Tencent News, “The Periscope
Contributing Author Lu Xi
Editor: Young Pudding
Dark blue velvet suit, entwined with tulle and adorned with light blue feathers, the popular star, Kenji Tang, danced across the intersection of Shenzhen Bay Vientiane City with unique skill. It’s October 2024, and VOGUE, the world’s leading fashion magazine, has organized a week-long event here. A call for celebrities and hipsters came in droves. With runway shows, dinners and forums, Shenzhen suddenly became the fashion heart of China.
In previous years, VOGUE has organized this event in New York, London, Rome and Shanghai, and this time, it has come to a big cooperation with Shenzhen Garment Industry Association.
In 2018, Shenzhen Bay Vientiane City in Nanshan District opened, where a large number of big first-tier luxury brands opened big stores. To match the momentum, brands do big exhibitions and shows in Shenzhen. In the past six years, French fine jewelry house Van Cleef & Arpels held a fine jewelry art exhibition in Shenzhen; Chanel walked its early spring resort collection – a show that was praised by Shenzhen’s official media for echoing Shenzhen’s desire to transform itself into a “design capital”; and Cartier held a global women’s entrepreneurship event in Shenzhen because it is a “city of entrepreneurship”. Cartier organized a global event on women’s entrepreneurship in Shenzhen because it is a “city of entrepreneurship”.
In the past, it was always said that the spending power of Shenzhen people on luxury goods had been “sucked” away by Hong Kong. Shenzhen refused to accept this, and the official even proposed that Shenzhen should develop in the direction of high-end fashion industry, digitalization and branding. The opening of Vientiane City in Shenzhen Bay is a new milestone, and the time has come for luxury goods to fully “bet” on Shenzhen.
Shenzhen’s “generation of creators” and “generation of dismantlers” are still mostly fashion insulators today, while their next generation has changed the city’s mold. Today’s Shenzhen is rich and in sync with the world, where technology and fashion go hand in hand, and money and art go hand in hand. Forty years of reform and opening up have turned stone into gold, and Shenzhen is a “gold mine” of luxury goods that is opening up slowly.
Clothes aren’t as important as a house to the “deep generation” of rich people.
The fashion world is mean and used to say that Shenzhen is a “fashion desert”. Shenzhen Fashion Week is held every year, and is said to be “playing with itself”. Someone did a math problem, the annual sales of a city’s top shopping centers, divided by the city’s GDP.The math shows that Shenzhen is not only not comparable to Shanghai, but also lags behind Chengdu, which is “as fashionable as life”, and Nanjing, a second-tier city.The conclusion: Shenzhen is rich, but not too dressy.
Shen Yi-han, an 80-year-old engaged in high-end finance, thinks: fashionistas are lonely in Shenzhen. Over the years, he has bought all the first-tier big-name men’s clothing, and is the biggest customer of a top Italian brand in Shenzhen. Every season when a new product arrives in China, the brand arranges a VIP tour of major cities. The route is usually Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu …… Shenzhen is either the last stop or the guests are merged into Guangzhou. Every time he has to face the samples that have been tried on many times by VIPs from the “big city”, he can’t help but frown.
He also often goes to the brand’s store in Shenzhen, when he mentions the style he likes on the Internet, the answer he gets is probably that there is no stock in Shenzhen, and he has to transfer it from Beijing or Chengdu. He felt that the brand for the Shenzhen store selection are shallow and easy to understand the explosive, really represents the essence of the brand, a breakthrough in the new design, are not given to Shenzhen. Is it possible that in the minds of the brands, the main consumers in Shenzhen are the middle-aged and the elderly?
Why are Shenzheners interested in fashion in general? Shen Yihan found an answer of sorts in her wealthy clients.
These people are in their fifties and are the “deep generation” of wealthy people, most interested in the subject of investment and wealth management.They are invariably interested in real estate, talking about what houses to buy to preserve the value, how to pass on to the next generation in high spirits. Another thing that makes the rich and powerful in the city rush in is feng shui numerology, theThese career successes are more keen than the average person to have a numerology guru point them in the right direction to avoid the reefs in business and life. Shen Yihan once brought in the world-famous Savile Row tailor in London, who is world-renowned in the world of bespoke menswear, to take his measurements, only to find that the guests were not very excited.
The portrait of the “deep generation” of tycoons is like this: after 60 years of age, they lived a hard life when they were children, didn’t study too much, and worked in labor-intensive industries with very low gross profit margins, usually building factories in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and cooperating with some Hong Kong-based foreign trade companies and agencies to export their products. These traditional industries until the beginning of the new century was a black joke to say all the bitter: China’s production and export of 800 million pieces of shirts, in return for the profit to buy a Boeing airplane.
