Shenzhen
On Nov. 8-11, 2023, I went to Shenzhen, by plane on Cathay Pacific from Manila to Hong Kong, and by car from Hong Kong to Shenzhen.
After four days touring Shenzhen’s business district and industrial zones and meeting executives of among the city’s biggest companies, I felt depressed, for my home city and my country, the Philippines.
I first went to Shenzhen in 1978, by train from Hong Kong. The trip was the nearest one could visit of what you call “China,” which was then a closed society. The hour-long train trip was disappointing, if not disgusting. Teems of people packed like sardines, each carrying a precious commodity bought from Hong Kong – TV sets and other small appliances, groceries including live chickens, and clothes, of course. You could sniff the smell of sweat and dirt in the crowd, standing eight people per square meter of space.
In 1978, Shenzhen was a small unremarkable fishing village of 25,000 scattered on a sprawling coastal and mountain territory on the Pearl River Delta. At 198,000 hectares, it is 3.14x the size of Metro Manila’s 63,600 hectares. Metro Manila’s 1978 population of 5.5 million was then 220x that of Shenzhen.
Today, with a population of over 13 million and a GDP of 420.5 billion yuan (about P3.238 trillion at P7.7 to one yuan), Shenzhen is ranked among China’s three biggest cities, after Beijing and Shanghai. In GDP, Shenzhen is bigger than the entire Philippines ($420 billion vs. $404 billion in 2022). Shenzhen’s per capita income is $25,144 – 7.4x Philippine per capita GDP of $3,394. Shenzhen today is the world’s leading technology city. It is China’s Silicon Valley; only better.
In 40 years, while the Philippines declined from a marvelous growth economy (8.9 percent GDP growth in 1976) to an incredibly poor country (4.9 percent GDP growth by the second quarter 2023, with negative 9.5 percent in 2020), Shenzhen climbed from backwater penury to unmitigated prosperity in just 40 years.
How did a dirt-poor Chinese fishing village of 25,000 people beat a bustling middle-class metropolis of 5.5 million from the starting gate in 1978 in just 45 years or less? In fact, how did Shenzhen beat the entire Philippines, today a nation of
