Why Shekou, and Why Start Here? | Shenzhen at 40, No. 1

Looking back to understand the present.

When people talk today about 40 years of reform and opening-up, they look first at the achievements. That list might include the China model, GDP, the rise of a great power, wealth and strength, China speed. And the doubts keep growing too: unfair distribution, the gap between rich and poor, vested interest groups.

This is perhaps the backdrop against which to look at Shekou's museum of reform and opening-up.

Some questions are easy to overlook. Shekou, for one — why build a museum of reform and opening-up here? And why does the flight to Hong Kong come first in the exhibition?

The simplest answer: people could not survive, and had to find a way out.

Before 1979, the map of southern China looked very different. Hainan Island was part of Guangdong Province, Shenzhen did not yet exist, and the area was a county under Guangdong called Bao'an.

Bao'an sat on the coast and was home to many fishermen. From the 1950s on, it also became a gathering point for hundreds of thousands of risk-takers from the bottom of society. They set out from here and swam toward Hong Kong. Hong Kong lay just across the water, but they did not always make it: some drowned and the waves pushed their bodies up onto the embankment; others gave up halfway and came ashore in the town of Shekou, thinking they had reached Hong Kong. In 1978, more than 46,000 people trying to flee the country were intercepted and detained in Bao'an County, having come from towns and villages, large and small, across China. Swim across, and you were in another world.

"For decades, we have not truly solved the problem of making the country rich and the people strong." At the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held from December 18 to 22, 1978, the government resolved to reform, open up, and invigorate the economy. "Starting in 1979, the focus of the whole Party's work should shift to socialist modernization."

Like the people who risked their lives to slip into Hong Kong, the country too chose to save itself at Shekou, leaning on Hong Kong. Gu Mu, then a vice premier of the State Council, replied: "Apart from local administration, which will follow the standard domestic approach, we need to make the economy a bit 'special' — meaning it should enjoy Hong Kong-style treatment, with free movement in and out."

Shekou faces the northwestern New Territories of Hong Kong across the water. Besides being a good place to swim from, it was also a good place to build a port. The two sides are 27 nautical miles apart — even swimming without a pause takes more than ten hours. But a boat leaving China Merchants' pier in Hong Kong could dock at Shekou in a little over an hour. After 1950, China Merchants was the Ministry of Communications' representative office in Hong Kong.

The industrial zone at Shekou was set up slightly earlier than the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was approved.

By the official account, it was born of two documents: the October 1978 "Request on Making Full Use of the Hong Kong-Based China Merchants Steam Navigation Company" and the January 1979 "Report on Establishing an Industrial Zone in Bao'an, Guangdong, by Our China Merchants Office in Hong Kong." In these two documents submitted to the State Council, China Merchants declared that it would "base itself in Hong Kong and Macau, draw on the mainland behind it, face outward to the world, run diversified businesses, combine trade with manufacturing, and combine industry with commerce," and would run the industrial zone by "taking Hong Kong's characteristics as a reference while accommodating domestic conditions."

Now that the results are abundant, praise comes easily, as if Li Xiannian, then vice chairman of the Party's Central Committee, had simply waved his hand, drawn a circle, and set China down a different road. In fact the start at Shekou was hard — harder than one might imagine. Again and again people asked whether this was socialism or capitalism, whether profits could be shared with foreign businesses, and where, exactly, a person's sense of security and belonging was supposed to come from.

And all of it might have been no more than a stopgap: could it even be done, would it work, who could say? The central government made the unusual decision not to intervene: "We won't give you money to buy ships or build the port — solve that yourselves. Whether you live or die is your own affair; you will have to fight for it yourselves." Li Xiannian had originally meant to hand China Merchants the whole 30-square-kilometer Nantou Peninsula in Bao'an County. But since developing one square kilometer cost about 100 million yuan at the time, the man in charge, Yuan Geng, decided to try it on just 2.14 square kilometers at Shekou.

Everyone was ready for failure — if it came, "the meat would still rot in our own pot," as the saying went; "it's only that small a patch of land," merely a "test tube."

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Shekou today is a subdistrict of Shenzhen's Nanshan District — modern, and, needless to say, expensive. Apart from street names like Industry First Road, little here suggests an industrial zone; Shenzhen's industrial character ended up being carried instead by one large company, Huawei, and by the electronics bazaar of Huaqiangbei. But as in the early years, Hong Kong people and foreigners working in Shenzhen like to live here. At Christmas they still get a street closed to traffic just for them, so they can pour out and celebrate.

