Bao’an County, a jurisdiction established in 331 CE to administer the PRD’s eastern coastal region. For most of its imperial history, Bao’an was a sparsely populated frontier zone, with its administrative seat located in Nantou, a walled town on the eastern bank of the Pearl River Estuary. The area that is now central Shenzhen was, until the late imperial period, a collection of small fishing villages and salt production settlements, with no permanent urban center.

The origins of Shenzhen as a distinct settlement trace to the late Ming dynasty, when a small market town known as Shenzhen Xuk (Shenzhen Market) emerged on the north bank of the Shenzhen River, a tributary of the Pearl River that formed the natural boundary between mainland China and the southern coast of Guangdong. The market grew slowly over the following centuries, fueled by cross-border trade in salt, fish, and agricultural goods with the indigenous communities of the New Territories, the area that would later be ceded to British colonial rule. The town’s growth accelerated in the late 19th century, following the 1898 signing of the *Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory* (commonly known as the Second Convention of Peking), which leased the New Territories, Kowloon, and the area north of the Shenzhen River to the United Kingdom for 99 years. The treaty formalized the Shenzhen River as the de facto border between British Hong Kong and Qing China, transforming Shenzhen Market into a formal border crossing point and catalyzing the development of a formal customs and immigration infrastructure.

<!-- 侧边栏：1898年《展拓香港界址专条》核心条款 --> > *Sidebar (Digital Edition): Key Provisions of the 1898 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory* > 1. The UK leased the New Territories, Kowloon (south of the Shenzhen River), and 230 islands adjacent to Hong Kong for 99 years, until 1997. > 2. The Shenzhen River was designated as the official border between the leased territory and Chinese territory. > 3. The UK was granted the right to govern the leased territory “as if it were part of Hong Kong,” with full administrative and judicial autonomy. > 4. Chinese residents living in the leased territory at the time of the treaty were granted the right to remain and retain their property rights.

During the Republican era (1912–1949), Shenzhen Market’s status as a border town was further solidified, as it became a key node in the illicit and formal trade networks that connected the Nationalist-controlled interior to British Hong Kong. The town was occupied by Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and served as a base for Communist guerrilla operations in the PRD during the final years of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the new government retained Shenzhen’s border crossing function, and in 1953 formally relocated the administrative seat of Bao’an County from Nantou to Shenzhen Market, citing its strategic location for cross-border trade and border security. The town was officially renamed Shenzhen Town, and placed under the jurisdiction of the Huiyang Prefecture (later Huiyang Region) in Guangdong Province.

For the next 26 years, Shenzhen Town remained a small, underdeveloped border outpost, with a built-up area of just 2.8 square kilometers and a permanent population of less than 20,000. Its primary functions were as a border crossing point, a center for small-scale cross-border trade, and an administrative hub for the surrounding rural Bao’an County. The town’s infrastructure was rudimentary, with no paved roads connecting it to other major cities in Guangdong, no running water, and an unreliable electricity supply. Its economic base remained overwhelmingly agrarian, with most residents engaged in farming, fishing, or small-scale handicraft production. The town’s only significant industrial facility was a small state-owned grain processing plant, built in the 1950s to support the county’s agricultural output.

The 1960s saw the introduction of a new layer of border governance that would have a lasting impact on Shenzhen’s development trajectory: the 1962 establishment of the “Second Line” checkpoint regime. In response to large-scale unauthorized cross-border migration and smuggling, the Guangdong provincial government erected a physical barrier and series of checkpoints along the border between Shenzhen Town and the rest of Bao’an County, effectively creating a separate administrative zone within the county. Only residents with a *bianmin zheng* (border resident permit) or official travel documentation were allowed to cross the Second Line, and all goods moving between the Shenzhen border zone and the rest of Guangdong were subject to strict inspection. While designed to restrict

While designed to restrict unauthorized cross-border movement, the Second Line regime inadvertently laid the institutional and physical infrastructure for the 1979 SEZ designation. The barrier, which stretched 84.5 kilometers from the Pearl River Estuary in the west to the Dapeng Peninsula in the east, was punctuated by 19 formal checkpoints staffed by Public Security, customs, and border control personnel. Its construction required the mass mobilization of Bao’an County’s rural labor force: between 1962 and 1963, over 120,000 local villagers were conscripted to build the earthen embankment, barbed wire fencing, and checkpoint facilities, a project that consumed 8% of the county’s total agricultural output that year and left a lasting memory of state coercion among the local population. For the 16 years of its operation, the Second Line effectively partitioned Bao’an County into two distinct economic zones: the 392-square-kilometer border zone encompassing Shenzhen Town and 12 surrounding communes, and the remaining 1,200-square-kilometer interior of the county, which was subject to far stricter movement controls and had minimal cross-border trade activity. By the mid-1970s, the central government and Guangdong provincial authorities had begun to recognize the potential of the border zone’s u