In China's Shenzhen, nostalgia persists for the old days of Hong Kong culture
By David Kirton
SHENZHEN, China, July 7 (Reuters) - A trip to glamorous Hong Kong was a distant dream for most Chinese mainlanders in the mid-1990s, but for schoolgirl Tracey Chen in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, it was just a lunchtime stroll.
As Hong Kong loses autonomy after 25 years of Chinese rule, Chen is among many of those in its Mandarin-speaking neighbour who yearn for the days when the former British colony's uniquely exuberant Cantonese culture permeated across the border.
Before Shenzhen began to be transformed in the 1980s, Hong Kong's freewheeling economy represented a consumer haven for many from the mainland.
Chen's school still stands on Sino-British Street, a 250-metre (273-yard) road sliced down the middle by the boundary between the territories, and the sole stretch where they are not separated by water.
As border guards kept a close eye on visitors browsing instant noodles, beauty products and other mainland rarities, Chen would pocket her communist student's red scarf and slip across to buy ice cream and magazines about Hong Kong popstars.
"There were some that came out once a week," she reminisced. "My classmates and I would take turns to go and get them."
TIDE CHANGE
Shenzhen was a sleepy trading town surrounded by hundreds of villages before the leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, approved one of China's first special economic zones (SEZ) there in 1980, in part to stop an exodus of those risking their lives to flee.
Liang Ailin, born in the village of Caopu in 1969, still remembers desperate villagers clambering onto cargo trains leaving for Hong Kong.
"Almost everyone in the villages has family members who fled," she said, speaking over a dim sum meal of Cantonese delicacies with friends, a stones' throw from the gleaming headquarters of software giant Tencent.
Villagers told tales of escapees such as Li Ka-Shing, a native of Guangdong province who fled to Hong Kong and became one of its leading tycoons, said Liao Wenjian.
"We all imagined Hong Kong was heaven in the 1970s," said Liao, another Shenzhen resident born in 1969. "As long as you work hard, you won't starve and you'll make a lot of money."
But after 1980, businesses in Hong Kong, well into its own export-led processing boom, poured across the border with more than 90% of Shenzhen's investment to pioneer industry there, as its officials learnt from their neighbour's market economy.
The flood of escapees ebbed soon afterwards.
SOFTSHELL TURTLES