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Few places capture China’s embrace of free markets, and the Communist Party’s new uneasiness with what Chinese-style capitalism has wrought, quite like Shenzhen.

Few places capture China’s embrace of free markets, and the Communist Party’s new uneasiness with what Chinese-style capitalism has wrought, quite like Shenzhen.

Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Wealth
The Big Take

A $30 Billion Fortune Is Hiding in China’s Silicon Valley

Shenzhen’s urban villagers have quietly amassed vast riches in ways that escape most outsiders. 

Bloomberg News

The Vibrant Express bullet train can speed from Hong Kong to Shenzhen in 14 minutes. Exit the downtown Futian Station here and what unfolds is unlike anything anywhere else: a Chinese mega-city rising from what was, until the 1980s, a rag-tag collection of villages. 

Today, in a place where people used to toil in rice paddies, you can stay at the Ritz, buy a $380,000 Porsche and, if you’re rich enough, cut a deal in China’s Silicon Valley.