In Shenzhen, ‘urban villages’ like Baishizhou have been lost to the megacity myth

And yet, until that plane took off without her, Du had never spent a night in Shenzhen. The theme for the biennale was “City, Open Door!” but, having been escorted around government offices, tower blocks, shopping malls, she’d never seen what truly lay beyond. Now obliged to stay, she stepped out for a late stroll, wandering from the pleasant streets of Overseas Chinese Town (OCT), its malls and Italian restaurant demurely closing down for the evening, and into less ordered midnight realms.

In the introduction to The Shenzhen Experiment, her book that grew out of that night and is subtitled, with deliber­ate irony, “The Story of China’s Instant City”, she describes “a clearing surrounded by walls of dimly lit buildings, six to seven storeys tall and leaning very close to each other”. In the middle, under strings of bare light bulbs, a night market glowed with food stalls, folding tables, steam, smells, chatter and, most strikingly, children and dogs. “I had not seen any children during all my prior visits to Shenzhen and certainly no street dogs, either,” she writes.

The following day, at the airport, when she rang a Shenzhen acquaintance and recounted her amazement at such a vision in the mysterious square, her (female) friend was appalled: “It is very dangerous there, especially for you as a woman alone at night! That place is called Baishizhou, the worst of Shenzhen’s many unfortunate chengzhong­cun!” That was the first time Du heard about these “villages in the city”. In the weeks she’d spent in Shenzhen, no one had mentioned them to her.

Eventually, she would learn there were more than 300 chengzhongcun, and they’d evolved from about 2,000 historical agrarian villages. One of the misconceptions she unpacks in her book – one first promoted by the govern­ment, then the media – is that Shenzhen is just 40 years old.