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2020年9月8日，李极明大使在孟主流英文报纸《每日太阳报》发表《中国良治之文化溯源》随笔专栏系列文章之四——《深圳特区四十载的启示》。文章介绍了深圳特区四十年的发展成就之后指出，深圳为体制创新科技创新提供了合适的土壤，从而培育出一批世界级的本土创新型企业，在多项创新指标上全球领先。作为中国改革开放的试验田、创新发展的基因谱，深圳的道路是观察和认识中国特色社会主义发展道路的全息图，反映出开拓与审慎兼顾、创新与守正并重的中国文化及其特有的改革路径，可为其他希改革图强经济体带去启示。英文全文如下：

A 40-Year Revelation of Shenzhen

Many years ago, a foreign journalist friend of mine，when he was preparing an in-depth news report on the reform and opening up of China, came to me for advice on which city he should conduct his interviews in. To his surprise, instead of Beijing or Shanghai, I recommended the city of Shenzhen without a second thought. Shenzhen occupies a unique place in China, known as the testing ground for reform, the genetic map and hologram of the country’s booming development. To some extent, the city is the master key to gaining an understanding of the future of China. Several days back, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone just celebrated its 40th anniversary. So it is high time for us to get to know a bit more about it, a city that represents both the present and the future of China.

Development of Shenzhen

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was established on August 26th, 1980. Since my first visit to Shenzhen back in 1986, I have been revisiting the city several times every year as a tourist, a business man or a government official, witnessing the drastic changes that have taken place here. To really put the development of Shenzhen in perspective, let’s first take a look at its rapid economic expansion:

Since 1980, Shenzhen’s GDP has been growing at an average rate of 20.7%, reaching 2.69 trillion yuan in 2019. It means in economic terms, Shenzhen has surpassed city-economies like Hong Kong and Singapore, and even some western European countries like Sweden and Austria. With a resident population of 12.53 million, Shenzhen had a GDP per capita of 29.5 thousand USD in 2019, roughly the same as that of the Republic of Korea and overtaking some European countries like Portugal.

After 40 years, Shenzhen has promoted itself onto a track of high-quality development: the city has the highest GDP per capita and per land area in the country, with the lowest energy and water consumption per unit of GDP. It has 1.97 million private companies (99.6% of the total) that contribute 40% of the city’s GDP, 60% of the tax revenues, 70% of the employment and 90% of the patents. 8 out of the Fortune Global 500 have their headquarters in Shenzhen. In 2019, the city’s total foreign trade value stood at 2.98 trillion yuan, including an export of 1.67 trillion, higher than any other cities in the Chinese mainland for the 27th year straight, as well as the highest FDI stock. At the same time, it is also a garden city with nearly 1,000 parks scattering across the urban area. A comprehensive social safety net is well in place for all the residents who have an average life expectancy of 81.45 years old.

In just 40 years, Shenzhen evolved from a rural backwater into a well-developed modern metropolitan with more than 20 million urban population, the 11th largest global financial hub and a world-class innovation centre. It is too big a development miracle to be overlooked. The Economist magazine once marveled at the "Miracle of Shenzhen", calling it the greatest success story out of the more than 4,000 special economic zones around the world. Ezra F. Vogel, a prominent American scholar and China expert at Harvard University, wrote in his book Learning from Shenzhen that “no city in the world has ever grown as rapidly as Shenzhen, China’s southern gateway to the outside world.”

Path of Shenzhen

Over the past few decades, China has taken a distinctly Chinese approach to its reform and opening up-one that seeks a balance between prudence and innovation. The traditional Chinese philosophy always holds a dialectic view on dealing with the changing and the unchanged. Just like Xunzi (or HsunTzu), a famous Confucian philosopher living in the 3rd century B.C. put it, “Nature operates on consistent principles” and “not knowing the consistent means inability to deal with changes”. Because there is no successful model to be followed – everything is new and unprecedented in building a socialist country of the size of China – it has to dwell on the best practices from the lessons learned in the past when feeling its way forward in unfamiliar waters. But at the same time there is also a sharp edge to this approach that encourages trailblazing innovation and experimentation, where cities like Shenzhen came into play.