Paper short abstract:

My paper reflects on how slogans in Shenzhen participate in the construction of a narrative of the city as a new place and a laboratory for economic reforms. It adresses the sense of a city without past that they convey, while participating in a history of South China as a frontier region.

Paper long abstract:

My paper reflects on how various slogans posted in different parts of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone participate in the construction of a broader narrative of the city as a place of new beginnings: a laboratory for China's economic reforms, a place where anyone can start from anew, and a brand new city that prefigures the future. Based on fieldwork carried out in an old village that has been absorbed in the urban sprawl of northern Shenzhen, the paper examines the striking parallel between the foundational statements that are visible in the village's ancestral hall and the lineage's genealogy, and the posters that were everywhere on the city's walls. Both claim: 'it all starts from here'. These slogans resonate with the narrative of pre-Shenzhen history offered in the Shenzhen historical museum, one that depicts the Pearl River Delta area as a region of pioneers.

A focus on these recycled slogans reveals the ambivalent relations between past and present, the here and there, and history and myth. These tensions are intrinsic to the discourse of present-day neoliberal reform in Shenzhen, but they are as well an integral part of the history of capitalism in China. While they convey the sense of a city without past - Shenzhen portrayed as a city that has sprung up ex-nihilo in a few decades - they simultaneously participate in the larger history of South China as a frontier zone - of which the creation of the Special economic zone is only one the most recent instantiations.