Reform as a Mobility Revolution: How Migrants in Shenzhen Remade the Chinese Economy

Taomo Zhou, National University of Singapore

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen—China’s first and most successful Special Economic Zone (SEZ)—is often celebrated as a “social laboratory” of reform and opening. Existing scholarship has emphasized how rural migrant labor, excluded from urban citizenship through the hukou system, powered the city’s rise and underpinned China’s transformation into the “factory of the world.” This paper broadens the analytical lens beyond rural-to-urban migration to argue that China’s market transition was fundamentally a mobility revolution. Human mobility played a foundational role in the remaking of state socialism and the reconfiguration of China’s global economic integration. I highlight two groups of mobile actors: “market-seeking cadres”—including relocated state-owned enterprise managers, policymakers, and technical professionals from China’s Cold War military-industrial complex—and “elastic co-ethnics,” referring to ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the wider diaspora. Within Shenzhen, the Chinese Communist Party strategically mobilized these actors to experiment with new ways of organizing the national economy and engaging international markets. Beyond human mobility, the mobility of economic factors—capital, labor, technology, and information—was central to the transition from plan to market. Market allocation depends on the ability of resources to move across sectors and regions in response to price signals. Shenzhen functioned as a bounded institutional space where constraints on factor mobility were selectively relaxed ahead of nationwide reform. In practice, marketization often began through tactically illegal mobilities; institutions followed through selective legalization; and the Party-state ultimately delineated the political boundaries of the market. Seen in this light, Shenzhen’s reform trajectory was driven less by coherent top-down design than by bottom-up dynamics generated through zonal experiments in mobility.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 150. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (I): A Hundred Protagonists