China's Silicon Valley
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SPOTLIGHT ON SHENZHEN CAREERS ILLUSTRATION, MILES DONOVAN; PHOTOS, FLYNN MURPHY/ GETTY MURPHY/ GETTY FLYNN PHOTOS, DONOVAN; MILES ILLUSTRATION, China’s Silicon Valley Shenzhen has emerged as a haven for biotechnology and cutting-edge hardware. BY FLYNN MURPHY n a Sunday afternoon in March, chil- Imagination and innovation are ubiquitous At last count, the city’s official population was dren snake through the exhibits at the motifs in the manufacturing powerhouse of nearing 12 million. Shenzhen Science Museum in south- Shenzhen. For decades, the city grew rich by Deng initiated the national policy of gaige Oeastern China. Two dozen have gathered in the manufacturing products designed overseas. kaifang — reform and opening up — in foyer for a circuit-making demonstration led Now, as wages rise and low-tech manufactur- 1978. Now, this chain-smoking, five-foot by a woman in her early twenties, who elic- ing drifts elsewhere, necessity has become the titan of economic reform smiles down over its answers and gently dissuades them from mother of invention for a city seeking a ticket Shenzhen’s arterial Shennan Middle Road from climbing on her desk. out of a manufacturing slump. a billboard — he faces a bike park brimming In the main hall, a boy in blue overalls with various brands of privately rented bicy- turns a wheel that controls the movements of FROM FISHING TO CHIPS cles, which can be unlocked by smartphone. a mechanical dog. Others admire a variety of Shenzhen’s rags to riches story has been told Gaige kaifang has been supplanted by gaige rolling ball sculptures and play with robotic and retold. It was once Bao’an county, the fish- chuangxin — reform and innovate. The slogan arms of the sort used in heavy industry. A girl ing village across the border from Hong Kong adorns everything from local government signs of around five applauds a machine that gener- that was chosen by China’s de facto leader Deng to bus-stop adverts for financial services. ates tiny tornadoes out of vapour. Xiaoping in 1980 to be the country’s first spe- Two of China’s oldest universities, Peking Two quotes in embossed metal command cial economic zone — a place where foreign and Tsinghua, have established small graduate the wall above the main hall, in Chinese and and domestic trade could take place without the outposts in the southwest of the city, in the pic- English: “Imagination is more important than explicit authorization of China’s central govern- turesque Shenzhen University Town. But this knowledge” (Albert Einstein), and “Innovation ment. Since then, Shenzhen has been flooded is a young city with an even younger popula- distinguishes between a leader and a follower” with thousands of foreign investors and millions tion — the average age is just shy of 30 — and (Steve Jobs). of domestic workers hoping to improve their lot. it shows, in both its budding academic ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts re18ser vMAYed. 2017 | VOL 545 | NATURE | S29 CAREERS SPOTLIGHT ON SHENZHEN sector and accompanying ambition. Take a vibrating electrocardiogram patch that sits on HAX is in Shenzhen, says Joffe, because the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technol- the skin next to the heart, will help wearers to of the city’s tech “ecosystem”. “You need to ogy (SIAT), a Chinese Academy of Sciences manage stress and anxiety by measuring the have circuit manufacturers, you need to have offshoot, which teaches mainly in English. In organ’s electrical activity and responding with the component supplier, the metal parts, the 2006, it began as a team of five. Nine years later, vibrations to guide the wearer’s breathing. “It’s plastic parts, the coating, the certification test- SIAT was home to almost 2,000 academics and kind of meditation on training wheels,” he says. ing, all those things in reasonable proximity.” had signed a deal with the McGovern Institute Frese, who is the chief technology officer HAX’s actual workshop is small because Shen- for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Insti- and part owner of Lief Therapeutics, has just zhen offers so many outsourcing options, he tute of Technology in Cambridge to establish returned from a trip to inspect conditions at a explains. And the extra capacity in the supply the Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Insti- nearby battery factory. “I showed it to them, I chain is a boon for inventors, with factories tute. Overall, Shenzhen is home to around said ‘it goes over your heart’,” he motions, “so more willing to deliver on small-scale orders. 