The Sleeping Village: Life in Bao'an Before 1979

Imagine a place where the pace of life is dictated by the tides and the growing seasons, where the loudest sounds are the chatter of farmers in the rice fields and the creak of wooden fishing boats against the waves. This was Bao’an County in the 1970s—a quiet, sprawling corner of Guangdong Province that time seemed to have passed by. To the millions who now swarm through Shenzhen’s skyscrapers and shopping malls, it’s almost impossible to picture this same landscape as a sleepy agrarian borderland, dotted with mud-brick villages and sleepy markets where the biggest excitement was a visiting relative from Hong Kong bringing a coveted plastic umbrella or a pack of cigarettes. Yet, before 1979, this was the reality: a world of fishing, farming, and carefully guarded borders, where the idea of turning this region into a megacity would have sounded like science fiction. In this chapter, we step back into that world—not just to list facts and figures, but to feel the texture of daily life, to understand why this particular spot on the map was chosen for an experiment that would change China forever, and to recognize the subtle currents of change already stirring beneath the surface calm. We’ll walk through the paddy fields, haggle in the border markets, and listen to the stories of elders who remember when Shenzhen was just a name on a map, not a symbol of urban frenzy. This is the story of the sleeping village.

Geography and Environment: The Land That Was

To understand Bao’an before 1979, you must first understand its geography—a geography that simultaneously isolated it and, paradoxically, made it the perfect candidate for China’s great leap forward. Bao’an County occupied the southern tip of the Pearl River Delta, a triangular fan of alluvial soil formed by centuries of silt washing down from the interior. Its eastern edge lapped against the South China Sea, with a coastline that stretched over 150 kilometers, including the deep, sheltered bays of Dapeng and Mirs Bay. To the south, it shared a porous, heavily guarded border with British Hong Kong—a border that was less a line on a map and more a state of mind, a barrier of bamboo fences, watchtowers, and soldiers that sliced through villages and rice paddies. To the north and west, it was surrounded by other counties of Guangdong—Dongguan, Huiyang, and Guangzhou itself—connected by dirt roads and waterways that had changed little since the Qing Dynasty.

The land itself was a study in gentle contrasts. Inland, the terrain was flat and fertile, crisscrossed by a network of rivers and streams—the Shima River, the Longgang River, the Maozhou River—that fed into the Pearl River estuary. These waterways were the lifeblood of agriculture, but also the arteries of local transport. Before paved roads, boats were the primary means of moving goods and people; a farmer from a village near Shiyan might take a wooden sampan downriver to the county seat at Nantou, a journey that could take half a day but was infinitely easier than hauling a cart along muddy tracks. The soil, enriched by river silt and marine deposits, was ideal for rice paddies, which shimmered green in the subtropical sun, and for orchards of lychee, longan, and citrus that dotted the higher ground. Coastal areas were dominated by mangrove swamps and tidal flats, home to egrets and crabs, and beyond them, the sea—a source of both bounty and danger.

What made Bao’an unique within Guangdong was its position as a frontier. It was the *first* county you encountered traveling south from Guangzhou toward Hong Kong, and the *last* you left when going north from the British colony. This meant it was both a gateway and a buffer zone. For centuries, it had served as a military outpost—the very name “Bao’an” (宝安) means “protecting peace,” a reference to its role in guarding the southern approaches to the empire. Remnants of this history were everywhere: Ming Dynasty watchtowers stood sentinel on hilltops, Qing-era coastal defense forts like the one at Dapeng Fortress (大鹏所城) still housed PLA soldiers in the 1970s, and narrow, winding lanes in old villages like Nantou were designed for defense, not traffic. This military heritage instilled a culture of vigilance that would later shape the Special Economic Zone’s security apparatus.

But it was the proximity to Hong Kong that defined Bao’an’s modern fate. From the county seat at Nantou, the neon glow of Hong Kong’s New Territories was visible on clear nights—a tantalizing, forbidden spectacle. The border was not just a political line; it was an economic and cultural chasm. In 1978, Hong Kong’s per capita GDP was over 20 times that of Bao’an. Across the Shenzhen River or through the checkpoint at Lo Wu, there were towering apartment blocks, bustling factories, and department stores stacked with imported goods. In Bao’an, most families still lived in one-story brick or mud-brick homes with tile roofs, cooked with charcoal stoves, and owned perhaps one bicycle and a radio. The contrast was so stark it felt like looking into another century. This juxtaposition—of poverty next to plenty, of planned economy next to capitalist dynamism—created a unique pressure cooker environment. For Beijing’s reformers, Bao’an wasn’t just another poor county; it was a *frontier*, a place where the winds of change from Hong Kong could be measured, tested, and perhaps harnessed.

The environment also posed challenges. The delta was prone to typhoons in summer, which could flatten villages and flood paddies. The soil, while fertile, was becoming exhausted from decades of intensive farming without modern fertilizers. And the border itself was a double-edged sword: it cut off Bao’an from the economic dynamism of Hong Kong, but it also meant that any experiment here could be tightly controlled, contained within a defined area where “capitalist tendencies” could be monitored. When Deng Xiaoping and his allies later debated where to locate China’s first Special Economic Zone, Bao’an’s geography checked all the boxes: accessible coastline for future ports, flat land for development, a ready labor pool, and—most critically—a direct line of sight to Hong Kong, the model they would emulate and eventually compete with.

The Rhythms of Rural Life: Farming and Fishing

Life in Bao’an moved to the rhythm of the sun and the seasons, a cycle so predictable it felt eternal. For the overwhelming majority of the county’s 300,000 residents in 1978, existence was defined by two pillars: the land and the sea. Over 85% of the population were peasants, working small plots of collective land under the People’s Commune system, while another 10% were fishermen living in coastal hamlets. The remaining 5% included a smattering of teachers, cadres, shopkeepers, and artisans. There was no industry to speak of—no factories, no mines—just the slow, relentless work of producing food.

The Life of a Farmer: From Dawn to Dusk Under the Commune System

A typical day for a farmer like Mr. Chen from Xixiang village began before sunrise. By 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., the first cockcrows would echo through the village, and the smell of burning charcoal would drift from open-air kitchens as families prepared congee (rice porridge) for breakfast. There was no alarm clock; time was set by nature and the communal horn that blasted from the village loudspeaker at dawn, signaling the start of the workday. After a quick meal, Mr. Chen would join his production team (生产队)—usually 20 to 30 households from the same kinship group—at the designated meeting spot, often a dusty patch of ground near the village committee office. Here, the team leader, a no-nonsense elder chosen for his experience and political reliability, would assign tasks for the day: which paddy field needed weeding, which drainage ditch required clearing, how many labor days would be logged for each job.

The work itself was backbreaking by modern standards, done almost entirely by hand or with animal power. Plo