It is the early 1990s and Zhou Haonan, an innocent young man from a rural family in China's West Canton Province, travels to the `golden city' of Shenzhen to seek his fortune. Kind and caring but highly ambitious, he works as an international businessman, becomes a Sanda boxing champion and even sells his blood as he spends the next 20 years striving desperately to achieve his dream of a Shenzhen permanent residence permit and a home of his own. Despite a string of humiliating failures and disasters and cruel treatment by the women who enter his life, he somehow manages to get back on his feet and carry on through all the setbacks which life throws at him. The Road to Shenzhen is one of very few novels ever to be written in English by a Chinese author who has lived all his life in China.ÿ

Qiao demonstrates how an impersonal and unbounded market can operate without legal protection or enforcement of property and contract rights.

One Step Ahead in China is a groundbreaking book, unique in its detailed coverage of Guangdong, the first socialist dragon to follow in the path of South Korea and Taiwan. 6 maps, 7 tables.

This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

In 2008, as few in the world are unaware, China was host to the world via the Beijing Olympics. The world watched the metamorphosis of Beijing from insecure capital to confident metropolis but, aware of it or not, the world was also watching the symbolic assertion, via the Games, of a rising superpower. The Pacific Rim will be the stage on which China initially displays its new hegemonic intentions, aspirations and ambitions. Thus in Post-Beijing 2008, the political, economic and cultural impact of Beijing 2008 on the geopolitical future of the Pacific Rim will be discussed. This perspective, analysed by some of the most distinguished academic commentators from some of the world's leading universities who are closely associated with the Pacific Rim (East and West), is original in focus and the analysis is pregnant with political possibilities. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

A thorough examination of the establishment and development of China's Special Economic Zones (SEZ). These eight SEZs marked a major milestone in China's gradual market-oriented reform process, and the developmental fluctuations of these zones offers an in-depth understanding of the complexities and difficulties of reform. They also provide critical insight into China's thirty years of economic and social transformation. This book is a valuable and practical resource for governments, academics and policy advisors looking for an insight into and analysis of how the Special Economic Zone strategy played a key role in the transformation of China's economy.