Globalization and the Miracle of Shenzhen: From Localizing the Global to Globalizing the Local

1 The Miracle of Shenzhen in the Age of Globalization

It would not be exaggerating to say that much of the twentieth century of China was dominated by the spirit of nationalism, radical revolution, and a complete dismissal of Western culture, which has manifested itself most strikingly in the historically significant decade of wenhua dageming (the Cultural Revolution: 1966–1976), a turbulent time when China’s government and Chinese people were dedicated to grappling with internal conflicts, while remaining almost isolated from the outside world. It was not until the termination of the Cultural Revolution and the initiation of reform and opening-up that China began to embrace foreign influences and play an increasingly important role on the global stage. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the post-Mao regime contended for the repudiation of Mao’s revolutionary idealism^[3] in favor of an economic developmentalism in order to modernize and transform China from a developing country, which had been committed to fervent revolution and impractical production, to an economically prosperous and vigorous modern nation. The fact that China is one of the biggest winners that has benefited enormously from the process of globalization has been widely accepted, and its astounding growth over the past few decades has pushed its economy to the status of the second largest one in the world, next only to that of the US since 2011.

To provide an insight into China’s process of modernization and globalization since reform and opening-up, it is most appropriate to make a careful exploration of the fastest-growing city in China – Shenzhen, a newly emergent city that has developed at such a phenomenal rate that it has been increasingly popular to equate “Shenzhen speed” with a staggering rate at which something gets done. It can be said that almost no other city has undergone such enormous changes as Shenzhen to develop from an initially poverty-stricken fishing village before China’s economic reforms to a highly modernized cosmopolitan metropolis in the age of globalization. Never has a city, with a population of more than 17 million and a vigorously booming economy, been created within 45 years in a fundamentally underdeveloped rural area.^[4] Even when compared with the founding myth of Singapore,^[5] the wonder created by Shenzhen appears to be significantly more conspicuous, for Shenzhen is several times larger than Singapore both in land and population. How can Shenzhen, a city built only 45 years ago, grow at such an astounding rate to emerge ultimately as one of the leading cosmopolitan metropolises in China, to the extent of rivaling the central status of world-famed cultural and historical cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong?

In striking contrast to the 1980s, a historical period when Shenzhen was viewed as a premodern region that needed urgent construction, the age of globalization has witnessed a wild proliferation of exhilarating possibilities and opportunities in this newly emergent city. Having undergone a process of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization in the era of globalization, Shenzhen is now looking completely new to the outside world: the magnificent skyline dominated by towering and gaudy skyscrapers, the hustle and bustle of city life, flourishing consumer industries, various forms of leisure and entertainment, as well as transnational corporations and events that attract people from all over the world, all attesting to a cosmopolitan scene that would instantly situate people in New York, London, or Paris. But it should be recognized that the advent of globalization, while giving a strong impetus to the development of China since reform and opening-up, has been vehemently contested by tenacious forces of nationalism, ethnicism, and regionalism. Here arises a provocative question that we cannot avoid in the age of globalization as to how to handle the relationship between the global and the local: is it inevitable to establish a binary opposition between them? In my view, the miracle of Shenzhen is the consequence of a synergistic interaction between the process of globalization and concrete Chinese practices, which can be investigated from two inextricable aspects: localizing the global and globalizing the local. More importantly, the remarkable achievement of Shenzhen can be construed both as an excellent epitome of China’s process of modernization and globalization since reform and opening-up, and as a brilliant embodiment of China’s glocalized practices amid the tensions and affinities between the homogenizing forces of globalization and specific Chinese conditions.