On December 26 last year, China's first museum on the theme of "reform and opening-up" opened here, named the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up. It stands at the intersection of Wanghai Road and Industry Second Road, beside a conspicuous statue of a goddess. The statue has been there since 1989: Nüwa, the goddess who mended the sky, with a human head and a snake's body and a two-sided face — joyful on the side facing the mountain, sullen on the side facing the sea. Across the sea is Hong Kong. Unless you have read that explanation, though, you can walk past the 12-meter stone figure and notice none of it, feel nothing of that old urgency. It looks like any other statue by the sea: white, with flowing lines.

The history has been preserved as fully as possible, but the way it is spoken of is careful, or too careful. Inside the museum, a few piles of sand at the entrance make up the first exhibition zone. They try to recreate the flight to Hong Kong, which went on for more than two decades. The government would rather not raise the subject today; at Shenzhen's Bao'an Migrant Workers Museum, the same episode is described as people going to Hong Kong for "re-employment." At the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up, there are no truly harrowing photographs.

As for how this museum of reform and opening-up, arriving 40 years late, came to be built, the explanation rests mostly on one thing: China Merchants Group's 145th anniversary in 2017.

The earliest history of China Merchants goes back to the Self-Strengthening Movement of the Qing dynasty. That movement began after Anglo-French forces occupied Beijing, and set out to build industry across the country by "learning the superior techniques of the barbarians in order to control them." On December 23, 1872, Li Hongzhang, Viceroy of Zhili and Minister of Beiyang Affairs, submitted the memorial On the Trial Establishment of a Merchant Steamship Company to the Qing court. China Merchants — the name means an office set up to recruit merchant shareholders. In 1873, a China Merchants steamship left the port of Shanghai and sailed into Hong Kong waters crowded with foreign vessels. By 1978, China Merchants had only a few dilapidated ships left at its Hong Kong dock. But soon it entered its "second golden age": it became the actual administrator of the Shekou Industrial Zone.

In 1978, Yuan Geng led the founding of the Shekou Industrial Zone and used it to experiment with economic and political reform. Shekou then had its own decision-making power and its own land-use rights. Yuan Geng died on January 31, 2016, and China Merchants put a memorial museum on its agenda.

People close to the museum say a museum touching on such an important chapter of modern history would certainly need a nod from the national level. The proposal is believed to have come from Premier Li Keqiang, who, after visiting the China Merchants History Museum, said Shekou needed a museum on the theme of reform and opening-up.

The museum opened on schedule, ahead of the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up. Officials turned out in force on opening day. Fu Gangfeng, deputy secretary of the Party committee and chief accountant of China Merchants Group, said the best way to commemorate history is to create a new chapter of it. What is that new history? "Working hard to build China Merchants — a state-owned enterprise supervised by the central government — into a world-class enterprise with global competitiveness." Ambitious, and entirely flat; if you have seen the old history tucked away inside the museum, you understand the difference.

A copy of A Complete Detailed Map of Hong Kong that Li Xiannian marked up in January 1979. In gray-black pencil he traced the Nantou Peninsula, put red stars on several piers in Shekou and Hong Kong, and roughly connected the shipping routes out of the port.

A cream-and-coffee-colored rattan chair. It came from the reception hall where Deng Xiaoping was received during his 1984 southern inspection tour of the Shekou Industrial Zone. The cushion and back are leather, and the rattan arms have darkened over the years. Pairing the two materials was not a matter of fashion but a limit of leather-furniture manufacturing at the time. Deng's visit signaled support for carrying the reforms on.

A few rimmed dinner plates, once used in the restaurant aboard the Minghua. The Minghua was a retired French passenger liner that docked at Shekou in 1983 and was converted into a luxury hotel. Before that, Shekou had nowhere to put up short-term visitors and no restaurants or bars to entertain them. Things improved in the 1990s; another document, a "Guide to Life in Shekou" aimed at businesspeople from Hong Kong and Taiwan, shows they already had far more to spend money on.

A large number of exhibits from the China Merchants History Museum were moved into this new venue as well. Most are historical footage and official documents about major events in Shekou's history. When Shekou began blasting hills and reclaiming land from the sea in 1979, for instance, Yuan Geng had someone film the blasting; that footage is now projected onto a white wall in the exhibition hall more than 15 square meters across.

