Shenzhen Speed

We crossed the border from Hong Kong into Shenzhen, China last Saturday. The crossing was a bit of a disaster. I realized that my backpack was missing and I had to go back to the University of Hong Kong to get it. The students and the professors went to the border without me, and I crossed alone about an hour after them. The crossing itself was very easy and fast, but I found out when I caught up with the group that one of our students had been turned away because of a typo on her visa. This is the kind of thing you hope doesn’t happen, but that there's no easy solution for when it does. She and one of the professors had to double back to Hong Kong and wait two days to get to the Chinese embassy for a fresh visa.

In the meantime, the rest of us got an introduction to the phenomenon known as “Shenzhen Speed.” A town that was a sleepy fishing village of about 30,000 in the early '80's (less than the year-round population of Chapel Hill, NC), a mere two decades has transformed Shenzhen into a towering metropolis of over 12 million. The “King of the Earth” skyscraper is noted not so much for its design as for the fact that it was constructed at a rate of one story every three days (total of 69 stories). The first and most successful special economic zone (SEZ), Shenzhen is now home to the world's largest factory complex, the Foxconn facility that employs 200,000 workers who make (among many products) every single iPod nano in the world. We visited the Foxconn facility yesterday, but of course what we saw and heard was far different from others.

On the streets of Shenzhen, you can still buy scallion pancakes from street vendors and get run over by a bicycle, just like every other city in China. However, you can also buy limitless numbers of knockoff designer brand products, depending on how much you want to get yelled at and fined by US Customs. You can also hear the sound of the next stage of global warming, as the horns from skyrocketing private car ownership sound off and drivers hit pedestrians (China has the highest pedestrian fatality rate in the world), cut each other off, and idle in the middle of intersections while they figure out where they want to go.