2 Localizing the Global: The Modern Centralization of Shenzhen

Just as global modernity has to be constructed and reconstructed in diverse cultural and historical contexts, Quanqiuhua (globalization), a translated and imported concept from the West, should also be localized in concrete Chinese context, otherwise it would be almost impossible for China to benefit from the process of globalization. When reflecting on the relation between the global and the local, Roland Robertson (1994, 38–39) has insightfully substituted the notion of globalization with that of “glocalisation,” which concerns “the simultaneity and the interpenetration of what are conventionally called the global and the local, or–in more general vein–the universal and the particular”. This is particularly true of China in the age of globalization, since the movement of globalization from the West to China has been challenged by resisting forces of nationalism and regionalism, as China is an ancient country with a splendid cultural heritage and unique national traditions. In the current age of globalization, often accompanied by the “immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market” (Jameson and Miyoshi 1998, xi), China has rapidly risen to a position of international magnificence not only through integrating itself into the global system but also through molding unique mechanisms and practices in accordance with specific Chinese conditions, for it is of crucial importance for China to take into consideration its own distinct circumstances if globalization is to function effectively in China. In other words, if China uncritically drew upon the ideas and practices from the West, there would be no rise of modern China, let alone the miracle of Shenzhen in the era of globalization. As Wang (2015, 2062) has noted, “it is the ‘glocalizing’ orientation that is enabling China to relocate itself in the broader context of global culture”. The astounding achievement of China since reform and opening-up indicates that China has benefited substantially from the process of globalization, and will continue to do so if the advent of globalization is localized in specific Chinese conditions.

Although titling his monograph A Singular Modernity, Jameson (2002, 94–95) appears to undermine his own central argument by defining modernity not as a “concept” but as a “narrative category” that has a relational character. Whereas a theoretical concept remains to be fixed under almost all circumstances, a narrative or an “aesthetic category or adaptation” can change its meaning from one context to another. In his reflection on the issue of modernity, Wang (2012, 618) also argues that “different versions of modernity … (that have been) produced in China … constitute a sort of alternative modernity or modernities that has deconstructed the ‘grand narrative’ of ‘singular’ modernity dominated by Western culture and ideology”. It can be said that the meaning of modernity varies remarkably in different places and times. Despite its full integration into the global system, Shenzhen has undergone a process of modern centralization with distinct Chinese characteristics. And I would like to argue that the central status of Shenzhen as one of the leading global metropolises has been formed historically, geographically, politically, economically, and culturally.

Historically speaking, Shenzhen was, from the very beginning of China’s reform and opening-up, was designated not as a cultural or political center but as an economic and financial center in order to invigorate the socialist market economy by reinforcing the conversation and collaboration with the outside world. It should be emphasized that the most urgent task for China at the time after the Cultural Revolution was neither to pursue national independence nor to maintain social stability, but to develop China as a powerful country that is capable of carrying out equal dialogues with its international counterparts. As Chairman Mao has famously remarked that a single spark can start a prairie fire, Shenzhen, commonly associated with the image of a “bull clearing the wilderness” (tuo huang niu), can be comprehended as the spark that has galvanized the transformation of China from economic obscurity to economic prosperity after almost two decades of stagnancy.

From a geographical point of view, Shenzhen is situated on the east bank of the Pearl River estuary, much more adjacent to the sea and Hong Kong than the capital city of Guangdong Province – Guangzhou. As the editors of Learning from Shenzhen (2017, 251) have concluded, “the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone became the prime example of how zones can afford the possibility for far-reaching social transformations by being as much a spatial solution to a political problem as it is an economic innovation”.^[6] Strategically located between mainland China and Hong Kong, Shenzhen has been a model city for consolidating the legitimacy of the new regime after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, while also adopting ideas and practices from the capitalist system. The core values that have shaped the Maoist era, such as collectivism and self-sacrifice, have diminished in their importance, giving way to more capitalist ethics such as competition, effectiveness, and autonomy. Due to the support of the central government and its close proximity to Hong Kong, one of the most prosperous financial and economic centers in the world that was not liberated from Britain’s sovereignty until 1997, Shenzhen has gradually established its central status as one of the busiest container ports or seaports in the world, ranked only after Shanghai and Singapore.

