Shenzhen - Special Economic Zone

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2017

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Economic Zones. The most successful was Shenzhen, which grew from a mainly rural area specialising in pigs and lychees to one of China's biggest cities.

Lucy Burns speaks to Yong Ya, a musician who has lived in Shenzhen since the 1980s, and to ethnographer Mary Ann O'Donnell.

IMAGE: Pedestrians and cars stream by a giant poster of Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen, the first of China's special economic zones. TOMMY CHENG/AFP/Getty Images

Transcript

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1:09.1	BBC World Service I'm Lucy Burns and today we're going back to China and the beginning of an economic policy that would change the world.
1:17.0	In May 1980, the government declared the city of Shenzhen to be a special economic zone, allowing capitalist activity in the country
1:25.0	for the first time since the Communist Revolution. Shenzhen was like a big village with some factories in it. It felt like people
1:39.7	were putting up new buildings all the time. This is Yong Yaa.
1:43.8	She was four years old when she moved to the Special Economic Zone.
1:49.2	It was 1984, the factory where my mother worked relocated to Shenzhen so we had to move.
	...

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