Below I summarize thoughts about the importance of Shenzhen in shaping China’s post Mao utopianism.
In the heady rush of hyperbole, it is tempting to describe the SEZ’s first thiry years as the – Unprecidented! Miraculous! Epic! – jump of a lowly county from the lowest escholon in the state apparatus to one of the highest. More prosaically, the systemic re-invention of Baoan County as Shenzhen Municipality took place over a series of administrative adjustments and concomitant reallocation of authority, responsibilities, and fundamentally, rights to the national allocation of people, services, and goods. From 1978-1982, the Central Government and/or Guangdong Province restructured Baoan County four times. Each restructuring had a different ideological meaning and aimed to created a different form of post Mao utopia. These ideological differences – more precisely different understandings of the utopian content of modernization – continue to vex the development of Shenzhen.
Shenzhen Noted 