It is also worth noting that Shenzhen has undergone several stages of development in the age of globalization, growing from a premodern fishing village to a highly modernized cosmopolitan metropolis. Initially, the economy of Shenzhen relied heavily on that of Hong Kong, leading to a mode of production known as “store (Hong Kong) in the front, factory (Shenzhen) in the back” (qiandian houchang). With its economy developing by leaps and bounds in the past several decades, however, Shenzhen has heralded its conspicuous appearance on the world stage as a pilot zone for boosting China’s economy by substituting the socialist planned economy with a market economy, thus outperforming many other cities in China in terms of global urban competitiveness. According to the “Global Urban Competitiveness Report” released jointly by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and U-N Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) in 2017, Shenzhen ranked the sixth among the numerous global metropolises with regard to urban competitiveness, surpassing that of Hong Kong (12th), Shanghai (14th), Guangzhou (15th), and Beijing (20th). Even as China’s economy was severely undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, the global ranking of Shenzhen’s urban competitiveness in 2021 did not suffer as dramatic a decline as expected, arriving at the 9th as compared to Hong Kong (11th), Shanghai (12th), Beijing (21th), and Guangzhou (42th) (Ni et al. 2023, 21). Although Shenzhen, at the initial stage, engaged with the global system in a relatively passive manner as a manufacturing base for Hong Kong, it has quickly adjusted itself to the process of globalization, to the extent of violating the tripartite pattern of Bei-Shang-Guang (Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou).^[7] Taking advantage of its adjacent position to Hong Kong and the favorable policies issued by the central government, Shenzhen has managed to establish itself as a cosmopolitan megacity that is capable of decentralizing not only Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province, but also current economic and financial centers in China, especially Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing.

Apart from the open and free policy in the field of economy, Shenzhen also places a high value on programs and policies that attract immigrants from all over the world, which manifests itself most patently in the pithy catchphrase – laile jiushi Shenzhenren ^[8] (People are unbiasedly accepted as Shenzheners whatever part of the world they come from). In stark contrast to the sense of superiority possessed by some local residents of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, the unprejudiced attitude of this newly emergent city, where the non-registered population more than doubles the registered one, towards newcomers has contributed significantly to the creation of a congenial and tolerant atmosphere, enabling Shenzhen to emerge as a cradle for new ideas and cultures. Given the major contribution of migrant workers to building Shenzhen into a leading global metropolis, it is reasonable that they have a strong sense of feeling at home in Shenzhen. In this regard, I think it would be illuminating to recall Immanuel Kant’s intriguing idea of “world citizenship,” which can shed some light on Shenzhen’s characteristics of cosmopolitanism and “universal hospitality” that can be easily embraced by the migrant population (1957, 20–21). It is fair to say that Shenzhen is a place where a considerable number of people are showing a high degree of tolerance and friendliness to newcomers, who are provided with large quantities of opportunities in employment, education, and health care. In view of this, Shenzhen appears to possess a congenial feature of what Craig Calhoun (2008, 431) calls cosmopolitanism: “a stylistic capacity to incorporate diverse influences and … a psychological capacity to feel at ease amid difference and appreciate diversity”^. From the dynamic interaction and collaboration among Shenzheners regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, there arises a substantial momentum for the growth of Shenzhen as a new city with enormous potential. Due to the intellectual, cultural, and physical support of these newcomers, it takes only a few decades for Shenzhen to emerge ultimately as one of the most prosperous global cosmopolises, leading to the formation of a megacity that accommodates over 17 million residents,^[9] whose distinct cultural, national, and linguistic backgrounds have significantly enriched the cultural and intellectual life of Shenzhen, let alone the vital role they have played in the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen’s economy.

