A Preface to the Other Half: From Handshake Buildings to High-Rise Dreams (Part 1, Pages 7-10)

When I tell people that I spent a summer working at a garment factory in Shenzhen, or my weekends standing at its gate to interview workers, their faces either soften into an apologetic pity or sharpen into a startled admiration, as if a teenager’s financial deprivation or humanistic curiosity had propelled some feat of bravery unimagined and unimaginable. Both reactions are as telling about the storyteller as about the story, about how removed many of us are from the lives that churn out our shirts, our shoes, our phones. They tell you about Shenzhen—the city whose nightscape is depicted on the back cover—as both emblem and amnesia, about the city’s skyline on glossy postcards and its invisible human scaffolding below. Much ink has been spilt over what rises above: Shenzhen as a parable of Deng’s experiment in “reform[ing] and opening up” China to the world, Shenzhen as the Special Economic Zone that raised startups and skyscrapers overnight. The graphs of GDP, maps of foreign direct investment, and charts of the swelling urban population point ever onward, setting the sky as the limit only to break through it. After all, in this metropolis metonymical of modern China, in this tech center nicknamed “China’s Silicon Valley,” who knows what it feels like to stitch the clothes we wear, drive the cabs we ride in, build the city we talk through?

There is a simple answer: those who work to stitch the clothes, who work to drive the cabs, who work to build the city—in short, the working class. And in Shenzhen, a fishing village transformed into a sprawling megacity in mere four decades after China’s post-1978 economic liberalization, most members of the working class are migrants—giving birth to a special intersectional identity termed 农民工 (nongminggong, “peasant-turned-workers” or “migrant workers”). In 2024, the city recorded a population of 17.99 million, over 60% of which are not registered locally in China’s Hukou system, the majority of whom are migrant workers officially registered in their rural hometowns. The lack of local Hukou status denies their access to the municipal safety net, public education, healthcare insurance, affordable housing, and so on. In response, they retreated into cheap rentals in slum-like neighborhoods called 城中村 (chengzhongcun, “villages within cities”), depicted on the front cover of the book. Reminiscent of late 19th century New York tenements, urban villages sprang up as the sprawling municipality absorbed farmland while denying farmers local Hukou status. The landless farmers responded by “growing buildings” instead of crops, converting their agrarian plots into multi-story rental housing to make a living. By the end of 2022, Shenzhen’s 2,042 urban villages had rented out over 319,000 buildings with near 5.92 million housing units, covering a combined floor area of around 220 million square meters—almost half of the city’s total housing stock. Both demographically and geographically, the migrant working class comprises half of Shenzhen.

If Shenzhen is the emblem of modern China, its migrant workers are, uncompromisingly, the “other half of modern China.” The front and back covers of this book each come from one half of modern China.

The front cover is shot during my urban village fieldwork, capturing migrant workers riding electric bikes through the narrow, wet alleyways of urban villages to get to work. The buildings there jostle for spaces, so dense that sunlight barely penetrates—and when it did in that photo, it took the characteristic shape of the landmark Ping An International Financial Tower, the tallest building in Shenzhen, the second tallest in China, and the fifth tallest in the world. The dramatic contrast between light and dark emblematize how the working class often finds itself—literally and metaphorically—overshadowed. And when a ray of light is occasionally shed in their direction, its source most likely resides in the privileged top (be it municipal officers, urban planners, journalists, or scholars who analyze urban villages as a macroscopic spatial phenomenon without interrogating the human experience within), as symbolized in the photo by the contour of Ping An Tower. The back cover is the much-vaunted Shenzhen nightscape, showing (from left to right) the Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan CBDs of Shenzhen, with the Ping An Tower in the middle. The book’s section and chapter breaks, as you will find, is the contour of landmark towers depicted on the back cover. Between and around the three CBD stand over 2000 urban villages, yet in its wieldy erasure, the photo captures none.

The pages that follow are an attempt to reconsider Shenzhen and, in turn, redefine modern China. It questions what is happening in the margins of the “obvious story,” and seeks to shed a light there—from the bottom up and the inside out, just as how migrant workers of Shenzhen came to know the city. The eleven portraits that you will flip through are seen, sketched, scripted in the former world, each a counterweight to the idealistic, reductionist narratives about growth, progress, and development symbolized by the latter.

I was not born a spectator of this other half. I grew up in the same loose geographies as many of the people whose voices you will hear through this book. Also migrants, my parents moved to Shenzhen when I was a child. I remember the cold crimson stamp that blocked my kindergarten entrance because my family lacked local Hukou certificates, the six-hour weekly commute to a rural school that felt like another life, and the uncaring arithmetic of luck and cost that made a small apartment inside a school district the difference between education and exclusion. From Fu Xiong’s struggles to secure her daughter’s education to Aunt Li’s pension insurance dilemma, this motif of access and the lack thereof weaves through the following pages. The tension between empowerment and exclusion, between emblem and amnesia, between glittering skyscrapers and the cramped urban villages they overshadow, is the book you are about to pour through.