Even on a humid day (which is to say, every day) the place is rather dusty, like a construction site where things haven't been tamped down yet. Houses are rare, though there is one district that looks something like an American suburban housing development, albeit more tightly packed. But this one looks like it's been abandoned and then recolonized by survivalists: Every house is surrounded by a high wall topped with something sharp, and if you peer between the iron bars of the gates, you can see that the windows and patio doors of the houses are additionally protected by iron bars and expanding metal security gates. Beyond that, everyone lives in high-rises.
On every block in central Shenzhen, clean new high-rises protrude from organic husks of bamboo scaffolding. Nissan flatbed trucks rumble away from the waterfront stacked with sheets of Indonesian mahogany plywood on its way to construction sites, where it will be used in concrete forms and then thrown away. The darkness is troubled by the report of nocturnal jackhammers, and all-night arc-welders hollow immense spheres of blue light out of the translucent, steamy atmosphere.
Only a quarter mile away from this scene of hysterical development, a green hillside rises, covered with an undisturbed mat of tropical vegetation and empty except for an ancient cemetery. It doesn't make sense until you realize that you're looking across the Shen Zhen into Hong Kong territory. Running parallel to the river is a border defense system meant to keep the mainland Chinese out. A chain of sodium-vapor lamps and a high fence topped with razor ribbon cuts across lakes and wetlands that have become wildlife refuges by default.
The population of Shenzhen is 2.6 million. Thirteen years ago it was two thousand. The growth rate of Guandong Province, which includes the Pearl River Delta, is the highest in the world.
It would be a lot higher if not for the Second Border that separates the Special Economic Zone from the rest of China.
When you're leaving Shenzhen you simply cruise through a chute without stopping. When you recross the Second Border on your way back, it's a different story.
The highway broadens into a vast slab of pavement covered with fine red dust from the Pearl Delta's devastated hillsides.
You and all other passengers have to bail out and pick your way hazardously through traffic until you've reached the border station.
Here you are funneled through one of many parallel lanes and checked out by a man in a uniform. If you're a Westerner, they don't even bother to look at you. If you look Chinese, you may have problems. A non-Chinese passport will get you through, of course, unless it's a British passport from Hong Kong; since the PRC doesn't recognize the legitimacy of Hong Kong, such people have to get a special document that serves the function of a passport inside the PRC.
If you are mainland Chinese, you don't get through unless the government has given you permission to live in the Special Economic Zone. Generally, such permission is only given to the young and college-educated. So Shenzhen has its own corrugated shantytowns of illegal immigrants, sitting in plain sight next to major highways, in the occasional patch of land that hasn't been covered with high-rises or factories yet.
Apparently the Shenzhen authorities have the same schizophrenic attitude to the illegals that many Germans do - they're tolerated as long as they're convenient.
Many Shenzhen residents would, of course, love to get across the river into Hong Kong, which has its own such neighborhoods. And many residents of Hong Kong are scrambling to get passports from Canada, the US, or the UK. Once they've secured non-PRC passports, they frequently come back to Shenzhen to start and manage businesses, staying in luxury condos built specifically for them by the city fathers. Seen through all these concentric barriers, the Overseas Chinese (ethnic Chinese returning to their homeland) must seem infinitely remote to the peasants being turned away at the Second Border. Locals call them the "spacemen."
Shenzhen is touted as an experiment in free enterprise, both by the government of the PRC and by an especially fatuous breedof Western free-market evangelist - people who think that a free market will lead to a free society. This gets us into some awkward questions of just what we mean by the word "free."
I wasn't able to get out to any of the slave labor camps, where many Chinese are hard at work cranking out exportable trinkets, but I did meet plenty of real-life indentured servants. After June 4th (which is how the Chinese always refer to the crushing of the Tiananmen demonstration) the government instituted a new program whereby any student who graduated from college was deemed to owe the government five years of service, at a place and in a job to be chosen by, you guessed it, the government. Needless to say, this is a handy way for the government to control the behavior of that frisky Tiananmen generation, while also giving government enterprises, and Sino-foreign joint ventures, a handy recruitment system.
Shenzhenese are proud of their railway terminal, which is a good quarter-mile long and ten stories high, clad in mirrored glass. Centered high on the side of the building, enormous in red neon, are the Hanzi characters for Shen Zhen, drawn in a rather spidery hand. Supposedly the calligrapher was none other than Deng Xiaoping. He launched the SEZ thirteen years ago, then swung through recently and spoke the immortal words "I like this," which has led to the founding of more SEZs in other parts of China.
I wandered through the hall where passengers line up to buy tickets, if they haven't already bought them from the cellphone-brandishing wise guys loitering outside. The space was regularly interrupted by heavy structural pillars, three or four feet on a side, sheathed in white stone.
A gaping hole had been kicked in one of them, revealing that the "pillar" was actually a column of air with several naked strands of inch-and-a-half-thick rebar wandering through it.
Holes had been kicked in other pillars by inquisitive passengers, affirming that the builders had not bothered to pour a single tablespoon of actual concrete.
Paul Lau, a Hong Kong-based photographer, accompanied me.
"Corruption," he said, shaking his head in exasperation like a farmer who's just discovered a cutworm infestation in his field.
Corruption in China is no secret, but the way it's covered in
Western media suggests that it's just an epiphenomenon attached to the government. In fact, corruption is the government. It's like jungle vines that have twined around a tree and strangled it - now the tree has rotted out and only the vines remain. Much of this stems from the way China is modernizing its economy.