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Shenzhen
OpinionChina Opinion
Ling Tang
Being Chinese
Ling Tang

Once, I was proud of the Shenzhen miracle. Now I’m not so sure

The Taiwanese-influenced accent my voice carries is a relic of the 2000s and hints at how differently my generation understands modernity

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A food delivery drone takes off from a site near Shenzhen Bay Park in Shenzhen on January 17. Photo: VCG via Getty Images
Ling Tang
Ling Tang is a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne and a singer-songwriter under the name Lyn Dawn.

I am a second-generation Shenzhener, born to parents who moved from Hunan province to Shenzhen city in the 1980s to seek opportunities. My father had a Master’s degree, a rarity then which afforded him the chance to look for work outside our province. Both my parents ended up with a state-owned enterprise.

My mother went back to Hunan in the 1990s for my birth, so my grandparents could help with childcare, but I was brought back to Shenzhen before my first birthday. Since leaving the city at 17 to study, I have lived in Hong Kong, Sweden and the United Kingdom and now teach cultural studies in Australia.

Today, Shenzhen means more to my parents than to me. The city “felt different” to my mother in her late 20s, as the train crossed into it. Shenzhen was and is modern, open and built for young professionals. It has fewer guanxi networks and clean streets. People come here from all over China, so it’s a Mandarin-speaking city in a Cantonese region.
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“Every time I come back to Shenzhen from my business trips or Hunan, I feel I am home,” my mother would say. “I’m so happy I let you grow up in Shenzhen. If I had stayed in Hunan, you wouldn’t be so global.”

Indeed, I was once as proud of Shenzhen as my mother. I was in primary school when the city’s first metro line opened in 2004, fast and clean. I went up Lianhua Hill every weekend to see the statue of Deng Xiaoping, the “architect of modern China” so central to the Shenzhen miracle. He had designated Shenzhen as one of the trial cities for economic reform and it became the most successful of them all. The 53-floor International Foreign Trade Centre, built at the rate of one floor every three days, was a symbol of “Shenzhen speed” and an inspiration to my mother.
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But what is Shenzhen? As a 13-year-old, when I went back to Hunan for summer holidays and picked up a slight Hunanese accent, I was afraid of losing the Taiwanese-influenced accent adopted by my peers in Shenzhen.
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