Shenzhen futures

by OWEN HATHERLY

fffNighttime panoramic view of the Shenzhen Civic Center, with the Ping An Finance Centre towards the right. Located in the Central District, the civic center building was designed by Lee | Timchula Architects and was the main focal point of the urban plan. IMAGE/Wikipedia

An only slightly caricatured version of the cultural arguments of Mark Fisher could be expressed as follows: ‘the future ended in 1979’. In that year, there began a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (a line from Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country, which Fisher attributed to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who had borrowed it without credit). It was in fact so slow that its effects weren’t fully felt until the start of the 2000s, when the formal innovations and novelties of popular music and Hollywood film finally dwindled to a trickle and then ceased entirely. This account mirrored Fisher’s wider contention about the effects of neoliberalism in smashing a ‘popular modernism’ that had productively linked aesthetics and politics for much of the twentieth century. It was an argument built largely around British and, to a lesser extent, American culture, and so it felt particularly strange hearing it discussed in Shenzhen, at the launch in January 2024 of the Chinese translation of Fisher’s first and most famous book Capitalist Realism (2009).

Shenzhen was, of course, founded in 1979, as the first of the ‘Special Economic Zones’ in which the People’s Republic of China could experiment with capitalism, built around the busiest border post between the PRC and the British colony of Hong Kong. It is, accordingly, the flagship city of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, and today one of the biggest and richest metropolises on earth. Shenzhen has more metro lines than London and a high-speed connection to Beijing – nearly 1,500 miles to the north – that has emerged in less time than it took to plan and build Crossrail in London, or the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan. It is impossible not to use the word ‘futuristic’ in appraising its cityscape: with its nighttime play of LED slogans and images, its seemingly endless ranks of skyscrapers, its flyovers and overhead walkways, its cleaning robots sweeping and mopping vast plazas, and its unexpectedly excellent public infrastructure, it fulfils the science-fictional promises of the 20th century with the technologies of the 21st. It is an entire future whose creation dates from the exact moment when the future was supposedly cancelled.

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