More importantly, Shenzhen, as a newly emergent city that has developed by leaps and bounds since reform and opening-up, is now characterized by the coexistence of premodern, modern, and postmodern elements. In Shenzhen, there is a unique spectacle of urban construction well suited to specific Chinese conditions. The economic reforms that were inaugurated in 1979 have brought about “the largest labor flow unprecedented in China’s history” (Ma 2004, 237–260), a massive migration of people from rural regions to urban areas. In Shenzhen’s process of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization, vast expanses of rural areas have been occupied by the expanding city, resulting in a phenomenon with specific Chinese characteristics – chengzhongcun (rural landscape within the urban areas) (Hao, Sliuzas, and Geertman 2011, 214–224). The urban village, normally inhabited by the non-registered population, is often surrounded by highly modernized and urbanized constructions, such as soaring skyscrapers and elaborate transportation infrastructure. Since China is still at the initial stage of socialism, where economy develops unevenly in different regions, the current existence of urban villages plays a vitally important role in Shenzhen’s process of urbanization and modernization by providing a realistically effective solution to the accommodation of the migrant population from different parts of the world. By subverting the dichotomy between the urban and the rural, the urban village “functions as a transitional neighborhood characterized by a mixture of rural and urban society” (Liu et al. 2010, 135–144) in China’s historical transition from an initially agrarian society to an increasingly modernized and urbanized one. In other words, by providing affordable and temporary shelters for the migrant population, Shenzhen’s urban villages, a special phenomenon with Chinese characteristics, have contributed to a relatively low cost of living in the city of Shenzhen, which not only highlights the uniqueness of Shenzhen’s process of urbanization and modernization in the age of globalization but also emphasizes the competitiveness of Shenzhen in rivaling other global metropolises.

It should be noted that globalization has exerted profound impacts on human society, “not merely in the economy, but more apparently in the aspects of cultural and intellectual production and studies” (Wang 2015, 2060). A glimpse of Shenzhen’s development over the past few decades reveals that Deng’s regime has been dedicated to integrating China into the system of global economy, while giving short shrift to the cultural domain, hence leading to the construction of an economically prosperous metropolis which lacks a rich cultural heritage and a profound cultural tradition. Despite all the wonders created by Shenzhen in its process of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization, Shenzhen as a newly emergent city is often associated with the image of a cultural desert in public imagination and discourse. When elaborating on the modernity and cosmopolitanity of Shanghai, Wang (2017, 94) remarks that Shenzhen is “still far from being a cultural center when compared with Shanghai, where there has been a cultural tradition since the Republican period”. It is true that Shenzhen is neither a city with a rich cultural tradition nor the capital city of Guangdong Province, but I want to point out that Shenzhen is currently in the process of transforming from a cultural desert to a cultural oasis that has immense potential for deconstructing the long-established hegemony of Beijing culture and Shanghai culture by adding to the breadth and complexity of Chinese culture as a whole. Deng Xiaoping, emphasizing the striking difference between “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and other political systems, describes the relationship between material and spiritual civilization as “liangshou zhua, liangshou douyao ying” (“seizing with both hands, [and] both hands need to be firm”). To provide a strong impetus to the development of migrant literature, the municipal government of Shenzhen, along with several influential newspapers such as Shenzhen News and Shenzhen Daily that have substantially enriched the cultural and intellectual life of the city, has offered a wide variety of platforms for the promotion of migrant literature, such as Dagongmei, Wailaigong, Dapengwan, and Shenzhen Special Zone Daily. Under such circumstances, Shenzhen has also molded its unique culture: the so-called Shenpai wenhua (Shenzhen culture) as distinguished from the prominent Jingpai wenhua (Beijing culture) and Haipai wenhua (Shanghai culture). Whereas Beijing culture is esteemed as traditional and cosmopolitan, and Shanghai culture is regarded as more romantic and broad-minded, Shenzhen culture is characterized by vitality, creativity, and cosmopolitanity. The newness of Shenzhen, with its dual connotation of referring to the novelty of the SEZs and to the young age of those who have taken up residence in this city, hints that both the city of Shenzhen and Shenzheners have numerous possibilities for creating miracles that would be almost inconceivable in many other cities where there is a long cultural tradition. While the cultural tradition of Beijing precludes the capital city of China from being deeply influenced by foreign cultures, Shenzhen enjoys considerably more freedom to embrace external influences, hence making its local culture more flexible and capacious. Just as the old Chinese saying goes, haina baichuan, yourong naida (the sea owes its increasing capacity to its admittance of the access of various sizes of rivers), Shenzhen culture owes its breadth, diversity, and vivacity to its open-minded tolerance to a wide spectrum of literary cultures. The convergence of a variety of cultures in Shenzhen has helped this city to shape its own cosmopolitan culture, and more broadly, the harmonious coexistence of different cultures in China, such as the above-mentioned Beijing culture, Shanghai culture, and Shenzhen culture, has contributed significantly to the formation of a pluralistic and complicated Chinese culture as a whole.

