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DAY TRIPPY

Just an hour from Hong Kong lies the economic hot spot of Shenzhen, theme park capital and knock-off central. Welcome to the surreal world.

Text: DON GILLMOR

1 | 2 | 3 | AUG '04

"Hello, hello. Welcome to Mickey," said a teenage girl wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, standing in front of the Disney store on Renminnan Road in Shenzhen.

"You speak English?" I ask.

"No," she giggled.

The unreal world of Disney has found a spiritual home in Shenzhen, less than an hour’s side trip from the cosmopolitan travellers’ paradise of Hong Kong and separated from the New Territories by the Shenzhen River. In some ways, the entire city of Shenzhen is a theme park. In 1980, it was a fishing village of 30,000. Now there are 8 million people, and the "planned city" stretches more than 50 kilometres along the Shenzhen River to spill out onto both coasts of the China Sea and leak through the hills and valleys to the north, a relentless march of high-rises and factories.

Conceived as an International Garden City, Shenzhen is a composite that borrows from several places. It has the heroic scale of Beijing with its wide boulevards and huge sidewalks lined with palms. Having just arrived from Hong Kong, I recognized that city’s unbroken verticality, the walls of needle-thin high-rises receding into the distance. I also saw glimpses of Los Angeles’ legendary traffic, of Detroit’s ominous downtown, of graceful European parks and of Disneyland.

Under the portrait of the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen’s city centre are the words "One Hundred Years Without Change," which now seem ironic. Change is the Zeitgeist of China’s Pearl River Delta, which could become the world’s most active economic belt by 2006. Nothing is rooted; even Shenzhen’s downtown is being moved to a new site.

Deng Xiaoping conceived the city as an experiment, existing somewhere between Beijing’s party socialism and Hong Kong’s distilled capitalism. Hong Kong’s colonial past is still evident, though overshadowed by relentless development. Shenzhen’s socialist core is withering under the onslaught of foreign investment capital, while Hong Kong’s distinct status is under threat from Beijing. In time they will blend. The border between the two is already opening up, and a Shenzhen resident said he saw them as "two halves of one large city." There are the beginnings of commuter traffic, with people living in Shenzhen – which is roughly half the cost of living in Hong Kong – and working in Hong Kong. Shenzhen was the first of five Special Economic Zones; it was here that the modernization of China would begin. Deng Xiaoping said, "The Special Economic Zones will become a foundation for opening to the outside world."

Oddly, one of the things the world sees is a miniature version of itself. One of several theme parks in Shenzhen, Window of the World is a collection of international monuments rendered in scale models. Inside the Alps pavilion, I skied on real snow, going up a Poma lift to rocket down a 15-metre vertical. Beside me, Chinese children in rented parkas were going down the hill in inner tubes, screaming happily. There is a one-third scale model of the Eiffel Tower, a miniature Manhattan, Taj Mahal and Sphinx and a familiar mock-up of Niagara Falls with a water ride running through it. The park is the most popular in Shenzhen, filled with Chinese tourists wandering through a world that has been largely closed to them.

Shenzhen manufactures a lot of South China’s electronics and clothes and is home to many of the factories that mass-produce cheap consumer goods for the West. It’s also the home of the knock-off. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a $30 Louis Vuitton bag, a wonderfully affordable Rolex or a pair of Calvin Klein jeans (subtly changed to GK jeans).

It isn’t just the goods that are being knocked off; buildings are copied as well, the blueprints pirated or sold to developers. Unlike Hong Kong, where the cult of the architect flourishes and the skyline boasts buildings by I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli and Norman Foster, in Shenzhen, architecture is simply a commodity. Identical high-rises are distinguished by a change in facade or an ornamental crown. The term "Shenzhen speed" was coined to denote the astonishing pace of building construction.

Along the wide main shopping street, I saw department stores set up as separate blocs: Woman’s World, Man’s World, Children’s World, Technology World. The planners laid the city out in separate, mutually exclusive zones: Overseas Chinese Town (a residential area for returning Chinese), the Industrial Zone, Commercial Centre, the Political Zone. The theme park motif recurs: Residential World, Shopping Land.

On my second day, I went to Minsk World. The local driver was on the eight-lane expressway that runs the length of the city, crawling along in the passing lane. He turned at an intersection, and I assumed he was going to do a U-turn. Instead, he headed into the traffic coming the other way.

"We’re on the wrong side of the road," I said.

"But not for long," he said, hunched over the wheel. His only English-language music, a Ricky Martin CD, was blaring.

Four lanes of traffic were coming toward us, an apocalyptic wall of container trucks, Buicks, Hondas and Mao-era black bicycles driven by old women balancing huge stacks of bound Styrofoam on their backs. We hugged the curb, and the oncoming traffic flowed around us like water. Despite a lack of formal driving rules and a persistent spirit of competition, there is virtually no road rage in Shenzhen. Horns occasionally honk, but every incident – every almost-hit pedestrian, every slow swing into traffic that causes eight cars to lock up their brakes, every Hollywood-wrong-way-down-a-one-way-street-car chase – is taken in stride.

At the gate to Minsk World, a military theme park, a woman was trying to pin a blue sash on a man in an inflatable bear costume. She yelled at him and whacked his inflated head, which wobbled back and forth, then pointed him toward me. He hopped from one foot to the other and waved, then guided me to the park’s main attraction: the Minsk, a decommissioned Russian aircraft carrier. The Chinese turned it into a theme park, a postmodern update of the swords-into-ploughshares fable. In the cavernous gunmetal gloom of the ship’s hold, where 30-odd fighter planes were once stored, a Russian dance troupe performed a Bob Fosse-like routine with hot pants and handguns.

1 | 2 | 3 | AUG '04