‘Do not turn back!’ Inside Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s history-making Shenzhen tour in 1992
- This excerpt from Jonathan Chatwin’s new book, The Southern Tour, follows Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 return to Shenzhen, whose transformation he had orchestrated
All night the same rattling and creaking of the train; the Doppler fade of its horn; the occasional slowing as they passed through another station. This was Deng Xiaoping’s second night aboard his special train; the journey from Beijing to Shenzhen in 1992 was a near two-day slog, no matter how important you were.
The interminable winter flatness of the North China Plain had been replaced. Outside the train’s windows now flashed a landscape of Guangdong province’s more limited horizons, defined by thickets of bamboo and egg-shaped hills that seemed to emerge unexpectedly from tiered farmland.
Clusters of single-room, single-storey stone cottages sat asymmetrically among this vibrancy; and where there were not homes or hills or vegetation there was water: terraces, rivers, lakes and ponds.
As the train moved closer, and then past, the provincial capital of Guangzhou, signs of the new China became more evident: roads and bridges; low-rise factories and accompanying accommodation blocks; modern houses of the white tile that covers a multitude of construction sins.
Further south, the train slipped through the fence and barbed-wire Second Line that separated the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone from the rest of China.
At 9am on January 19 the train pulled into Shenzhen Station, and Deng descended to the platform to be greeted once more by a phalanx of officials.
