Designated an SEZ in 1980, Shenzhen drew export factories, migrant labour and, after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 Southern Tour reaffirmed reform, a flood of further investment. Its population climbed from a few hundred thousand to well over ten million in three decades, built largely on planned superblocks, expressways and later a metro and high-tech districts. So-called "urban villages" absorbed migrants the formal housing system did not. The city became a byword for the speed of Chinese urbanisation and later a centre of electronics and innovation.
Shenzhen is the emblematic instant Chinese megacity, demonstrating how state designation plus migrant labour could conjure a metropolis in a generation.
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