Shenzhen is a hothouse of innovation

ON A RECENT weekend several hundred academics and lawyers gathered in a hotel ballroom in Shenzhen for a discussion on “Innovation, inclusion and order”, an event jointly organised by the law schools at Peking, Oxford and Stanford universities. Legal conferences can be soporific, especially in China, and a scholar from Beijing duly set the tone by asserting that “order is important in the market.” But one of the local speakers livened things up by delivering a surprisingly stout defence of disruptive innovation. Xu Youjun, vice-chairman of the Shenzhen division of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a government advisory body, said Shenzhen owed its success not to the government or the Communist Party but to its policy of allowing people to go “beyond the planned economy”.

The city imposes few limits on freedom of movement (though only a minority of its population has an official hukou, or household-registration certificate), is relaxed about employment contracts and does not discriminate against outsiders. “People are the greatest source of our growth,” Mr Xu concluded. The contrasting views of the boffin from Beijing and the local apparatchik help explain how disruptive entrepreneurs turned Shenzhen into one of the world’s most innovative cities.