Having spent four days in Shenzhen, Deng took a boat across the flat grey waters of the Pearl River. The hydrofoil he travelled by – a remarkably futuristic looking craft in 1990s China – passed a Qing dynasty custom house as it crossed the broad mouth of the river. Here, in the days before the end of the empire in 1912, passing ships were required to stop to pay taxes due on the goods they carried. Upon seeing it, Deng commented that the era when China could be humiliated by foreign powers was now over.
Stretching along the southern coast, Zhuhai is Shenzhen’s smaller sibling, and another of the Special Economic Zones established in 1980. As Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, so Zhuhai borders the old Portuguese port of Macau, which returned to Chinese control in 1999. It is today connected to Hong Kong and Macau via a bridge and tunnel which cost nearly twenty billion dollars to build, and is the longest sea crossing on earth.
Just outside Zhuhai is Luo Sanmei mountain: a verdant, low-rising eminence, zig-zagged with concrete steps. In 1984, on an earlier visit to the south, Deng had climbed Luo Sanmei. Halfway up the climb, he turned around and declared to those accompanying him: ‘We will not turn back’. The phrase was both a commentary on the journey, and on reform and opening.
Deng arrived in Zhuhai on January 23rd. He spent almost a week inspecting progress there, and visiting factories and meeting workers, shaking hundreds of hands in the process. As in Shenzhen, Deng visited a revolving restaurant atop its trade center, 29 stories up, and watched the construction of the city. After his stay in Zhuhai, he travelled by car around the western edge of the Pearl River Delta to Guangzhou, where, after an hour-long meeting with local officials, he was reunited once more with his private train. On his journey north to Shanghai, the train stopped briefly at the small city of Yingtan. It was from this town, Deng’s daughter reminded him, that nineteen years previously he and his family had boarded a train to take them back to Beijing, after the long, painful years of exile during the Cultural Revolution.
Shanghai was the final stop on Deng's journey, and he passed Chinese New Year here, visiting new development zones and construction sites. On February 18th, the day of China’s Lantern Festival, Deng arrived at Shanghai’s famous shopping street, Nanjing Road, and visited Shanghai’s ‘No. 1 Department Store’ to buy pencils and erasers for his grandson. As his daughter remembers, ‘One time he tried to go shopping in Shanghai, but when he got to the store he was surrounded by people applauding him and taking pictures. Later we asked him, "What did you see on your shopping trip?" He replied, “Nothing, just the people.”’ On the top floor of the department store today, a permanent exhibition tells the story of Deng’s legendary trip to buy stationery.
During a visit earlier in the 1990s, Deng had acknowledged that Shanghai had been held back in its development, for fear of it once again becoming a foreign trading enclave, whilst the establishment of Special Economic Zones in the south had driven remarkable urban transformation in places such as Shenzhen. His declaration in 1990 that ‘Shanghai is China’s trump card’ accelerated the economic revitalisation of the city and, in particular, the development of the area across the river from Shanghai's famous art-deco Bund: Pudong, now home to China's most iconic skyline. In 1992, Deng would witness first-hand the beginnings of this transformation.
To talk about Shanghai’s transformation, I’m joined today by Dr Jenny Lin. Jenny Lin is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design. She is author of Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture and the fashioning of global Shanghai published by Manchester University Press in 2019.