Spirit of openness
His experience offers a glimpse into a defining feature of Shenzhen's transformation: a city that has drawn people from across China and around the world, allowing their ambitions and ideas to become part of its development.
That spirit of openness and experimentation is also part of the vision President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, has laid out for Shenzhen during his tours to the city since 2012.
Through those visits, Xi reaffirmed China's commitment to reform and opening-up, encouraged innovation and charted Shenzhen's development as a pioneer of high-quality growth.
As Shenzhen prepares to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting next week, the city is once again set to showcase China's economic transformation and its growing connections with the wider world.
The scale of that transformation is striking. Shenzhen's population has grown from 323,900 when it became a special economic zone in 1980 to more than 18.2 million at the end of 2025. Over the same period, its economic output increased from 270 million yuan ($40 million) to 3.87 trillion yuan.
Xi first visited Shenzhen in December 2012, just a month after assuming the Party's top post. The visit, his first inspection tour outside Beijing, came as China faced the challenge of deepening economic reforms and finding new drivers of growth.
He emphasized the importance of respecting the people's pioneering spirit, encouraging bold experimentation and breaking new ground, while underscoring that reform and opening-up must continue.
The message resonated with Shenzhen's history as a city built by successive generations of newcomers, many of whom arrived with limited resources but were determined to build better lives.
For Gao Feng, technical director of Shenzhen Toch Prepress Technology Co, Xi's emphasis on initiative and a pioneering spirit echoes his own journey from an unskilled migrant worker to an accomplished technician.
In 1993, he left his hometown with just 300 yuan, money his mother had painstakingly saved by raising pigs for two years.
After a long-distance bus journey, he arrived in Shenzhen with few skills and little idea of what awaited him.
His first job was packing materials at a construction site. The pay was meager, but he soon noticed that skilled workers could earn several times as much. "I firmly believed that learning a technical skill could change my life," he recalled.
Over the following 15 years, Gao passed all five skill levels to become a certified electrician. His technical expertise earned him national honors. Later, he would pass on the skills that had transformed his own life at a training center bearing his name.
When Xi returned to Shenzhen in October 2018, as China prepared to mark the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, the city was confronting a different set of challenges.
Having established itself as a major manufacturing and export center, Shenzhen was increasingly seeking to strengthen technological innovation, develop advanced industries and deepen cooperation within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
Xi visited an exhibition documenting Guangdong's four decades of reform and inspected the Qianhai-Shekou area, where he called for further institutional innovation and deeper cooperation with Hong Kong.
He emphasized that China's commitment to reform and opening-up remained unchanged and encouraged Shenzhen to pioneer reforms that could be replicated elsewhere.
Two years later, at a city celebration marking the 40th anniversary of its establishment as a special economic zone, Xi laid out a more comprehensive agenda for Shenzhen's next stage of development.
He reflected on Shenzhen's transformation from a small border town into an international metropolis, describing its achievements as a miracle created by the Chinese people in the history of world development.
Xi called on Shenzhen to become a pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics and a model for cities in a modern socialist country.
He set out six priorities: pursuing high-quality development, deepening reform, expanding opening-up, modernizing urban governance, improving people's well-being and advancing the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
Innovation featured prominently in his speech.
Xi also called for greater investment in basic and applied research, closer integration of industrial and innovation chains, and the development of emerging and future industries, with the aim of building Shenzhen into a globally influential hub for technological and industrial innovation.
