China capitalist dream chokes in Shenzhen’s murky bylanes

“I was terrified at first, and really embarrassed not even knowing how to use a condom,” said the soft-spoken young woman. “But I didn’t have any choice. Little by little, you have to get used to it.”

Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migrant workers, Zhang among them.

Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village in the Pearl River delta, next to Hong Kong, when it was decreed a special economic zone in 1980 by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, the city has grown at an annual rate of 28 per cent, though it slowed to 15 per cent in 2005.

Shenzhen owed its success to a simple formula of cheap land, eager, compliant labour and lax environmental rules that attracted legions of foreign investors who built export-based manufacturing industries. With 7 million migrant workers in a population of about 12 million — compared with Shanghai’s 2 to 3 million migrants out of a population of 18 million — Shenzhen became the literal and symbolic heart of the Chinese economic miracle.

To other Chinese cities, Shenzhen has begun to look less like a model than an warning against the limitations of a growth-above-all approach. Shenzhen’s gigantic plants, employing as many as 200,000 workers each, have established a reputation for harshness among workers and labour advocates. Monthly turnover rates of 10 per cent or more are not uncommon, labour groups say.

The harsh work conditions have helped spawn one of the most important labour developments in China in recent years: large-scale strikes and smaller job actions for better hours and wages. The Guangdong Union Association, a government-affiliated group, said there were more than 10,000 strikes in the province last year.

Shenzhen’s recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labour.

After cataloguing the city’s problems, economist and former adviser to the Chinese State Council Zhao Xiao said: “Governments can’t count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness.”

Shenzhen’s boom has spread little wealth. While the city is dependent on migrant labour to keep its factories running, onerous residency rules discourage migrants from settling here permanently and make it difficult for them to obtain public services from education to health care.

“The government has evaded its responsibilities toward migrant workers,” Jin Cheng, a member of an influential local civic forum, Interhoo, said bluntly.

The resulting rootlessness has fed a wave of crime of a sort hardly ever seen elsewhere in China. Gunfights, kidnappings and gang warfare are rife, and crime rates are skyrocketing.

Although the city does not publish crime data, Southern Metropolitan News, a reputed Chinese newspapers, reported that there were 18,000 robberies in 2004 in Baoan, one of six districts in Shenzhen. By comparison, in Shanghai, a city of around 18 million, there were only 2,182 reported robberies for all of 2004, according to figures compiled by the city.