The “deep generation” of rich people can be successful, rely on hard work, is every cent, they do not have the leisure to engage in literature and art, talk about aesthetics and taste.Some of the more extreme billionaires have literally no desire to spend money and wear ordinary clothes, and there are even rich people who are ignored and neglected because they look shabby.
Earned money, willing to upgrade consumption, the concept of consumption is also very special: to buy a house can throw a lot of money, because the house can preserve the value of appreciation. A local real estate media in Shenzhen had this inventory: in the past, the buyers of Shenzhen’s top luxury homes were mainly Chaoshan bosses from the catering, construction, hardware and other industries. They like to buy big houses, show off the many rooms and high floors, and store a room of Maotai at home. After the 80s, the new rich and the second generation of rich people to buy luxury housing, they like a few hundred square meters with only two bedrooms, the balcony can ride a bicycle design. There are also a lot of “deep generation” rich people buy luxury cars, buy watches, but the car should be ranked in front of the table, clothes and so on to the last.
Movers and shakers and charterers, the alternative group of Rolexes
One day in the 1980s, the villagers of Huide Village, located in today’s Bao’an District of Shenzhen, were stunned by a sudden news: the construction of the Shenzhen Airport had expropriated their land, and the compensation for the whole village was as much as 30 million yuan – that was in the 1980s when there was a lack of material goods! Who wouldn’t be tempted by a pie in the sky? Miraculously, the village council of the time went door-to-door and convinced the villagers to invest the money in the construction of an industrial estate. Nowadays, the wealth of Wai Tak Village has been passed on to the next generation. Shenzhen’s success is not only due to opportunities, but also comes from people’s vision.
Shenzhen is the flagship of China’s reform and opening up. 1978, the old revolutionary Yuan Geng led the establishment of industrial development zones in Shekou, Shenzhen, where more than 40 years ago the slogan “time is money, efficiency is life” was shouted. “The emergence of Shekou and Yuan Geng has opened a big hole in the iron curtain of planned economy that can never be mended again.” Financial writer Wu Xiaobo wrote this. Today’s financial carriers China Merchants Bank and Ping An Insurance were born in Shekou. Located in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, Shenzhen, by virtue of the special policies granted by the Central Authorities, has established a relationship with Hong Kong as “a store in front and a factory at the back”, developing exports, establishing bonded zones, and carrying out ocean trade, so that the export-oriented economy, mainly in industry, has developed rapidly.
After 60 Chaoshan Ye Zhongwei came to Shenzhen in the 1980s, when Shenzhen “everywhere is gold”, “do anything to make money”. 2000 before and after he did a watch agent, operating a number of Swiss watches, the business started very quickly.In Shenzhen at the beginning of the new century, people chased Cartier and Longines, and worshiped Rolex as a god. This originated from a Hong Kong movie that was popular in the mainland at that time. Before Chicken ran away in the movie, Hao Nan gave him a Rolex to take with him in case of an emergency to exchange for money. This plot touched countless people, and until today it still affects Chinese middle-aged men, branding Rolex as a value-retaining, hard currency.
At that time, people from all over the country ran to Shenzhen, stayed in the sea business, or through Shenzhen to Hong Kong, a boiling age. Bosses who got rich started to buy good watches, and it became customary to buy watches as gifts to open the way for their own business opportunities in a city where business dealings accelerated like crazy. 2013 saw the country’s heavy-handed anti-corruption efforts, and gift-giving activities were silenced overnight. The watch industry experienced a downturn, while the wheels of economic development did not stop, people bought watches for themselves and their families, Vacheron Constantin, Cartier, Patek Philippe and Rolex, are the most respected brands on the market.
Similar to many other cities in China, there is a special group of people who play with watches – relocated households. It is not difficult to buy a good watch by spending a little bit of change when your old house is demolished and relocated. Before the reform and opening up of Shenzhen is a small fishing village, the local farmers are self-built houses, including a kind of peasant houses known as “pulling the hand building”, and later became a village in the city. When foreigners came to Shenzhen, they rented here, and the locals became the legendary landlord and landlady. The miracle of Huai De Village has been staged repeatedly, Shenzhen’s urban construction relocated many multi-millionaires, billionaires. 2023, a landlord in Shenzhen nine buildings were demolished at once, compensation of more than one hundred million.
