I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism

with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me Lucy Burns.

Today I'm bringing you the story of a new economic policy that changed the world.

In May 1980, the Chinese government declared the city of Shenzhen to be a special economic zone.

This allowed capitalist economic activity in the country for the first time since the communist revolution.

Chen Zhen was like a big village with some factories in it. It felt like people were putting up

new buildings all the time. This is Yongya. She was four years old when she moved to the

special economic zone. It was 1984. The factory where my mother worked relocated to

Shenjin, so we had to move.

We just got sent here. We didn't choose to come.

The Chinese government has been relaxing restrictions on its citizens' activities,

and a new and unique Chinese system of capitalism is beginning to emerge.

The special economic zones, there were four of them on the Chinese coast,

were part of an experiment by the Chinese government, moving away from a planned economy to a market economy, or essentially experimenting with capitalism within a socialist system.

Mary Ann O'Donnell is an artist and ethnographer who's been living in Chen Zhen since 1995.

Setting up a capitalist system is ugly. That's true anywhere it's happened. In the 80s,

Shenjin was not a place where people would come because they said, gee, it's a great city.

It was under construction, was muddy, electricity came and went. It regularly flooded during the monsoon season because the

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