SHENZHEN, China — When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall.
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Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
Housing costs in Shenzhen have been growing by about 30 percent a year. A buyers’ boycott was organized, to the authorities’ displeasure.
Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. It became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.
And it was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26-year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China’s breakneck economic expansion and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.
Increasingly, though, with its growing pains multiplying, Shenzhen looks like a preview, even a warning, of the limitations of the kind of growth-above-all approach that has gripped much of China.
Shenzhen’s 28 percent average annual growth rate since 1980 is likely to stand as a record in China for some time, but the price of this phenomenal success is painfully evident. Throughout most of the year its skies are thick with eye-burning smoke. Street crime is high. And the workers it has drawn so effortlessly in the past from the countryside are becoming harder to recruit, as their options increase elsewhere.
But Shenzhen may also herald more promising changes. Possibly the greatest force taking shape here is the quiet expansion of the middle class, thicker on the ground here than perhaps anywhere else in China. This middle class is beginning to chafe under authoritarian rule, and over time, the quiet, well-organized challenges of the newly affluent may have the deepest impact on this country’s future.
“Many people laughed at me, because they don’t have confidence in the government,” said Qian Shengzeng, a 62-year-old former rocket scientist who led the movement against the expressway. “They think the government is hopelessly rotten. However, our view is that maybe there is a remaining sliver of hope, and the government needs to be pushed.”
In newly rich Shenzhen, as in much of China, social change is being driven by economic transformation and, more than anything else, property ownership.
Red-hot real estate markets have given birth to a new class of people, known as mortgage slaves, because the financial burden of buying into the middle-class dream of home ownership has suddenly become so great. The new property owners have poured their energy into everything from establishing co-op boards to spar with landlords, to organizing real estate market boycotts to force down prices.
Others, meanwhile, have begun running for office in district-level elections, where they hope to make the city government more responsive to their needs, though, like governments at every level in China, the ultimate power here rests with Communist Party officials.
Shenzhen has also spawned a local research group known as Interhoo, an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.
“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”
Academics and others who study the city’s development say it is no surprise that Shenzhen is emerging as the cradle of movements like this. From the start, its proximity to Hong Kong has made it unusually open to outside influences. The city is also new, founded in 1980, and populated by migrants who contribute to a culture of greater individualism and risk-taking than anywhere else in China.
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Even with all of this political activity, China is a long way from participatory democracy, even at the local level. Yet a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that Shenzhen’s expanding middle class now accounts for about 10 percent of the city’s population of 12 million — a higher percentage, most here believe, than in any other city in China, though reliable figures are hard to come by. As the middle class grows, civic leaders say they expect to see a steady growth in citizen involvement.
“This is a process of struggling for our interests,” said Jiang Shan, a computer software expert who works in advertising. “It’s difficult, with serious obstacles from the administration and pressure from the powerful. In the long term, to have a good outcome we have to speed up education about law, including election law.”
More than most, Mr. Jiang knows how hard that fight is. Together with a small number of other middle-class Shenzhen residents, he has been at the forefront of a battle to turn what has been a symbolic neighborhood elective office into a real force in people’s lives.
It started when Mr. Jiang filed a series of lawsuits to try to resolve a number problems related to property management. After a string of defeats, he sought help from his local representative, only to discover that the man was a party to one of his lawsuits.
“It was only then that I realized that according to the election law, if I could get enough votes in the community, I could become a representative myself,” Mr. Jiang said. Or so it appeared.
Mr. Jiang began sending out hundreds of short messages with his cellphone to seek backers for his candidacy. He printed campaign cards, which he distributed in the neighborhood to encourage residents to vote.
When he had enlisted enough support he tried to register his candidacy, but he was turned away by officials who told him he was not a Shenzhen resident and therefore could not even vote locally.
On the eve of the election, Mr. Jiang filed suit over the denial of his voting rights. Three days before the trial was to begin, registration officials tried to force their way into his apartment. He agreed to meet them outdoors, whereupon the officials informed him that they would allow him to vote. Minutes later, court officials showed up telling him he could be a candidate if he dropped his lawsuit.
Mr. Jiang refused, saying the process was too tainted for him to participate, and his lawsuit was later dismissed. In another part of town, another resident sought election to the local district council, only to see the number of eligible voters double after the close of registration. Saying it was a clumsy attempt to fix the outcome, the candidate, Ma Jinhua, withdrew in protest.
“If I continue to participate, I will lose,” said Ms. Ma, the owner of a local gardening business. “By quitting at least I can send a warning to the government so that in the future things can be done in a more fair and reasonable way. It’s a reminder that says, ‘Pay attention, you can’t get away with this again.’ ”
Others in the city’s bulging middle class have taken their activism into other arenas. Zou Tao, a Shenzhen golf equipment supplier, recently won national attention when he started a home-buyers’ boycott aimed at reining in real estate prices that have been increasing at a clip of 30 percent a year.
“Prices have been stirred up by speculators stockpiling houses, and by officials and businesspeople joining hands,” Mr. Zou said. “The government hasn’t done its job well in supervising the market.”
From Shenzhen, Mr. Zou’s boycott quickly spread to other large cities, allowing him to collect more than 100,000 signatures. He has also earned the ire of the authorities, who he says have tapped his telephone and barred the press from writing about him or using the words “housing boycott.”
But Mr. Zou has refused to back down, prompting the government to bar him from television and to block Web sites that he operates. “Facing boiling public opinion, the first thing the authorities think of is not ‘maybe we should listen,’ but repression,” he said.