China Southern

Not Bad for an Old Fishing Village: China’s boomtown Shenzhen is on the cusp of intercontinental stardom

China Southern

Not Bad for an Old Fishing Village: China’s boomtown Shenzhen is on the cusp of intercontinental stardom

November 2017
1 min read
Seth Kaplan

Already a subscriber? Login

Issue Overview

No place symbolizes China’s economic miracle quite like the city of Shenzhen. Often described as a mere fishing village before 1980, it’s today home to some 12m people, with a gross domestic product approaching $300b. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire economy of Pakistan, which has a population of 190m people. A Bloomberg News report in September cited one financial analyst who thinks Shenzhen will have a larger economy than that of its nextdoor neighbor Hong Kong as soon as next year. And this year, Shenzhen is finally starting to develop the international aviation heft commensurate with a truly global…