Organizer: NYSEAN

Type/Location: Hybrid / New York, NY

Description:

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China’s first and most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the frontier for the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) adoption of market principles and its entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. Acclaimed as the “Silicon Valley of the East,” Shenzhen has produced some of China’s most internationally competitive technology firms in the past two decades. 

The official account of Shenzhen’s growth centers on how political decisions by top leaders in Beijing decisively transformed an impoverished border town into a modern metropolis. In this talk, I present a simultaneously global and local history of Shenzhen by tracing how the city’s development was entangled with China’s Cold War engagements with Southeast Asia. I show how thousands of ethnic Chinese displaced by regional wars and ethno-nationalist policies in Southeast Asia became a disciplined labor force in Shenzhen’s agricultural and consumer electronics industries; how ships acquired by the PRC to repatriate ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia were later repurposed, including one transformed into a hotel and entertainment complex in Shenzhen; and how a PRC intelligence operative with extensive experience in Indonesia became one of Shenzhen’s most consequential local reformers, establishing the country’s first industrial zone open to foreign investment. Together, these stories reveal a Southeast Asian genealogy of China’s reform and opening. Starting from the late 1970s, migratory circuits, maritime transport infrastructure, and intelligence networks across the South China Sea played an important role in connecting China to global capitalism.

About the Speaker:

Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is the author of the award-winning Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War. Taomo is currently completing her second book, Shenzhen on the Move: Migrants, Money and Markets in China’s First Special Economic Zone.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.

To attend the event virtually, please join the webinar here.