A Preface to the Other Half: From Handshake Buildings to High-Rise Dreams (Part 3, Pages 17-21)

Understanding the city on a human scale is vital. Shenzhen’s shimmering skyline, luminous nightscape, and concrete cosmos house an economy so prosperous, a workforce so huge, and an ambition so futuristic that the city deindividualizes, blurring lives and labor that build and sustain its horizon into a vague apparatus of modernity. The emphasis of this book is therefore unapologetically amodern and humanistic. I did not assume Shenzheneses’ stories from Shenzhen’s statistics. I learned to see Shenzhen and its migrant population as a living, breathing tapestry.

Statistics tend to smooth over the seams. Numbers overwrite the stories of those who stitch the seams. In China, 547 million people earn less than 1,000 yuan (~150 USD) per month, while another 417 million survive on wages between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan. Together, they represent 69 percent of the population. Income equality is as steep as ever: 84 percent make less than 3,000 yuan, and 95 percent earn under 5,000 yuan, while the wealthiest 1 percent controls 31 percent of the nation’s assets. My work embodies a naively stubborn curiosity: who are the people occupying the base of Shenzhen’s vast, unending social ladder? What does it mean to be simultaneously central to the city’s rise and peripheralized in its account of success? Through my journey, I found not a singularity of revelation but a mosaic of truths about visibility and invisibility, mobility and immobility, and claim-making and -dismissal. You will read about the industrial laborer whose hands weave together the map of mass production, the taxi driver who rises and falls with the urban economy, the social worker who balances a policy architecture that rarely tilts toward the vulnerable. Together, the eleven portraits offer a snippet of the other half of modern China, the rural-to-urban migrants who built Shenzhen and who live, love, and labor in hidden urban villages that the city’s glossy brochures barely broadcast.

This is the paradox the book keeps returning to: the disconnect between the individual and the city, between migrants’ transience and urbanism’s permanence, between the metropolis’s prosperity and its dependence on those who remain, in one way or another, in the shadows. Urban villages are physical testaments to this contradiction. When the Hukou system barred migrant workers from entering the cities, Shenzhen’s urban villages became an absorptive membrane, housing waves of rural migrants who comprised the backbone of labor that powered factories, construction sites, and service economies. Often occupying the majority of land in the city’s early development zones, they housed vast populations in extraordinarily dense clusters, thereby mitigating the urban housing crisis. The largest among them, Baishizhou in Nanshan District became home of fifteen thousand migrant workers by the 2010s. Interviewing village CEOs and urban planners, I learned how the city’s blueprints once intentionally “left [these] villages blank” to redline them out of redevelopment schemes, a seemingly passive omission that paradoxically constituted an active policy choice. By tolerating these “informal cities” within the city, the municipality gained a flexible labor pool while sidestepping its regulatory and welfare obligations to the migrant population. For example, the city’s safety net does not cover urban villagers, who are structurally denied Shenzhen Hukou status. In this parable of modern China, modernity’s gleam sits on human foundations treated as temporary, even dispensable.

From an urban studies perspective, Shenzhen’s urban villages preach a lesson about modernity’s geography. These dense, self-governed neighborhoods not only supplied labor to factories, but also incubated informal economies built by street vendors and shopowners. In some cases, even manufacturing enterprises sprang up. The most famous among them was Zhejiangcun in Beijing, a migrant enclave of 80,000 Zhejiang migrants in the capital city. In the early 1990s, the village’s low- and mid-end clothing output dominated China’s industry, while its leather jacket wholesale market welcomed buccaneers from all over Central and Eastern Europe. By 2003, over 1600 tons of commercial items passed through the hands of Zhejiangcun’s wholesalers daily, amounting to over 30 billion yuan (~3.7 billion USD in early 2000s) in annual trade volume. Zhejiangcun and many other urban villages demonstrated that informality can be socioeconomically potent albeit at the same time precariously contested. Depending on the scale you take and the lens you adopt, what was overlooked by municipal design was also an engine of industrialization. What was a symptom of exclusion was also an instrument of inclusion.

Urban villages’ existence is telling of Shenzhen’s physical structure. The city’s post-1978 transformation is often told as a vertical story, narrated by towers rising and GDP multiplying. The real urban morphology, however, is palimpsestic. A block away from the skyscrapers is the substrate of labyrinthine streets and handshake buildings that form urban villages. A street across the offices of CEOs are the assembly lines populated by migrant workers. To understand the city is to read those layers together. It is through these migrant workers and from the other half of Shenzhen, that a disproportionate share of value is extracted and transferred to multinational conglomerates, digital platforms, and global consumers whose purchase habits ripple back into the working conditions of factories and the living standards of workers. Therefore, the human subjects of this book are not peripheral spectators of globalization; they are integral participants, contributing labor to international trade while trade contributes to waged labor positions. The consumer who clicks “buy” on Amazon or Shopify rarely sees the fingers that sewed the seam, and these portraits are an attempt to make each finger visible, to bridge the moral gap between commodity and person.