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If
SHENZHEN
had been around in classical times, poets would doubtless have compared its gleaming downtown towers to mountain peaks, each rising higher than the other. Incredibly, in 1979 this metropolis was a simple rural hamlet and train station on the Hong Kong border called
Baoan
, with the first office foundations yet to be dug in its alluvial plains. Within six years, delegations from all over China were pouring in to learn how to remodel their own businesses, cities and provinces on Shenzhen's incentives-based economy. By 1990 the city had four harbours and its manufacturing industries alone were turning over two billion US dollars a year, necessitating the construction of a nuclear power station to deal with local energy needs. Shenzhen may not have been the cause of capitalism in the People's Republic, but it was a glorious piece of propaganda for those who promoted its virtues, and almost two decades later the city remains a model for how the rest of the country would look if it too had been built from scratch with generous foreign investment.
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