In conclusion, while it is true that the advent of globalization has galvanized the modern centralization of Shenzhen since reform and opening-up, it should also be noted that Shenzhen, thinking globally and acting locally, has brought global and local resources into alliance in order to demonstrate its uniqueness and competitiveness in the age of globalization.

3 Globalizing the Local: The Postmodern Decentralization of Shenzhen

To examine modernity in the global context, it is necessary to take into account both modernity and postmodernity, for global modernity manifests itself differently in diverse cultural and historical contexts. With particular emphasis on the duality of Chinese alternative modernity, Wang (2012, 621) holds that Chinese modernity has distinguished itself from other forms of global modernity through its unique characteristics, while making a significant contribution to the grand discourse of global modernity in the plural form. The efforts of the central government to convert capitalism into socialism with Chinese characteristics do not in any way contradict its goal of internationalizing China, for it is only by localizing the global and globalizing the local that China can genuinely move from periphery to center. Likewise, Shenzhen seeks to engage in a dialogue with its Western counterparts and enhance its international influence after undergoing a process of modern centralization in the age of globalization and rising to the status of being one of the most conspicuous megacities in the world. It is worth mentioning that Shenzhen’s success has already captured the imagination and critical attention of scholars on a global scale, as can be seen in the multidisciplinary volume entitled Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (2017), coedited by eleven scholars with diverse academic backgrounds. In this section, I will concentrate on how Shenzhen’s process of modern centralization has been accompanied by a process of postmodern decentralization not only within the national or regional framework but also beyond the perimeter of China. After the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Shenzhen’s function as a border city has dramatically declined.^[10] As a precursor of China’s reform and opening-up, Shenzhen has transformed from a traditional manufacturing and distributing base to one of the most cutting-edge information and technology zones not only in post-industrial and post-revolutionary China but also in the world.

How has Shenzhen brought its manifold advantages into full play and what role has Shenzhen played on the international stage? To begin with, Shenzhen, as a coastal city of China, enjoys an abundance of favorable natural assets: a pleasant climate, an easy access to natural environment, sufficient ports and harbors that substantially facilitate its maritime transport both with other cities in China and with its international counterparts. Generally recognized as “China’s Silicon Valley,” Shenzhen has exhibited its uniqueness and competitiveness by bringing local and global resources together in a flexible way. As a hub of high-tech corporations, Shenzhen has itself cultivated a large number of world-renowned leading enterprises over the past several decades, including Konka (1980-), Vanke (1984-), ZTE Corporation (1985-), Huawei Technologies Corporation (1987-), TP-Link (1996-), China Merchants Bank (1987-), Skyworth (1988-), Foxconn (1988-), Ping An Insurance Company (1988-), S. F. Express (1993-), BYD (1995-), Tencent (1998-), Gionee (2002-), DJI-Innovations (2006-), and Ping An Bank (2012-). In 2015, against the backdrop of the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road – yidai yilu (The Belt and Road Initiative),^[11] Shenzhen municipal government established Qianhai & Shekou Free Trade Area (FTA), the biggest international community in southern China, as an attempt to strengthen the conversation and collaboration among different national or regional cultures along the historic Silk Road. In addition, yuegang’ao dawanqu (Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area),^[12] in which Shenzhen is currently playing an indispensable role, has ascended to a world-class Bay Area, next to the New York Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Tokyo Bay Area. Such a tripartite regional alliance would positively motivate the establishment of an exceedingly modernized urban cluster with a high degree of global competitiveness, thus giving a strong impetus to the initiative of “the Belt and Road” for the sake of what President Xi calls the building of renlei mingyun gongtongti (the community of common destiny for all mankind). It can be concluded that the remarkable development of Shenzhen has galvanized the political and economic recentralization of the Pearl River Delta, where local economies contend with one another in attracting foreign investment with a lower cost in labor, resource, land, and infrastructure, instead of subjecting the entire economy to the plan of the central government.