There are also plenty of Shekou identity papers. They tend to be vividly laid out and printed in both Chinese and English. Some are everyday documents: a health-check report from the joint hospital run by the China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone and Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, with a mint-green cover, and a Shenzhen bicycle license plate, dark green. There are also several entry-and-exit passes for the China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone, which had its own checkpoint at the time, sealing it off from the world outside. That eased some people's worries about the reforms: even if they failed or turned chaotic, the damage would stay inside a small area and not disturb anyone else.

As if in a utopia, employees could earn "above-quota output bonuses" for extra production, and they took part in the earliest wage reform, the "structural wage system" — unimaginable anywhere else in China at the time. Some Shekou employees bought welfare housing in the industrial zone in installments, the earliest instance of housing being sold as a commodity. Every Shekou employee could vote to elect the Management Committee, the industrial zone's highest governing body; being a "cadre" was no longer a job for life. Pay slips, housing purchase records, and ballots have all entered the collection.

But all these institutional reforms had to happen inside an "industrial" frame. One early Shekou administrator reminded people, at a small seminar during the museum's preparation, that industry was Shekou's birth permit. The hope was to make money from processing plants, and factories were the first things built. In 1979, China Merchants signed an agreement with foreign investors to run joint ventures in the Shekou Industrial Zone; after that came the joint venture Huamei Steel, the joint-venture Huayi Aluminum Plant, a float-glass factory, the wholly foreign-owned Far East Flour Mill, a branch of Japan's Sanyo Electric, and the Luks color TV factory, later reorganized into TCL — all established at Shekou. The museum has set aside an area for dual-cassette recorders, televisions, and factory-branded employee belongings made in Shekou.

Almost none of these factories survive today; what Shekou left the world instead came from elsewhere in the industrial park — Ping An Insurance, China Merchants Bank, and the shipping-container maker CIMC. One rare exception is the Dacheng Flour Mill: its old site has not been torn down, and still stands amid high-rises and construction sites. Its off-white facade and its sense of history won it a place as a main venue of the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. On display in the museum is a Dacheng Flour Mill flour sack a donor had kept for years; the curators stuffed it so it looks as though it had just come off the line.

The exhibition also includes newspapers recording the changes the reforms brought and the arguments they set off. There are plenty of them, some excited, others critical and hesitant. Among them is a piece in the Shekou Bulletin (《蛇口通讯报》) offering blunt advice to Yuan Geng, the top administrator of the Shekou Industrial Zone, and pieces on Hong Kong residents' worry that Shekou's growth would hurt Hong Kong.

Han Yaogen was the founding editor-in-chief of the Shekou Bulletin. He thinks it is rare for a museum to rebuild history out of old newspapers this way, especially since some of the important figures who appeared in those pages are now contentious in official discourse (a reference to Zhao Ziyang). He has heard that the publicity department of Nanshan District, which Shekou belongs to, once had reservations, but the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up did not alter or dress up the exhibits. "No museum on the Chinese mainland right now is this bold."

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At the start, the China Merchants History Museum was responsible for drafting the exhibition outline. That corporate museum grew out of the "historical materials display room" of the China Merchants Archives, set up as far back as 1992, which holds a complete set of official documents, including the Qing-dynasty memorial that founded China Merchants. But when it came to building a new Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up, the team was not sure of itself.

They invited more than a dozen elderly people who had been active in Shekou in the 1980s and 1990s to discuss the outline together. Most still live in Shekou, or at least spend part of each year there. Among them was Chen Nanxian, founding principal of Yucai School, which Shekou set up in 1983 to school the children of industrial-zone employees and which is now a large education group.

Another was Tan Ziqing, born in the 1950s, who worked briefly in her early years as an editor at the outspoken Shekou Bulletin; after the paper was shut down, she handled land and property rights at China Merchants. In 2015, when Shekou subdistrict set up the Shekou Community Foundation, she was elected its first chair. This civic organization has a clear mission — "to carry on the spirit of Yuan Geng" — and its members deliberately imitate the democratic deliberation of old Shekou, using Robert's Rules of Order in their own discussions; the longest meeting ran eight hours.

In May 2016, the Shekou Community Foundation was formally commissioned to collect exhibits for the planned museum of reform and opening-up, and signed a cooperation agreement with China Merchants. "A very delicate combination," Tan Ziqing told QDaily this April: a regional history museum is usually built by the government, and here it was handed to a listed company under a central state-owned enterprise, which in turn handed the collecting to civilians.

