Shanghainese often ask foreigners to compare their city with Hong Kong. Most reply that Shanghai is catching up fast. What they should say, however, is that a more suitable role model exists about an hour's drive to the north.
Shenzhen may not have Shanghai's old buildings. It does not have its historic and cultural attractions. And it certainly lacks the Shanghainese propensity for grandiosity. But it has something else to covet: a firmer grounding in the reality of market economics.
This should surprise no one. Although Shenzhen is a much younger city - before 1982 it was but a few rice paddies - the special economic zone has had a decade longer than Shanghai to develop a market-based economy.
For the 10 years to 1992, Shenzhen was the place to get business done in China. By the time Shanghai's socialist shackles began to be slipped off that year, following the late Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, Shenzhen knew how to work this thing called capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Despite Shanghai's progress, Shenzhen has kept its lead in the to-get-rich-is-glorious stakes: it has a per-capita gross domestic product of US$6,600, about US$1,000 more than Shanghai's. It also grew five percentage points faster last year.
What is most notable about their contrasting achievements is that Shenzhen has made its own luck. It was not given handouts by Beijing, but it had one very important blessing: economic freedoms. While Shanghai was a bastion of state-run enterprise, contributing as much as one-quarter of the national tax revenue, Shenzhen was able to offer tax breaks and other incentives that attracted private investment. What it received far outstripped that which Shanghai was getting from Beijing.
History tells the results. Companies came not only from overseas, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but from all over the mainland. Even now, more of the mainland's wealthiest individuals have their companies' headquarters in Shenzhen than in Shanghai.