Mary Ann O’Donnell

TWENTY years ago, it was still possible to find gardens and litchi orchards in what we call the CBD today. Indeed, east of the Shanghai Hotel was “downtown.” West of the hotel was a stretch of land that was neither downtown nor suburban, but instead seemed poised at the edge of transformation, a space waiting for the future.

But what does it mean to say that Futian was “waiting for the future?” The Central Park provides insight. The section of the park along Shennan Boulevard had sidewalks, plazas and benches. However, the section along Zhenhua Road was still a working litchi orchard. Every May, Zhanjiang bee farmers set up temporary camps in the orchard to produce litchi honey. While the bees flitted from blossom to blossom, the transient farmers cooked simple meals on propane stoves, played cards, chatted, and sold honey from their tents. In some sense, the scene seems no different from pre-reform rural China. And yet changes already rumbled through the area. Tianmian, Gangxia, Huanggang — these villages, which had been teemed up with handshake buildings, had been going through renovation and reconstruction — erected arches that boldly declared themselves as “new villages.”

I came to Shenzhen in 1995 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. I rented a room in Yuehaimen, just next to Shenzhen University. In the 1980s, University president Luo Zhengqi had designed a university campus without borders, but when I arrived, the campus had already been bounded, except for a gate between Yuehaimen and the south campus. I didn’t think of Yuehaimen as being a “village.” It had six-story buildings, concrete apartment buildings, a wet market, restaurants, beauty parlors and small convenience stores. In other words, Yuehaimen physically looked like a low-income neighborhood, but was in fact considered a “village.”

A student of anthropology, I was interested in the new Shenzhen culture that was being created by migrants and locals. There were two kinds of migrants — white-collar professionals, usually from other Chinese cities, and blue-collar laborers, usually fresh off the farm. Migrants had come to Shenzhen in order to change their lives. In contrast, the locals identified with their villages, even though physically these spaces were rapidly urbanizing. I wondered what kind of Shenzhen identity these diverse groups of people who spoke different hometown languages and occupied different social statuses were creating. Some 20 years ago, the social category “Shenzhener” did not exist. I was curious when and how this identity would emerge? And once there was such a category, who would claim it?

When I arrived, people still spoke of Shenzhen as a special economic zone (SEZ), rather than as a city with a common identity and as a hometown. Only in the early 21st century have residents begun speaking of Shenzheners and Shenzhen culture. Several social factors have contributed to this change. First, manufacturing has been gradually moved outside the original SEZ border. We no longer see hundreds of factory workers eating alfresco dinners along food streets in Bagualing and Hongling. Second, downtown was moved from the area around the Shenzhen Railway Station in Luohu to Futian. The rough and tumbled landscape of half-finished construction, farms and litchi orchards has given way to a state-of-the-art central axis that stretches from Lianhua Hill in the north to the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center in the south. In between are the Civic Center, designer skyscrapers, luxury condominiums and malls.

All the polished finish notwithstanding, Futian still seems to be waiting for the future. We now realize that creating a better tomorrow means more than simply erecting new and improved buildings. The pressing question remains one of social identity. Although they have been surrounded by skyscrapers, urban villages remain the primary point of arrival for new migrants. In other words, they do not live in “Shenzhen,” but rather inhabit a transitional space between tradition and modernization. Of course, we are no longer speaking of rural tradition, but rather the way Shenzhen continues to structure migration through access to affordable housing.

These transitional spaces remain entangled in paradox. On the one hand, most migrants begin their pursuit of the Shenzhen Dream in an urbanized village with the goal to move into Shenzhen proper. Indeed, these transitional spaces are vital to the city’s prosperity. The villages house sanitation and restaurant workers, recent college graduates, young entrepreneurs as well as working-class neighborhoods for blue-collar families. On the other hand, the goal of every migrant is to move out of an urbanized village into a gated community. In addition, many urban planners see urbanized villages as blights on the urban fabric.

More importantly, this paradox constitutes the material form of the Shenzhener identity. Migrants come to transform themselves. In order to do so, however, they need a point-of-arrival, a transitional space that is and is not Shenzhen, a space waiting for the future. In this sense, as long as Shenzhen is a migrant city, no matter how grand its architecture, Futian needs spaces like Tianmian, Shuiwei, and old Gangxia — urbanized villages that are “waiting for the future” of each arriving man and woman.

American scholar, translator and poet, Dr. Mary Ann O’Donnell has been doing research on anthropology in Shenzhen since 1995. She recently launched “Handshake 302,” a community public art project that aims to redefine urban village through creative engagement.