SPOTLIGHT ON 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 . 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 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 , 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 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

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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 is better described as an elec- Kong University of Science and Technology. YOU CAN VERY tronics . 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 named the city a special economic zone. take a toll. He notes that having connections

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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. former Shenzhen resident Scott Edmunds, “The VPN issue is such an intermittent who edits Chinese genetics giant BGI’s problem,” he says. “One day you can have GigaScience journal. “It’s one of the main lightning fast speeds, you’re streaming at reasons I moved to the Hong Kong office.” like 1080p. And the next day you can’t even (Hong Kong, although part of China, is in a open your e-mail account. I would say it’s unique position as a special administrative the thing that frustrates me most.” region. It has very little Internet censorship.) Although China blocks web traffic, it Edmunds says that using unreliable virtual has a more complex relationship with private network (VPN) services to access VPN services. Chinese state media the unfiltered web was one of the biggest organizations have Facebook accounts, and challenges of his time in Shenzhen. the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Australian mechatronics engineer Communist Party has an active channel on Mike Reed says that there are far more blocked-by-default YouTube. F.M.

with people who know the system is essential BGI. Edmunds, who trained in cancer molec- to success. ular pathology at Queen Mary University of Ali Muhammad, an electrical and computing London, was headhunted in 2010 to run BGI’s engineer, moved from Hyderabad in India to GigaScience journal (see ‘Frustrations with Shenzhen in 2009. He remembers the intense communication’). energy the first time he set foot in Huaqiangbei In recent years, he notes, a number of ex- market. “I was very excited. You can buy any- BGI staff have struck out on their own, with thing from a single chip to the latest complete some setting up rival companies and others cell phones and accessories,” although, he says, maintaining good relations with the parent “you need to be careful” not to buy low-quality group, enriching the overall biotech scene. fakes. Edmunds says that iCarbonX, founded by Muhammad was working for Pakistan’s former BGI chief executive Jun Wang when he National Telecommunication Corporation departed the company with around 100 other when he was selected for a training pro- experts, falls into the latter category. Using gramme in the headquarters of Shenzhen- genomics data collected by BGI from medical based telecoms giant . imaging and health records, it is making efforts Now completing a PhD in Canada, to wed artificial intelligence with health care. Muhammad was deeply impressed by the A massive new biotech hub has sprung up technology he saw there. The social experi- 50 kilometres east of Shenzhen’s city centre in ence, too: “It was truly multicultural — almost . It’s home to China’s first every neighbour was from a different country.” national gene bank, which opened in Septem- ber as a public–private partnership between BIOTECHNOLOGY BOOM BGI and the local government. Local media Shenzhen might be a young city, but China is reports claim it could store 60 petabytes of going grey. World Economic Forum figures data — enough space to save the entire writ- suggest that by 2050, close to 500 million Chi- ten works of humanity in all languages since nese citizens will be over 60 years old. One- the beginning of recorded time or, in more third of those will be over 80. It’s no stretch to modern language, around 800 years of back- predict an increase in chronic diseases such as to-back high-definition film. dementia on a troubling scale. For foreigners who cope well with change, Enter Shenzhen. A decade ago the Chinese Edmunds says that there are plenty of opportu- genetics giant BGI (previously Beijing Genom- nities in the city. “Salaries haven’t quite caught ics Institute) moved here from the nation’s up,” he says, “but they’ve got mass overcapac- capital. BGI now has more than 5,000 staff ity of computers. [They’ve got] state of the art worldwide, with 4,000 at the Shenzhen head- imaging centres. It’s a bit of a nerd’s paradise. quarters, and around 150 in a Hong Kong office If you’re a tech nerd, it’s heaven.” ■ that focuses on international sequencing. Scott Edmunds has watched Shenzhen’s Flynn Murphy is a freelance reporter based life-sciences scene evolve over seven years at in Beijing.

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