Compared to the entrepreneurial generation, the movers and shakers have a relaxed mindset, live a cozy life, and don’t think twice about wearing flip-flops to the mall. Money comes relatively easily, and they often splurge.They don’t buy into all the marketing of Western luxury goods. In addition to buying houses, cars and watches, they sometimes go to buy jadeite jade or gold, and if they have the means to do so, they build large pools in the yards of their homes to raise expensive koi carp, as they please.
Xu Kang, who works for a high-end Swiss watch company based in Shenzhen, has observed over the years that many securities, insurance and intermediary practitioners are particularly fond of buying good watches. Because the clients they face are very rich, they need gorgeous clothes to support their appearance. Young people who have not been in the industry for long time buy Longines and Tudor, while the more mature ones go after Rolex and even the more expensive Richard Mille and Patek Philippe. They are flexible and sell a watch after wearing it for a period of time, and then go to buy a new, more expensive and more famous one, giving people the impression that they know a lot about watches and are always buying new ones.It is for this reason that the market for used watches in Shenzhen is more active than elsewhere.
Day after day, the streets of Shenzhen are crowded with cars and the tide of luxury consumption is rising.In 2004, Shenzhen Vientiane City in Luohu District opened, the first Vientiane City in the country, with more than 40,000 people flocking in on that day and sales exceeding 1 billion dollars in the first year of operation. Almost since then, big name luxury goods have shown an attitude that they will not always rely on Hong Kong stores to serve Shenzhen customers.In 2009, the Louis Vuitton flagship store, which covers an area of about 20,000 square meters, opened here, and with other big names coming in, the luxury brand lineup at Luohu Wuxiang City says it all.
The top tycoons and nouveau riche love jewelry and art even more
In 2024, a Chinese animated film “Bears’ Reversal of Time” won 2 billion box office, in which Bald Qiang first played screws in an electronics factory, and then went to Huaqiang South to repair cell phones. His real name is Liu Huaqiang, and the production company behind him is from Shenzhen, called Huaqiang Fante.
In the 1980s, Shenzhen Huaqiang North opened the low-end electronics manufacturing industry known as “three to one”, and later Huaqiang North Sage Plaza gave birth to the legend of the “one-meter counter”: small bosses or husband and wife stores to rent a one-meter wide counter, a safe, a cell phone can Can complete a variety of electronic components purchasing and distribution.
Today, Huaqiangbei not only can make the Bear, but also out of the Shenzhou computer, TP-LINK router and other well-known enterprises. Electronics manufacturing is the process of Shenzhen’s takeoff will not be ignored, a group of entrepreneurs who dare to think boldly grew up, and there are even claims that here was born at least 50 billionaires.
With the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and a highly developed financial industry, Shenzhen has more than 550 domestic and foreign listed companies by the end of 2023, ranking behind Beijing and Shanghai. When entrepreneurs meet financial tools, wealth expands dramatically. The company listings and mergers and acquisitions that happen every year push one entrepreneur and team to the pinnacle of wealth, and they are Shenzhen’s nouveau riche.
The Shenzhen tycoons whose wealth has reached a certain order of magnitude have begun to use the collection of jewelry and works of art to preserve and increase the value of their wealth.
Leng Xiaomo works in the jewelry industry in Shenzhen, helping wealthy individuals invest in jewelry and gemstones. She conducts detailed preliminary communication with clients, introducing and analyzing the various quality parameters and appreciation potential of gemstones, including large-carat colored diamonds and colored gemstones. Once the client has decided on the type of gemstone, she will search for and purchase the appropriate gemstone from various sources around the world.
Large pieces of jewelry are usually bought by men for their wives, daughters or girlfriends.But in Shenzhen, the percentage of successful female entrepreneurs who buy jewelry for themselves is higher than in other major cities.They will stock millions at a time in their favorite big jewelry brands, so that they can easily pick up and withdraw whenever they want.Women entrepreneurs are also quite pragmatic and jewelry should not only be beautifully designed but also have precious stones to lay down the value. Large pieces of jewelry are a symbol of their status and power, and they wear them carefully to social occasions to help them influence clients and compete for business opportunities.
The art investment community is even more exclusive. The rich, celebrities, artists and important organizations make contacts and weave their social networks in this elegant atmosphere. The top tycoons sometimes don’t necessarily come out on their own; they auction paintings and artworks to show their strength in the top social circles, and as a kind of knock on the door of relationships. The globally recognized art trading platform, Artron, was founded in Shenzhen.
From time to time, Shenzhen tycoons go in and out of some highly private clubs, such as the Deep Bay Club at One Shenzhen Bay, the Artron Art Center, and the Hua Forum in OCT. These Shenzhen high society clubs are circles of interest to top luxury brands, and some high jewelry brands have cooperated with these clubs to hold private VIP events.
