Eye on China: Breath of fresh air in city of migrants

It was a relief this week to finish my trip to headquarters in Hong Kong and cross over the border back into China.

Despite being an important node in the worldwide net that globalisation has thrown over the world, there is something remarkably stuffy about Hong Kong. The weather and the accommodation are, of course, literally stuffy, but the atmosphere of old, established wealth makes it even more so.

That's not to say Hong Kong is lacking in dynamism. The city shows plenty of evidence of vitality, but much of the dynamism is driven by established businesses. Half a dozen huge companies dominate the city's economy. It's not fair to call it an oligopoly because the companies compete ferociously against each other.

But the barriers to entry are now so high that any aspirant to mega-wealth has to up sticks and move over the border to China.

That's precisely what Vincent Lo of Shuion Holdings did. The son of the owner of a relatively successful Hong Kong construction company, he tried his luck in Shanghai, with excellent results.

He has built Xintiandi (New Heaven and Earth) one of the most high-profile sites in Shanghai, combining upscale offices, accommodation and entertainment.

Leveraging off that, he has expanded into mass accommodation and similar projects in secondary cities.

I know what Lo must have felt on his trips to Shanghai. After Hong Kong, my trip to Shenzhen was also like a breath of fresh air. Shenzhen is the closest mainland city to Hong Kong, just 60km to the north.

The city is exceptionally young overall and there is a high proportion of young women. Many Hong Kongers don't like Shenzhen because it has a justified reputation for a high crime rate, but I found it intoxicating.

It reminded me of how New York must have felt during the peak of its appeal to immigrants. Shenzhen is full of talented migrants from all over China.

For somebody like me, who speaks Chinese but can never be Chinese (and doesn't wish to be), the contrast to other Chinese cities is striking. I live between two very different worlds, but so do people in Shenzhen, and that gives them a wider perspective on life.

There is no established culture in Shenzhen. There is none of the clannishness of Shanghai or the bureaucratic arrogance and peasant surliness of Beijing.

Everybody came to Shenzhen from outside so they had to create their own networks on the spot. For me, that gives Shenzhen people some of the characteristics of the effortlessly social Jewish and South Asian business people and traders that I come across. I find them friendly, curious about the outside world and culturally humble.

These people came to Shenzhen to better themselves. They have suffered through the Chinese system, so they are less likely to slip into the lazy nationalism of the more established parts of the Chinese empire.

Take one woman I met. She is from Wuhan and is finding her feet in Shenzhen practising Chinese medicine. Her story is typical of the risks Chinese take and of the reasons why they end up here.

A few years ago, she pooled some money with her friends and bought a multi-storey building in her native city off the city government. The group was on friendly terms with a senior city official who facilitated the deal for them.

Unfortunately, it turned out that while the city official was genuine, and was using genuine seals to approve the transaction, the documents he provided were not.

An unexpected investigation by the central government found that the tower block belonged to a category of ownership which prohibited its outright sale to investors. It could, in effect, only be leased.

This made the transaction my friend had embarked on illegal. The official proceeded to flee with the several million yuan he had made from the transaction. When he was eventually caught, he had squandered all the money in time-honoured corrupt official fashion on large cars, women and gambling.

Rather encouragingly, the official was successfully prosecuted and is now sitting in jail on an extended sentence. I expressed surprise that the man had been successfully put behind bars. My friend was blase about the event and said that these days the prosecution of crooked officials with the help of increasingly professional lawyers was common.

Yet she was not much better off after winning the case. Since the offender had spent most of the funds, they didn't get much back and the lawyers took 20 per cent of what they did get.

"But I am ambitious. Even though I am trained in Chinese medicine, I want more from life. That's why I came to Shenzhen," she says.

I tell her it is interesting that she came down to Shenzhen, 2500km from her home town, rather than travel the much shorter distance down the Yangtze River to Shanghai.

"The Shanghainese hate outsiders from other parts of China. But they fawn on foreigners from overseas," she says in that wonderfully bitchy way the Chinese have when speaking about regional differences.

The Chinese abroad have always been clannish and reluctant to interact with the host culture.

That's what I like about Shenzhen, the fact that it promises a successful and modern China without the incapacitating burden of Chinese tradition and xenophobia.

* The writer remains anonymous to protect his position in China.