Since 1980, the ongoing transformation of rural Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality has symbolized and constituted the frontier for China’s post-Mao transition, serving as a model for the country’s urban future. Yet outside China, many have overlooked or dismissed Shenzhen’s importance to domestic and global transformation, even as the city came to dominate contemporary global manufacturing and now sets its sights on becoming one of the world’s largest startup hubs. This multidisciplinary volume brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive approach to Shenzhen from the perspective ... More

Since 1980, the ongoing transformation of rural Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality has symbolized and constituted the frontier for China’s post-Mao transition, serving as a model for the country’s urban future. Yet outside China, many have overlooked or dismissed Shenzhen’s importance to domestic and global transformation, even as the city came to dominate contemporary global manufacturing and now sets its sights on becoming one of the world’s largest startup hubs. This multidisciplinary volume brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive approach to Shenzhen from the perspectives of social history, urban history, and urban anthropology, addressing topics in public health, labor, architecture, planning, infrastructure, creative industry, gender, politics, and education. The authors offer a situated account of China's socialist transition from the ground up, exploring how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logics led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city. In doing so, the authors bring the extensive literature of China studies into dialogue with urban studies and its recent rethinking of the “spatial turn” that has come to define the field. Methodologically, the volume offers the general and expert reader alike a broad and interdisciplinary scope of study supported by up-to-date fieldwork. This collective history of one of the world's most dynamic cities contributes to the multidisciplinary interest in the urban case study as the site of critical problems and possibilities in contemporary China and beyond.