Remembering Hong Kong’s unsung role in Shenzhen’s glory – 40 years on, have fortunes reversed?
- Celebrating Shenzhen’s success, state media omit mentioning critical role played by Hong Kong
- Pioneer investors took a leap of faith, while experts shared knowledge with mainland Chinese officials
Two years before Shenzhen was named mainland China’s first special economic zone in 1980, Hong Kong industrialist Cheng Ho-ming arrived to start working with a state-run wig factory.
He found himself in a rural backwater. The small 2,153 sq ft factory was in Luohu district, which had only one concrete road.
“None of the buildings in town was higher than five storeys and there was only one restaurant,” he recalled. “Shenzhen officials arranged for me to travel by bus to their office to negotiate the deal because they didn’t have any cars at the time.”
Cheng, 34 at the time, was the first Hong Kong entrepreneur to invest in Shenzhen, then a Guangdong fishing village with a population of 2,000.
He never imagined the place would become a metropolis of 13.4 million, or that Shenzhen’s economy would outpace that of Hong Kong within just four decades.
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