LEARNING FROM SHENZEN: CHINA’S POST-MAO EXPERIMENT FROM SPECIAL ZONE TO MODEL CITY

Please join us on Wednesday evening, April 26th, for a reception celebrating the publication of Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, edited by Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, & Jonathan Bach (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

This multidisciplinary volume presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. From an experimental site as the first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is now a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy, a UNESCO City of Design, and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. A city of contradictions, it embodies the spatial and temporal intricacies of the contemporary urban experience. The book explores especially how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation. Through cases of labor, architecture, gender, public health, politics, education, and more, this urban case study serves to explore critical problems for modern-day China and beyond.

The book just received prominent mention in the latest Economist magazine special feature on the Pearl River Delta.

Remarks by co-editor and author, Jonathan Bach, chair of the Global Studies Program (New School), Mark Frazier, Professor of Politics (New School), and special guest Na Fu, Luce Visiting Scholar in Urban Studies at Trinity College and head of the research department at the Shenzhen Center for Design.

Refreshments will be served and books will be available for purchase at a discount.

Sponsored by the interdisciplinary programs in Global Studies, Urban Studies, and Environmental Studies, the India China Institute, the Department of Anthropology, and the Graduate Program in International Affairs.