That decision proved shrewd; in less than a year more than 5,000 exhibits came in. People stirred up each other's nostalgia. Shekou residents were once the focus of the whole country, but in truth no one had taken much interest in them for a long time. The large collection drive of 2016 reminded them that they mattered. Forty-eight of them were chosen as advisers, took part in 16 salons, and were filmed in more than 50 videos.

They carried old certificates, documents, and trifling little booklets they had kept to a collection point near Garden City, and ran into old friends there who had also come to donate their "relics." Sometimes they waited at home for a truck, which would haul away a hopelessly out-of-date bicycle or a four-speaker radio that had not played in years; before long, these antiques would show up in a newly built museum that seemed to have been made just for them.

Han Bangkai, English teacher for the first cohort of the Shekou Industrial Zone's business management training course, divides his time between Australia and Shekou. When he is in Shekou he comes by almost every day — "donating one photo today, another tomorrow."

How to fit these exhibits into a single space and make them interesting to more people: the curatorial team was eager to try. Most of its members were born in the 1980s and had backgrounds in architecture, and they wanted to shake off some of the preaching of a history museum and connect with young people today.

The idea was not unrealistic. "Reform" and "opening-up" have always been fresh, young words, and 30 or 40 years ago Shekou pulled hard on the young: a freer atmosphere for speech, higher incomes — perhaps five or ten times what the rest of the mainland paid, or more — and exposure to the wider world, professional knowledge as well as entertainment, from the library, news salons, free open-air film screenings, or the cluster of bars packed with foreigners, modeled on Hong Kong's Lan Kwai Fong.

China Merchants found its design team by tender. Beyond that, the early curatorial team got almost no explicit instruction from China Merchants management — nothing on what style the exhibition should follow, say, or which points to stress. But the exhibition outline had been settled in advance, and it set the tone. The team drew on the National Museum of China's "The Road to Rejuvenation," an exhibition that, as the Beijing Youth Daily put it, "uses more than 1,280 pieces and sets of precious cultural relics and over 870 historical photographs to look back on the arduous struggle of the Chinese people over more than a hundred years of modern history to achieve national rejuvenation, and in particular the glorious course by which the Communist Party of China led and united the people of all ethnic groups across the country in the fight for national independence, the liberation of the people, national prosperity and strength, and the people's happiness."

More of the design references came from a museum in Mexico, the Museum of Memory and Tolerance. It is an outstanding museum against genocide, in its architecture as well as its content, and some people consider it a marvel that such a place exists in a developing country. What the Shekou team valued was how it handles a grand subject without becoming crushing: "the tone is just right."

Design and construction of the exhibition space started in early 2017 and came out in the planned modern-industrial style: a great deal of cement and lime-finished surface, spotlights imitating gallery lighting, all of which the curatorial team hoped would make the place look cooler. Some things fell short. The photo frames, for instance, ended up in aluminum composite panel, the most common material in propaganda exhibitions. The team felt the design and construction contractors were sometimes lazy: they knew the standard playbook of China's modern-history exhibition halls too well and had no new ideas to offer.

Senior China Merchants officials and visitors alike now say the lighting in the hall is too dim and the aisles too narrow, which makes it unfriendly at peak hours. They see little to fault, though, in the design details — materials, typefaces and so on.

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Some critics think the trouble goes deeper.

Tan Ziqing understood from the beginning that the museum was a political assignment. Visiting the Nixon Library in the United States later, she felt she had found a decent template for a political museum, but she knew the same approach would be hard to pull off at Shekou. For her the problem was not the design; it was what the museum chose to show. The hall is full of group photographs of leaders, and they sit on top of the civilian memories that were so painstakingly collected — almost inevitably so.

During the collection phase, the Shekou Community Foundation submitted a detailed proposal to China Merchants. "This is already an exhibition outline!" Tan Ziqing recalls a staff member at the client, China Merchants Shekou, exclaiming. It did not persuade the client to use this more human outline. The foundation kept it and put it into a large-format hardcover commemorative book, Remembering Shekou: A Record of Collecting Exhibits for the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up (《记忆蛇口——蛇口改革开放博物馆展品征集实录》). The book is not sold to the public and circulates only among a small group, but it too received funding from China Merchants Shekou, and at China Merchants Shekou's request some wording judged inappropriate was cut or revised.

