According to I. Willis Russell, Time magazine was the first to use the expression “bamboo curtain” analogously to Churchill’s use of the “iron curtain.” Cited in Fifty Years Among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms, ed. John Algeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126.
See Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2006); Ezra Vogel, The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).
Tensions between the countries grew after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, and in 1961 the PRC formally denounced “revisionist traitors” in Moscow. For a discussion of the consequences of the Sino-Soviet split, see Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: The Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Since 1992, China has increasingly used market mechanisms to regulate the economy, using the plan to determine strategic goals and investment. China’s first five-year plan was passed in in 1953 and its thirteenth five-year plan was approved in 2019, setting economic goals and strategies for the 2020–2025 period.
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Verso, 2007).
See Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach, “Introduction,” in Learning From Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, eds. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1–19; Mary Ann O’Donnell, “What the Fox Might Have Said About Inhabiting Shenzhen: The Ambiguous Possibilities of Social- and Self-Transformation in Late Socialist Worlds,” TDR/The Drama Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 96–119.
The three theories were: “cat theory (猫论),” “don’t debate theory (不争论),” and “feel theory (摸论).” Like feel theory, cat theory and don’t debate theory were important to how early reforms were conceptualized, debated, and promoted. In his defense of using capitalist instruments to create Chinese markets, for example, Deng Xiaoping argued that, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white. Any cat that catches rats is a good cat.” Similarly, he put forward don’t debate theory in response to internal Party concerns over whether or not reforms belonged to the socialist or capitalist clan (姓社姓资). The point was to get on with the practical work of developing the economy.
Members of China’s first generation of revolutionary veterans, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun cooperated to remove Hua Guofeng from power in order to reform the Chinese system. However, the two men represented radical and conservative approaches to reforming Chinese markets. For a nuanced discussion of their relationship, see Susan L. Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In Between (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).
Ibid., 92.
Van Gennep begins his analysis of ritual with descriptions of thresholds, demonstrating that spatial and geographical progression correlates with a cultural passage, see Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Yizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960). For more on how physical experiences provide the metaphorical grounding for emotional and cognitive experiences see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
See Joshua Bolchover, “Border Ecologies,” in Border Ecologies: Hong Kong’s Mainland Frontier, eds. Joshua Bolchover and Peter Hasdell (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), 9–25; Matthew Hung, “Timeline,” in Border Ecologies: Hong Kong’s Mainland Frontier, eds. Joshua Bolchover and Peter Hasdell (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), 26–34.
See Jianfa Shen, “Cross-Border Connection between Hong Kong and Mainland China under ‘Two Systems’ Before and Beyond 1997,” Geografiska Annaler 85 (2003): 1–17; Weiping Wu, “Proximity and Complementarity in Hong Kong-Shenzhen Industrialization,” Asian Survey 37, no. 8 (1997): 771–93.
More recent examples of this geopolitical logic include the China (Guangdong) Pilot Free Trade Zone, Qianhai & Shekou Area of Shenzhen (est. 2015, ➝) and the Shenzhen Shantou Special Cooperation Zone (est. 2011).
Based on the 1980 draft plan, the 1982 Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Comprehensive Plan proposed a tripartite division of the SEZ into eastern, central, and western clusters. Luohu-Shangbu was the new city’s central—and therefore most important—cluster. In the east, Shatoujiao had been an important cross-border market since the establishment of the Sino-British border in1898. In the west, Nantou boasted the longest urban history of any area in Shenzhen. It was established over 1,700 years ago as part of the government salt monopoly and became the County Seat of Xin’an during the first year of the reign of the Wanli Emperor (1573). See Luxin Huang and Yongqing Xie, “The Plan-led Urban Form: A Case Study of Shenzhen,” 48th ISOCARP Congress (2012); Mee Kam Ng and Wing-Shing Tang, “The Role of Planning in the Development of Shenzhen, China: Rhetoric and Realities,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 45, no. 3 (2004): 190–211.
This area was called “Shenzhen” into the 1990s, when the government began actively using the term “Dongmen” to distinguish the old market town from the new city, which had moved its offices from Luohu to Futian (formerly known as Shangbu). Dongmen is considered the “heart” of contemporary Shenzhen, while Nantou is treated as a historic site. Mary Ann O’Donnell, “Heart of Shenzhen: The Movement to Preserve Ancient Hubei Village,” in The New Companion to Urban Design, eds. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee (Routledge, 2019), 480–93.
Patrick H. Hase, “Eastern Peace: The Sha Tau Kok Market in 1925,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 33 (1993): 147–202.
“1864-1911 Building KCR,” KCR, https://kcrc.com/en/about-kcrc/history.html (accessed February 9, 2020); Tymon Mellor, “The Kowloon Canton Railway (British Section) Part 4 – The Early Years (1910 to 1940),” The Industrial History of Hong Kong Group, https://industrialhistoryhk.org/kcrc-railway-british-section-3-early-years-1910-1940/ March 10, 2016.
K. W. Chau notes that during the early years of Hong Kong industrialization, water shortages were resolved by rationing water to residents in order to keep factories running, see “Management of Limited Water Resources in Hong Kong,” International Journal of Water Resources Development 9, no. 1 (2011): 68–72. For a more detailed account of cross-border infrastructure, see Mary Ann O’Donnell and Viola WAN Yan, “Shen Kong: Cui Bono?” Border Ecologies: Hong Kong’s Mainland Frontier, ed. Joshua Bolchover and Peter Hasdell (Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), 34–47.
Emma Xin Ma and Adrian Blackwell, “The Political Architecture of the First and Second Lines,” in Learning From Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, eds. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 124–37.
“曾是深圳建材来源地 人大代表建议关停上步码头 (This Was Once the Source of Shenzhen Building Materials, Deputies to the People’s Congress on Closing the Shangbu Docks),” Nanfang Dushi (micro-blog), https://sz.house.qq.com/a/20140127/005326_1.htm (January 27, 2014).
Naughton, 109–11.
For more on the history of Shenzhen’s urban villages, see: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Guo Man and Feng Xingyuan, Ritual and Economy in Shenzhen: Making the Case for Global Social Science (forthcoming); Juan Du, The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); Mary Ann O’Donnell, “Laying Seize to the Villages: The Vernacular Geography of Shenzhen,” in O’Donnell et al, 107–23.
Barry Naughton, “The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior,” The China Quarterly 115 (September 1988): 351–386.
Jingting Fan and Ben Zou, “Industrialization from Scratch: The Persistent Effects of China’s ‘Third Front’ Movement,” October 20, 2015, SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2676645.
Mel Gurtov, “Swords into Market Shares: China's Conversion of Military Industry to Civilian Production,” The China Quarterly 134 (1993): 213–41.
Ting Chen, A State Beyond the State: Shenzhen and the Transformation of Urban China (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2017), 151–189.
Silvia Lindtner, “Laboratory of the Precarious: Prototyping Entrepreneurial Living in Shenzhen,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2017): 287–305; Silvia Lindtner, Anna Greenspan, and David Li, “Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs,” Proceedings of the 5th Decennial ACM SIGCHI Aarhus Conference on “Critical Alternatives,” Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing, (S.l.), v.1, n.1, (October 2015): 12–25.