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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Here's Shenzhen, before and after tech. Shenzhen really was a fishing village in 1950, and a small town into the 1970s. All the action was in Hong Kong nearby. A local photographer has been taking pictures from the same spots every year since 1985.[1]

Population of Shenzhen:

    1950      3,000
    1960      8,000
    1970     22,000
    1980     59,000
    1990    875,000
    2000  7,193,000
    2010 10,223,000
    2020 12,357,000

[1] https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414d306b6a4d31457a6333566d54/...

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I first visited Shenzhen in 2008 and back then it was almost impossible to find anyone who was actually born in Shenzhen. It's increasingly common nowadays with the younger generation. Also, many Hong Kongers I knew were literally afraid to visit Shenzhen and nowadays, Shenzhen feels more modern and safe than Hong Kong (IMO). It's mind blowing how fast this city grew.

Bear in mind that the growth of one fishing village involves growing-into aka annexing neighboring villages, I've heard it said "Shenzhen did not start as one village, it started as thousands"

This is a super important point, Chinese city are the equivalent of American MSA's.

No, Shenzhen is just one city. The metro area is the Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region. That includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Huizhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, and Dongguan. The metro area is about 75km across. 86 million people.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta

You can randomly circle area. But that is integrated, even cat ones gov is not totally on charge of Shenzhen, let alone the hk even after suppressing freedom there. This is different kind of cats herding cf inside major china area.

Compare New York Metropolitan Area.[1] Involves several states. Not a governmental unit.

Metropolitan areas are usually computed by working outward until the density drops. Look at the Pearl River area in satellite imagery. It's a roughly circular high density region, and then farmland appears.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

100x growth in 20 years starting from 1980 is insane. Would’ve been very interesting to witness.

the migration during the last decades from rural China into the cities has been the largest population migration in the history (something like 800M people moved). One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations - like that of the Goths and Huns in the 4th century or this migration in China in the 20-21st century and the resulting large scale effects on the history lasting for centuries.

Btw, interesting depiction of Shanghai - exterritorial status of the foreign concessions for example - in 1937 in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Hundred . In the West we sometimes miss that the 2nd Sino-Japanese war can be naturally considered part of the WWII which thus de-facto was already going in the 1937.

> One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations

They won't be. Twisting and erasing history is part and parcel of Chinese education.

Shenzhen received, in 1980, the special legal privilege of engaging in commerce with Hong Kong. It's not natural growth.

That doesn't dull their point; that kind of growth, natural or not, is wild.

That kind of growth is what you see when everyone outside is legally required to be poor.

For a country with nearly one billion poor people, one will never make all of them rich with one step. That is why China "allows some peasants to get rich first", and why they say "Common Prosperity Does Not Mean Equal Wealth" and "Those Who Become Prosperous First Helping Those Who Lag Behind". Although it is truly questionable if those get rich first want to help those lag behind, with a big government, it is more or less realized.

So trickle down economics ?

"Trickle down economics" is a loaded term. It's not an actual theory advocated by any economist or politician[0].

[0] https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...

kind of, but with the actual intent to make it work. the lie behind "trickle down economics" wasn't that it can't or never works as advertised, but that it doesn't automatically happen just by letting people get rich and the reaganites talking about it never intended for it to work. basically every rich country got rich through some form of uneven development

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