To gain a competitive edge on the international stage, it is also important for Shenzhen to cultivate and promote its unique cultural identity in the global context. The uniqueness of Shenzhen culture lies in its all-embracing atmosphere where cosmopolitan and local elements are coexisting with each other. As a border city of Guangdong Province, Shenzhen is not restricted to the language of Cantonese; instead, a wide spectrum of languages, both global and local ones, are spoken in Shenzhen.^[13] Apart from the prevalent use of Mandarin Chinese and various foreign languages due to the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the migrant population, Shenzhen also preserves its local characteristics, as local languages are still commonly used by local people, such as Hakka (kejiahua), Weitou dialect, and Teochew (chaozhouhua), thus generating a symphonic coexistence of the global and the local.

Over the past several decades, Shenzhen has cooperated with a substantial number of prestigious universities at home and abroad to build world-class institutions of higher education and research. Inspired by the mutually supportive relationship between Stanford University and Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, recognized as “China’s Silicon Valley,” has placed a high premium on academic research and scientific innovation. Although it is true that high-quality educational and research institutions in this newly emergent city are still far from sufficient to achieve its ambitious pursuit of international prominence, the central government of China and Shenzhen municipal government have made joint efforts to improve this situation. Apart from Shenzhen University (1983-) and Southern University of Science and Technology (2010-), large quantities of satellite campuses of prestigious universities have been founded in Shenzhen, such as Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School (2001-), Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (2002-), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (2014-), Renmin University of China, Shenzhen (2016-), and Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School (2019-). And it is also worth mentioning that Shenzhen, as the host city for the 26th Summer Universiade in August 2011 and the WTA Finals from 2019 to 2028, was also one of the major venues for the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup. The past decades have also witnessed the establishment of a considerable number of cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, theaters, concert halls, and libraries. The village of Dafen, generally known as the “world’s oil painting factory,” once produced massive amounts of art reproductions of paintings in the Western art canon, accounting for approximately 60 percent of the entirety of oil paintings available worldwide. As Winnie Wong (2014, 193–212) has noted, the remarkable achievement of Dafen village as a global center for the mass reproduction of oil paintings not only throws into question the Western notion of authenticity but also gives rise to a creative cultural industry that represents the “China Dream”.

But how can Shenzhen culture transcend its cultural point of origin to reach the international audience? The fact has been widely accepted that translation has played a critical role not only in bringing foreign literature and cultures into China especially since the New Culture Movement, but also in introducing Chinese literature and culture to the rest of the world. According to Walter Benjamin (2002, 254), translation, “the process through which a literary work becomes international or cosmopolitan,” initiates an afterlife, or “a continued life” of a literary work, without which it would remain marginalized or unrecognized outside its own cultural domain. While some conservative intellectuals perceive cultural globalization as a disguised form of cultural colonization, or, to put it more precisely, Americanization of marginal cultures, other scholars side with the view that the opening up of developing countries, such as China, to the outside world is a favorable process during which peripheral or Third-World countries can benefit a great deal from foreign cultures, cultivate their own distinct national identities, and disseminate their unique literature and cultures worldwide. The process of cultural globalization in China has not only stirred “the creative imagination of various writers and artists” through the introduction and translation of numerous foreign literary works and theories into Chinese (Wang 2017, 98), but also accelerated the movement of modern Chinese literature from periphery to center through the translation of Chinese literary works into several major languages such as English and French.