The book collects more than 100 oral accounts, drawn from dozens of hours of interviews and 16 seminars held during the collection. Those conversations were also condensed into a video under an hour long. In it, gray-haired Shekou residents say that everything done in the Shekou Industrial Zone back then was aimed at setting people free. Reform in that era felt like reform on every front: economic, but also political and ideological.

At the "Thinkers' Talk" held on opening day last year, the curatorial team invited Qin Shuo, former editor-in-chief of Window on the South, along with Xu Zidong and Dou Wentao — guest and host of Behind the Headlines with Wen Tao (《锵锵三人行》), a talk show already pulled from circulation on the Chinese mainland — to talk about Shekou. There is no firm plan yet for this year's "Thinkers' Talk," because no clear answer has come back on whether it may go ahead.

On June 2 this year, less than six months after opening, the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up closed "for upgrades." Besides fixing the lighting and the aisles, it will add more material on the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and on President Xi Jinping.

This is in fact only a temporary hall for the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up. China Merchants hopes to build the museum on "Microwave Hill," a mound at the foot of Nanshan no taller than three stories; even Shenzhen residents do not know the name well, but the place mattered a great deal once. The earliest microwave communications station was built there in 1981, over criticism that it might endanger national security, and phone calls between Shekou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong could then be dialed direct. The mainland's telephone system at the time still ran on old switchboards that needed operators.

Along with the museum there is a broader plan for a "core socialist values theme park." But because a restaurant at the top of the hill still has time left on its lease, all of it is on hold.

Shekou's hotly disputed slogan of the day — "Time is money, efficiency is life" — now stands at the foot of Microwave Hill. It has been made in every kind of material over the years, planted on hilltops and paraded on National Day floats; painted gold, it is not much to look at now, and certainly less striking than its spinoff, a pair of fridge magnets reading "Don't interfere with my" and "efficiency," which the curatorial team solicited as creative-design products before the museum opened.

As a stopgap, the museum of reform and opening-up has been placed for now inside a stylish modern building designed by Fumihiko Maki, the Japanese architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 1993; its facade is three flat boxes. Of the institutions in those boxes, the best known is the V&A — the long-celebrated museum named after Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert — which chose to run this new Shenzhen outpost with Design Society, a unit of China Merchants Shekou.

Shenzhen, once an "industrial city," has spent years trying to change its character: it moved factories out to nearby Dongguan and Huizhou, welcomed internet companies and fashionable fintech firms, and now means to remake itself as a design capital on the strength of southern China's advertising tradition.

We found the museum of reform and opening-up in the first place while visiting the V&A. But most of the time no one dares imagine that the V&A show on the first floor and the museum of reform and opening-up on the second might draw traffic for each other. They belong to two entirely different kinds of visitor.

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After the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening-up opened to the public on December 26, more than 2,000 people came on its busiest days — far beyond what the curatorial team expected; they had assumed a few hundred a day at most. Visitors come from many directions: besides individuals, Party and government agencies and state-owned units come in groups, and schools see the museum as a good option for public-education outings.

Shenzhen does not have many history museums suited to public education. The city's own history is simply short. It was more than a year after work on the Shekou Industrial Zone began that the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was approved, in 1980.

The city now has more than 12.5 million residents and produced 2.243839 trillion yuan of GDP in 2017, narrowing the gap with Hong Kong to 61.1 billion yuan. Its center has shifted from Luohu to Futian, and more landmark buildings are going up in Nanshan District, home to Tencent's headquarters, where GDP per capita passed US$50,000 in 2017. None of this has much to do with Shekou.

Sometime after the late 1980s, in fact, it became another place altogether. In 1992 Shekou was folded into Nanshan District, and the Shekou Industrial Zone ceased to exist as an administrative unit.

April 23 was the 101st anniversary of Yuan Geng's birth. The Shekou Community Foundation organized a local forum that day to discuss whether Shekou is still a livable city. This is how some people understand the spirit of Yuan Geng and the part of Shekou worth carrying on: strip away the metaphysics, and Shekou was meant from the day it was founded to let people live comfortably.

Yu Changmin was once head of the Shekou Industrial Zone's policy office. In a video made by the Shekou Community Foundation, he says he came up with a comparison for Shekou early on: it was like Edison's bulb, which stayed lit for only eight minutes — no matter, what mattered was that the world was bright afterward. Yuan Geng agreed.

Cover image photographed by QDaily