This is where China's great experiment began, where communism first flirted with the free market. Here, in what became the mainland's economic laboratory of its future, cars careen the wrong way down one-way streets.
Soldiers hassle truckers for bribes.
Open sewers and bare huts border gleaming new skyscrapers. Just a mile or so away, civic order and efficiency prevail in colonial Hong Kong, virtually corruption-free. Shenzhen is the unruly younger brother of its well-behaved sibling across the border. It represents a new generation of cities that Beijing hopes will transform the nation through a distinctly Chinese mixture of free enterprise and state control. If China wants to become a market-based titan, it needs to create dozens of factory cities like Shenzhen.