Along with the “going out” of Chinese culture and literature, Shenzhen literature is also undergoing a process of moving beyond its home soil, with the literary works produced by local writers gaining increasing aesthetic appreciation and critical attention on a global scale. When positioned in a global setting, Shenzhen literature is targeted at depicting unique local cultures and practices based on the contemporary social reality of China, particularly about the life experiences and mental predicaments of Shenzhen residents. After several decades of extraordinary growth, a distinguished school of literature is currently taking shape in Shenzhen, known as dagong wenxue (Migrant Literature),^[14] a unique literary genre that has emerged in Shenzhen’s process of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in the age of globalization. Ever since the inauguration of reform and opening-up, a massive number of people from different parts of the world have swarmed into Shenzhen, bringing about a sort of “Shenzhen Gold Rush” in a land of abundant opportunities, but the tremendous discrepancies between urban and rural areas have given rise to a sense of dislocation, disorientation, and disempowerment among the migrant population. As a consequence, the past few decades have seen a wild proliferation of migrant literary works, which provide insights into the existential dilemma and mental distress of the displaced population. With the publication of the first piece of migrant literature entitled Shenye, haibian you yigeren (There is a Person at Seaside Late at Night) by Lin Jian in 1984, a mounting number of migrant workers have begun to write about their personal or collective experiences in this increasingly modernized and globalized megacity through literary means such as novels, short stories, poems and articles. As I have argued repeatedly in this article, Shenzhen as a newly emergent city has provided an amiable environment for migrant workers to strive for a better life, but the spiritual distress of the floating population has directed our attention to the complexity and hybridity of urban life. Not only does migrant literature truthfully portray the living conditions of migrant workers, but it also represents the spiritual and emotional status of them in a most strikingly expressive way^. In a broad sense, Shenzhen’s migrant literature provides an insight into the material and spiritual progress of China from a premodern stage to a modern one, and also from a state of self-isolation to that of openness.

In this regard, a large number of local writers, such as Yang Zhengguang,^[15] Deng Yiguang^[16] and Sheng Keyi,^[17] have already had their literary works published in several foreign languages, hence enjoying a growing amount of popularity among readers on a worldwide scale. Among all those local writers, Xue Yiwei^[18] has been celebrated for his cosmopolitan attitude and global perspective, as he has successfully portrayed individual and collective life experiences on a comparative basis. His well-known masterpiece Shenzheners,^[19] taking its inspiration from James Joyce’s Dubliners, vividly delineates the universal dilemma of human existence in modern society in the age of globalization. It has been translated into English by Darryl Sterk and subsequently into French in 2017, both of which have gained enormous popularity in the Western academy. His diasporic writing of individual experiences in today’s global context not only reflects his penetrating insight into the shared destiny of all human beings, but also demonstrates the fact that people from different parts of the world, regardless of their religion, nationality, gender, race, and ethnicity, are all citizens of the globe. In a nutshell, despite the profound influence of globalization on China’s cultural identity, we are also provided with exhilarating opportunities to promote Chinese literature and culture in the broader context of global culture. With the emergence of a wide variety of ways to portray individual experiences and sentiments in the era of globalization, Shenzhen literature has made its unique contribution to the breadth and complexity of world literature by providing a distinct Chinese perspective.

4 Conclusions

As one of the earliest cities in new socialist China to dispense with the planned economy in favor of the socialist market economy, Shenzhen has, over the past few decades, achieved unprecedented growth from an impoverished rural area to a cosmopolitan metropolis with its own distinct glocalized practices. In China’s process of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization since reform and opening-up, Shenzhen has played an indispensable role not only due to its close proximity to Hong Kong, but also because of its exceptional function as a test ground for China’s economic reforms; as a window to the outside world through which mainland China can catch a glimpse of the global context of economy and culture; as a place characterized by the harmonious coexistence of premodern, modern, and postmodern elements; as a newly emergent city that has attracted an enormous number of newcomers from different parts of the world; and as the cradle of migrant literature that would make its unique contribution both to the breadth and plurality of Chinese literature and to the complexity of world literature. Due to its remarkable achievement based on the dynamic interplay between the global and the local, Shenzhen has consolidated its role as a national and global model inspiring other countries and cities on a worldwide scale to stimulate socioeconomic transformations in the age of globalization.