On January 28, 2026, I took an EV rideshare via Didi from my hotel on the outskirts of Shenzhen to the city’s trendy Nanshan District, and walked around the Shenzhen Talent Park. The park’s well-manicured trees, trails, and gardens curled around waters of the Pearl River Estuary leading out to the South China Sea, crisscrossed with trails and spanned by footbridges and a road overpass.
I saw unfamiliar birds chittering in the trees, and my trusty iNaturalist citizen science app identified them as a masked laughingthrush and oriental magpie-robins. An egret took flight at my approach and launched itself over the water, long white wings soaring against the background of shiny-new skyscrapers.
The city of Shenzhen is one of the most striking examples of China’s super-rapid development in recent decades. As recently as 1955, it was just a collection of fishing villages in the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), with an estimated 5,000 residents. The name “Shenzhen” meant “deep drainage ditch.” It was nowheresville, a patch of emptiness only distinguished by proximity to better-known cities. In American terms, a patch of Long Island that was mostly empty lots.
In 1980, as part of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy building a market economy to help develop China after Mao’s depredations, Deng Xiaoping established this strategically located patch of coastline as China’s first “Special Economic Zone,” allowing foreign companies to invest and build there on preferential terms. The then-governor of Guangdong, Xi Zhongxun (a political ally of Deng’s who had previously been purged and jailed under Mao) was an early advocate for Shenzhen’s SEZ status as well. His son, Xi Jinping, is of course the current ruler of China.
Shenzhen’s first skyscraper was built (unprecedentedly fast) in 1982, becoming the tallest building in China. Migrant laborers flocked from across the impoverished Chinese mainland to the new hard but relatively high-paying jobs in rapidly-multiplying Shenzhen factories, and Shenzhen had 175,000 residents by 1985. “Shenzhen speed” became common slang for rapid construction.
The new city moved up the value chain quickly, and by the 21st century was known as the “Silicon Valley of China,” home to a host of startups that were becoming global players. The list of companies founded or headquartered in Shenzhen now reads like a summary of modern Chinese economic power. World-leading electric carmaker BYD. World-leading drone-maker DJI. Smartphone behemoth Huawei. Chinese Internet titan Tencent, founder of the WeChat super-app that runs much of daily Chinese life By 2015, Shenzhen had 10.7 million residents. Quite a lot of the battery-based rapid electrification technology China is now mass-producing and exporting worldwide had its conceptual origins in the tech boomtown of Shenzhen.
The broader Pearl River Delta complex, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, and many other fast-growing cities from Dongguan to Zhongshan, would now count as by far Earth’s largest city if these adjacent megalopoli were counted as one. The Chinese government keeps investing in rapid transit to further interconnect the mega-region, and there are rumors of a joint Olympics bid in the near future.
As a new development on the coast, Shenzhen has also invested heavily in becoming a “sponge city” to build resilience to climate disasters and sea level rise. An integrated development plan, heavily based on the pioneering work of Chinese urban water management expert Kongjian Yu, has made Shenzhen a “garden city,” with extensive green spaces and protected wetlands on large stretches of the coastline helping to absorb excess water during floods.
Today, Shenzhen’s combination of being a world-leader in electrotech and a pioneer of city-scale nature based solutions for climate adaptation has led to the “Shenzhen model” being a buzzword in international development.
I spent the rest of the day walking and taking public transport around Shenzhen, trying to get a “feel” for life in this global hub city on the ground. After checking out the Nanshan neighborhood some more, I took the subway to the Futian neighborhood. (Shenzhen is large and polycentric, with many different hub areas). Shenzhen’s subway system opened in 2004, and it’s now reportedly the fifth longest in the world (behind four other Chinese cities) with over 600 kilometers of track.
It was positively warm in Shenzhen today: Beijing had felt like the depths of winter, Chengdu and Chongqing like an autumn or early spring temperature, and Shenzhen felt like late spring or early summer. Many trees and shrubs were in full leaf or even blooming with flowers. As I walked around the Futian neighborhood, I was struck by how quiet and vernal the streets were; electric vehicles seemed even more prevalent here than in Beijing, Chengdu, or Chongqing. You only heard a slight whirring of air displacement as they passed, with the grinding engine noises of internal combustion a positive rarity. Looking it up later, my on-the-ground guesses reflected the real statistics. In 2024, “new energy vehicles” (in practice, almost all EVs) accounted for 77% of new car sales in Shenzhen, compared to 48% in all of China. Every single bus, taxi, and ride-hailing car in Shenzhen is now an electric vehicle.
As in much of China, the air quality in the Pearl River Delta was horrendous until very recently (though never as apocalyptically bad as Beijing) but has since improved a lot. One study found that Shenzhen’s PM 2.5 levels fell by 47% in just one decade from 2014 to 2024, “mainly from emissions cuts.” When I was there, the AQI was “Moderate,” and the skies shifted between partly cloudy and overcast, with more fog in the evenings and more blue skies around the middle of the day.
As I walked from the streets of Futian District1 to the trails of Lianhuashan Park, I reflected that Shenzhen was just an incredibly functional place. The public transit worked. The streets were quiet. The cars were electric. There were parks everywhere, engineered/grown to help protect the city from extreme storms and floods.
And there’s so much more being developed. Just in January 2026, construction began on gigantic new ultra-high-voltage transmission lines set to bring more renewable energy from distant dams, solar farms and wind fields to power the entire Pearl River Delta mega-region. It’ll replace 12 million tons of coal when complete in 2029. Walking towards the top of Lianhuashan hill, I saw and heard several fast-moving multi-rotored delivery drones flying overhead, though I didn’t manage to get a picture.
None of this is unique to Shenzhen. New York and Boston have their own “sponge city” efforts going on with Kate Orff’s SCAPE studio and Mayor Wu’s sea level rise preparation. Paris has lately pedestrianized and reduced air pollution. Even African cities like Kigali are now rapidly electrifying their transportation networks. The suite of policy and technology shifts I like to call “solarpunk urbanism,” a mix of public transport and electric vehicles and green spaces and urban wetlands and walkability…it just works. It’s a civilizational best-practice. People like it. I fervently hope that these manifestly good ideas will continue to diffuse across the semipermeable membranes of national and jurisdictional boundaries, and more and more cities will keep rebuilding themselves to be greener and cleaner. As with many things about modern China, perhaps one of the most encouraging takeaways from the story of Shenzhen is that profoundly ambitious socioeconomic, technological, and political transformations are possible — and not just possible, but practical and doable.
I also got to try a lot of really excellent street food in Shenzhen, including a scallion pancake, traditional “stinky” tofu, and a whole roast yam from some guy on the sidewalk, among others. One cool thing Chinese cities do is allow some street food vendors to set up their carts inside subway stations. Would recommend!
I've shared this article with both my parents. We lived there in the late 1970s when it was still very much a nation of extreme poverty, determined to dig itself out. I was there in the 1990s when it was building skyscrapers like mad, then in the 2000s. I saw Shanghai before and after its estuary was built over. So there was some angst about the direction. These articles, especially the good news about pollution reduction, are so great and reassuring. I would expect nothing less of China.
This has been so fun traveling with you!