90,000 university students, its government says. our batteries need to be safe.” That same ecosystem breeds competition. But analysts suggest that scale and enthusi- Around 9% of Lief Therapeutics has been Of around 1,000 hardware start-ups that apply asm are not enough for the city’s academic sec- to join the HAX programme each year, only tor to compete on the national stage, and that 30 are successful. the supercharged private sector is where the ground-breaking research is. “Shenzhen’s been SHENZHEN’S A ELECTRIC AVENUE historically quite weak in terms of its academic HAX is perched above what is often described reputation,” says David Zweig, who researches PLACE WHERE as the world’s largest electronics market. China’s efforts to attract scholars at the Hong Huaqiangbei is better described as an elec- Kong University of Science and Technology. YOU CAN VERY tronics district. It’s packed with market-malls “You’re competing against a city like Beijing, QUICKLY TURN of concrete and steel, some avant-garde in which has Peking University, Tsinghua Univer- design, rising like giant computer chips from sity ... Those are 100 years old.” long causeways. In some, complete gadgets — What Shenzhen does get, Zweig says, is a AN IDEA INTO A cables, computer keyboards, karaoke micro- lot of ‘returnees’ — Chinese citizens who have phones, smartwatches — hang from every studied and spent an extended period in places PRODUCT. surface. More hang in the air, from remote- such as the United States and Canada. Shenz- controlled drones (Shenzhen is home to the hen is the key beneficiary of China’s overseas world’s largest drone manufacturer, DJI). studies programme, Zweig says. “They’re bought by the Shenzhen-based hardware Others, like Building Number Two, look getting back lots of really good people. And accelerator HAX, which is in turn owned by the like a shipment of electronics has exploded, they’re not so interested in manufacturing. venture capital firm SOSV, based in Princeton, showering transistors, resistors, circuit boards They’re more interested in hardware, IT, life New Jersey. and capacitors of every conceivable sort across sciences, biotech.” In HAX’s open-plan office, rows of mostly floor after floor. young, foreign teams are developing their own In alleys that wind behind the markets, white HARDWARE HAVEN inventions, sandwiched between containers of and yellow tarpaulin sacks better suited to rice In a small workshop on the eighth floor of protein powder and upside-down rucksacks. and grain are packed full of components and Huaqiang Electronics World’s Building Num- Benjamin Joffe — one of HAX’s general partners machine parts, and loaded onto trucks and into ber Two, Billy Frese is tinkering with his latest — motions to an industrial robot arm about the the baggage compartments of commuter buses. invention. The University of California, Berkeley size of a desk lamp, which he says is about to be Nearby, perched on a bike and wearing a bioengineering graduate explains how the Lief, bought by a major car manufacturer. floral shirt, is delivery driver Li. The 45-year- old took the ‘English’ name Sony — after the Japanese electronics manufacturer — when he moved to the city four years ago from regional Hunan. Sony has barely introduced himself when he begins a lecture on the finer points B. HALL/GETTY of the city’s economic transition. He says low- skilled jobs are being sent offshore to parts of Africa, where he worked as a manager in a Chi- nese-owned manufacturing plant in Tanzania for half of last year. He returned because the money there was poor — around US$3 a day. ENTREPRENEUR CITY “Shenzhen’s a place where you can very quickly turn an idea into a product,” says Blair Ney, a biomedical researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Ney worked as an intern at a Shenzhen biomedical company in 2015. “The thing that stands out is how many people there are in an entrepreneurial mindset.” But Ney says that his basic level of Mandarin made life in the city alienating at times. Most of his interactions were with foreign entrepre- neurs, on whom he saw “Chinese bureaucracy” A Shenzhen street in 1979, one year before Deng Xiaoping named the city a special economic zone. take a toll. He notes that having connections S30 | NATURE | VOL 545 | 18 MAY ©20172017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. SPOTLIGHT ON SHENZHEN CAREERS INTERNET POLICY Frustrations with communication As elsewhere in China, researchers working opportunities for engineers in the city than in Shenzhen struggle with the Chinese back home. But like Edmunds, he finds central government’s Internet censorship Internet issues to be a continual source of policy. Both Google and Facebook, for frustration. Reed, who works for the hardware example, are blocked here. accelerator HAX and has an interest in “The work that I do requires a good biodegradable circuit design, has been in connection to the rest of the world,” says Shenzhen for around two-and-a-half years.