Maoist Soldiers as the Infrastructure of Reform: The People’s Liberation Army Engineering Corps in Shenzhen

In three decades, Shenzhen, located in South China immediately north of Hong Kong, transformed from a small town of peasants, peddlers, fishermen, and oyster farmers to the forefront of China’s adaptation to market principles and opening up to the world economy. The speed of the city’s development was among the fastest in the world. In today’s Shenzhen, as in many other metropolises around the world, the profit-and-efficiency-seeking rationale of capitalism prevails. Yet soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who personified the Mao-era ethos of selfless pursuit of collective good, erected its first concrete buildings and paved its first asphalt roads. Between 1979 and 1982, 20,000 members of the PLA Engineering Corps arrived in Shenzhen. They took charge of the city’s infrastructure building and participated in the construction of landmarks that symbolized Shenzhen’s miraculous growth, including the 20-story Shenzhen Electronics Building and the 53-story International Trade Centre. In 1983, after laying the foundation for Shenzhen’s development into the Chinese capital of skyscrapers, the PLA Engineering Corps were demobilized, instructed to “swim by themselves” in the tumultuous sea of capitalist experiments. Trained to obey orders at all costs and taught to dismiss the pursuit of profits as shameful, they became the unlikely pioneers of Chinese economic liberalization. Among them rose creative and daring entrepreneurs such as Ren Zhengfei, the CEO of Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer. While Shenzhen’s metamorphosis symbolizes the broader social and economic transformation of China since the late 1970s, the stories of PLA Engineering Corps members offer insights into the lived individual experiences of Chinese facing a fundamental reorganization of everyday socio-economic practices and an overhaul of the public value system.