I'm afraid nothing. If you read the article well, you'd see the city is a victim of its own success more than anything.
We in Shenzhen call what's going on recently as "Dubaisation" of the city. Land prices are on their way to stratosphere. Factory rentals follow rent price too. Working class is being priced out.
A factory owner can sell the remaining value on the land lease for up to 40 times the average annual rent. A lot of them do.
When factories close, they leave a lot of unemployed youth. Those youth who already been living from salary to salary will have hard time hanging there for longer.
Shenzhen is no longer a city where people come in hopes of making money more so than spending them. If people will not have confidence in making more cash tomorrow, than they can make today, they will no longer be coming to Shenzhen, and go to other cash cow cities.
Once they leave, they will not be coming back, and restarting manufacturing in the city will be getting harder and harder. This is why it is very important for city's party cadres to find ways to stop labour force exodus. It is important to prevent a feedback loop where low labour availability will driver more factory closures.
High incomers will hang around in the city only for as long as there will be industrial companies to hire top tier professionals. We can not hope that the city can live off high incomers alone if their employers have no reason to stay in Shenzhen.
If you think about it, what's happening in Shenzhen is basically what has happened in most major cities in wealthy western countries. As the city becomes richer manufacturing slowly disappears, because new manufacturing is too expensive to set up.
> We in Shenzhen call what's going on recently as "Dubaisation" of the city.
How does this compare to Beijing and Shanghai I wonder? I'd have to imagine all the top Chinese cities, with their absurd real estate prices, are seeing similar
You could make similar analogies to top American cities too of course
Beijing and Shanghai had relatively little industry to begin with. They don't have to "battle" the phenomenon to survive, their economies, and people lives will not crash from that.
Maybe manufacturing was just a stage in the development of Shenzhen and the area will develop like other regions in the world have.
There will be some bad years, but overall, Shenzhen will not go back to the stone-age. Certainly not a Detroit scenario as Shenzhen is not a single industry,
Who will need you to manage them, if they can manage themselves by themself?
This up for the point that one can both make his own products, and make money from it too, without any greedy "helpers"
Unlike China-US trade where OEMs can't do anything with American superiority at marketing, the brand value, and your "management" will mean close to nothing outside of USA.
There is a lot of design, engineering and manufacturing expertise in Shenzen that is unapproachable or unattainable in the US or Europe. Mechanical engineering, design for manufacturing, etc.
But they do, they have factories making their stuff in shandong, hebei, and other places where Foxconn can put up new factories. There will always be places for factories, they don’t have tk be in or even near expensive big cities.
We in Shenzhen call what's going on recently as "Dubaisation" of the city. Land prices are on their way to stratosphere. Factory rentals follow rent price too. Working class is being priced out.
A factory owner can sell the remaining value on the land lease for up to 40 times the average annual rent. A lot of them do.
When factories close, they leave a lot of unemployed youth. Those youth who already been living from salary to salary will have hard time hanging there for longer.
Shenzhen is no longer a city where people come in hopes of making money more so than spending them. If people will not have confidence in making more cash tomorrow, than they can make today, they will no longer be coming to Shenzhen, and go to other cash cow cities.
Once they leave, they will not be coming back, and restarting manufacturing in the city will be getting harder and harder. This is why it is very important for city's party cadres to find ways to stop labour force exodus. It is important to prevent a feedback loop where low labour availability will driver more factory closures.
High incomers will hang around in the city only for as long as there will be industrial companies to hire top tier professionals. We can not hope that the city can live off high incomers alone if their employers have no reason to stay in Shenzhen.