In 1980 China designated Shenzhen, a cluster of fishing and farming settlements in Guangdong adjacent to Hong Kong, as its first Special Economic Zone under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. The zone offered tax incentives, relaxed rules and openness to foreign investment, and was planned and built at extraordinary speed into a manufacturing and technology megacity. Its population grew from a few hundred thousand to well over ten million within a generation, with a planned grid of districts, industrial estates and high-rise housing. It became a laboratory for market mechanisms within a state-directed system.
Shenzhen became the template for state-capitalist megaproject urbanism, demonstrating how zones and incentives could conjure cities within decades. Its model of fast, state-led, export-driven urbanisation was widely emulated across China and the Global South.