深圳速度 Shēnzhèn sùdù — Shenzhen Speed

Forty years, twenty million people, and the 户口 question

Shenzhen is the clearest single illustration of what happened to China after 1978, and the numbers are worth stating plainly. In 1979 the area was a county of market towns and fishing villages next to the Hong Kong border, with a population in the low hundreds of thousands. In 1980 it was designated China's first 经济特区 — a special economic zone with its own rules on foreign investment, trade and land. It now has something over seventeen million registered residents and a real population usually estimated at around twenty, a GDP larger than Hong Kong's, and the headquarters of Huawei, Tencent, BYD and DJI. 深圳速度 entered the language as a phrase for doing things implausibly fast, from a period when a floor of a tower went up every few days. What makes it socially unusual is that almost nobody is from there. Shenzhen is a 移民城市 in the internal sense: the overwhelming majority of adults arrived from somewhere else, most of them since the 1990s, and the average age is around thirty-three — young enough to be a different kind of city from Guangzhou an hour away. There is no dominant local dialect in the way Guangzhou has Cantonese; Mandarin is the lingua franca precisely because everybody came from different provinces. For a learner this is genuinely convenient, and it is worth knowing why. The complication is 户口. Household registration ties a person's entitlements to a registered place, and moving to a city to work has not automatically meant acquiring its registration. The consequences are concrete: children of migrant workers historically could not enrol in local state schools without it, some were left with grandparents in home villages — the 留守儿童, left-behind children, of which there have been tens of millions — and access to subsidised housing and some benefits followed the paperwork rather than the person. Reform has been continuous and partial: points systems, relaxations for graduates and for smaller cities, and steady tightening in the largest ones. It is openly discussed and argued about in China, by economists and by the people affected, and the argument is about sequencing and cost rather than about whether the problem exists. Alongside that sits the price of success. Shenzhen property is among the most expensive in the world relative to local incomes, which is what 阿明's 房价也惊人 means, and the phrase you will hear about it is 买不起 — can't afford it, a potential complement from lesson 56 doing heavy emotional work. The gap between what the city pays and what it costs to live in is the standard complaint of young professionals there, and it is the same conversation as lesson 84's Mallorca in the Spanish course, conducted at a different scale. One last thing worth noticing, because this course keeps returning to it. Shenzhen has no old town, few 弄堂 or 胡同 equivalents, and almost no pre-1980 fabric. Whether that is a loss or simply what a new city is, people disagree about — often the same people who queue for two hours to see the restored lanes in lesson 57.