China Studies Centre, The University of Sydney
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm (AEDT), Wednesday 9 October 2019
Room 708, Jane Foss Russell Building
The University of Sydney
Like the Berlin Wall, the boundary between Hong Kong and its neighbouring Bao’an county (Shenzhen, today) artificially separated people organically connected by family ties, cultural roots, and economic relations into two contrasting socio-political systems. Similar to the German case, many of those living under socialism made various attempted to migrate. This paper focuses on a crisis in spring 1962, when over 100,000 PRC citizens sought to enter Hong Kong via Bao’an. While earlier scholarship has correctly identified the 1958-1961 famines in China as the main trigger, food scarcity alone seems insufficient to fully explain the extraordinary scale of the migration.
This paper reveals how the PRC purposefully loosened border control and allowed profit-seeking commercial activities in Bao’an so as to ameliorate the devastating consequences of the famines. In stark contrast to the militarily fortified frontiers in Berlin, the borders between Bao’an and Hong Kong were sufficiently porous for small-scale trade and informal investment schemes to develop. Oftentimes escapees from Bao’an were not criminalized but became ironically entitled to special benefits as “returned overseas Chinese” should they come back for visits. Some became powerful policy influencer across the Sino-British border, as they gained the leverage to bribe, cajole, or pressure the Bao’an officials into directing the frontier town further toward a market-oriented economy. This study complicates the popular narrative of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone – the most renowned “laboratory” for Chinese economic reforms – as a product of Deng Xiaoping’s policies in 1980 by tracing its prototypes in the Mao era.
This event is organised by the China Studies Centre and co-hosted with Department of Chinese Studies. Taomo Zhou’s visit was enabled by aSSEAC grant.
About the Speaker
Taomo Zhou is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Her writings have appeared in publications such as The China Quarterly, The Critical Asian Studies, the journal Indonesia, and The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines how two of the world’s most populous countries interacted when the concept of citizenship was contested and the boundaries of political mobilization were blurred. She is starting a second project on the historical transformation of Shenzhen, the first special economic zone of China.
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