Nomads in a city of their own making: a portrait of migrant workers in Shenzhen, 1980–2000

Abstract

On 21 August 1980, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was officially born and the guideline of “the whole country supports the SEZ, and the SEZ serves the whole country” was set. As the first shot of China’s reform and opening up, Shenzhen Shekou industrial zone broke ground in 1979 and immediately started a high-intensity practice. The slogan “time is money, efficiency is life” proposed by Yuan Geng, was affirmed by Deng Xiaoping and gradually spread from the region to the whole country. Similar to other big cities, migrant workers serve as a crucial role in making it. In this visual essay, we focus on those city actors and use nine pictures of the migrant workers’ portraits taken by professional photographers in Shenzhen from 1980 to 2000 in order to understand the relationship between the process of urbanization and the impacts of it on people who build it up. This approach is in line with how Xiao and Chen (2022) regards photographic archive of normal people and their daily life as a way of demonstrating the China modernity and can become an important method to understand a city. In contrast to the “new” Chinese era featured with platform economy and digital labors, it presents a pre-digital working and living lifestyle of the “old” Chinese. Overall, one of the most common pictures associated with Shenzhen is mobility: many foreign visitors make a short transition through the Shenzhen Customs, and many leave and return for long periods of time; the gap between the rich and the poor in Shenzhen and Hong Kong breeds a desire to move, and the border encourages flight and return, deeply manifested in the geographical memory. The infinite expansion of the power of capital is accompanied by profound social changes. In the constant fusion of capital, culture, and social forces, the process of globalocalization eventually leads to cultural uniqueness, the transformation of villagers’ roles, the tremendous growth of wealth, and the rise of the creative, financial, and technological classes, the prevalence of consumerism and the transformation of the power of capital into one dream after another. Being constantly constructed and shattered, the city is narrated in ever more grotesque images. Urban mobility is often encouraged to fit in the urban development initiated by the government. This would also result in many social consequences and problems such as gentrification, displacement, and mental issues. In the case of Chinese migrant workers who mostly live in the urban villages, gentrification would often happen when those places are in demolition and rebuilt to attract the white-collar workers or the middle class. In consequence, the migrant workers would either leave the city or join into a new style of economy such as working for the digital platforms. The