What Kind of Public Space is the City of Shenzhen?

This chapter argues that the Chinese state has used Shenzhen to reform the country’s planned economy, opening it to global capital. It compares Chinese and North American accounts of early manufacturing in Shenzhen and maps historical boundary objects in the Shenzhen condition that enabled North American and Chinese media to deploy early manufacturing in Shenzhen to achieve different social goals, thus placing Shenzhen on very different world maps even as on-the-ground interactions depended on their presumed equivalence and facile translations. The author delineates how such interactions and transactions have activated specific public spaces in Shenzhen.