Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [30]
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: A CITY WITHOUT ARRIVAL
Shenzhen, China
At 16 years of age, Jiang Si Fei traveled alone from her mountain village in Guangxi Province to the city of Shenzhen, found a job in an electronics factory, and fell in love. He was a shy man, six years her senior, working at another assembly table on her shift. His name was Hua Chang Zhan, and he had come from even farther inland, in Hunan Province. In a city where everyone is from somewhere else, most people are young, and childless, and working lives are often lonely and friendless, and the two became inseparable. Two years later, their factory went out of business, and they found themselves trawling the labor halls and job centers of Shenzhen together, searching for the perfect opportunity: a factory paying at least 1,800 yuan ($263) a month that had two positions open.
Given this, you might think that Fei and Zhan would be looking for a place to live together. But, despite their dreams of marrying and having a family someday, cohabitation is beyond even considering. “We are both looking for housing right now,” Fei told me as she pored over listings, “but we’d prefer to live in separate dorms, the smaller ones with four to six other workers in the room, because it’s so much cheaper and more convenient to do so. If we tried to get an apartment, we would never save any money.” This is true: If they were to live together and thus move out of bunk-bed dorms, they would destroy any financial possibility of having a future in the city, or a home in some other city. Despite the length and commitment of their relationship, they can both name the number of times they have been alone in a room together. They both enjoy the lively bustle and high wages of Shenzhen and would love to find a way to move here permanently, but they’ve realized it is almost impossible to put down roots in any lasting way. Aside from the impossible housing costs, the city’s regulations make it very difficult to raise a child here if you’re from a village elsewhere, no matter how long you’ve worked here. Although the city was theoretically the first in China to abolish the rigid hukou requirements for citizenship, in practice, it grants this residence status only to skilled, educated, or wealthy workers. In a city of 14 million, only 2.1 million, or 15 percent, have a Shenzhen hukou, which entitles their children to education in the city.§ Fei and Zhan have no hope of getting one. Their future, and their family, will have to take place somewhere else. Millions of other workers have come to the same conclusion.
Shenzhen, on the southern mainland of China across the Deep Bay from Hong Kong, is the world’s largest purpose-built arrival city. As recently as 1980, it was a fishing village of 25,000 people; then Chairman Deng Xiaoping declared it the first Special Economic Zone, exempt from restrictions on movements of workers and freely allowed to practice capitalism, and it quickly swelled into an industrial hub whose population, by the end of the twentieth century, was officially almost nine million but more likely in excess of 14 million, owing to the masses of semi-permanent village migrants from all over China who pack its workers’ dormitories. It spawned a thriving middle class, a leading high-tech sector, and one of the best universities in China. It’s the place where iPods and Nikes are made, along with much of the Western world’s clothing and electronics.
And yet, Shenzhen today is, by most measures, a failed arrival city. After its explosion of success in the 1990s, something went wrong. Despite its having the highest per capita income and urban living standard in China, workers have been flooding out of the city for years, most often headed to inland cities closer to their home villages, where the wages are half those in Shenzhen and it’s possible to live in “urban village” slums, like Liu Gong Li. After the 2008 New Year holiday, during which half the workforce traditionally