At the end of 2024, Luohu Vientiane City will unveil its newest Tiffany flagship store, and the Tiffany blue color has already excited Shenzhen fans when the store hoardings are erected. Tiffany opened a store here more than a decade ago, and is now taking it a step further by expanding its size and enriching its features. The big name in fine jewelry has expressed its interest in Shenzhen with a big investment, and is a proof that Tiffany has done well in Shenzhen in the past decade or so.
Collector-grade jewelry aside, the main function of jewelry is still wearable, jewelry in Shenzhen showed a strong national, in September this year, Shenzhen International Jewelry Exhibition with 1,500 booths, more than 500 domestic and foreign exhibitors, attracted more than 30,000 buyers around the world, where they feasted their eyes, but also to find business opportunities.
Shenzhen is also known as the gold jewelry and jade market Shui Bei, the annual turnover of more than 100 billion yuan. From Shui Bei has come out of the Tetra A, Chow Tai Sang and other two listed companies, there is a company called “Saturday Fook” is busy with the Hong Kong IPO.
Shui Bei continues the style of barbaric growth of different industries on this piece of land in Shenzhen, and has become a pivotal link in the domestic jewelry industry chain amidst the skepticism of “Shanzhai”.
The “second generation of Shenzhen” who bought LV in middle school to get rid of the charm of luxury goods.
Xu Kang has a friend’s child who just returned from studying abroad and chose Audemars Piguet for his first watch. Perhaps because of the proximity of Hong Kong, the second generation of Shenzhen children have been exposed to far richer information than mainland children, and their way of thinking is more internationalized. Over the years, the number of Shenzhen groups studying abroad has been increasing every year, and many children from wealthy Shenzhen families go overseas on their own at the age of 15 or 16. Their values are both realistic and avant-garde, and they chase trends and are no strangers to luxury goods.
Nowadays, many of them go back to their home countries to inherit the family business or are employed in Shenzhen, which is no longer a fashionable desert because of them.
Fang Jinlu was born in 1992, she and her classmates are typical of the second generation of Shenzhen. When she was in junior high school at the beginning of the new century, many of her classmates’ parents came from Chaoshan to do business in Shenzhen. They were related and often came from the same big family in Chaoshan and cooperated with each other.
The parents of these students often go to Hong Kong and bring back colorful goodies.When Vientiane opened in 2004, several of my classmates went to buy Louis Vuitton, and at that time they knew that Neverfull and Checkerboard were “classic must-buy” items. They had the business acumen to sell their cell phones as second-hand goods instead of leaving them in the closet to collect dust and move the money around.
Fang Jinlu was initiated to luxury consumption because she studied abroad. She bought Dior sunglasses in London and recently bought Dior earrings after returning to China. She feels that these small accessories are within her spending range and can bring a strong sense of pleasure. Now that Fang Jinlu teaches at a university, her female colleagues often get together to discuss Hermes accessories and what nice new products have come out from their favorite luxury brands.
There is a female coworker who loves Chanel, and has more than a dozen brooches with the double C logo alone. She would talk to others about the subtle differences between these brooches, and every time she goes out, she will carefully match some of them, never ostentatious, but there is a kind of natural elegance.
In the eyes of these “deep second generation”, luxury goods have no mystery, and are not used to show off or to fill the face of the line, but just some of their favorite, more expensive good things.
Now, Fang Jinlu and his classmates into the 30s, when the school selling second-hand cell phones in the male students early into society, to join the family business, but also their own entrepreneurship, broke out a little fame. Many of her female classmates have married rich wives and are now the main consumers of luxury goods in Shenzhen.
Shenzhen’s post-00s have gone one step further, as Fang Jinlu has seen some youthful female college students carrying five-figure designer bags in their university classes. Recently, Marni’s straw “vegetable basket” bags have become popular in universities, and she has seen several of them at school in a day.
The “second generation of Shenzhen” is a generation of active thinking, they have personally experienced the take-off of Shenzhen, enjoying the biggest dividends of China’s reform and opening up, especially after seeing the scenery abroad, they have the confidence from the bottom of their hearts.
Of course, another category of young people brings a different pull to luxury spending.
Shen Yihan had seen some special people at VIP events of luxury brands. For example, netizens, young, good-looking, but poorly educated, they have become rich in a grassroots way in the Internet frenzy, and some young people in their twenties have already earned millions of dollars. In his circle of acquaintances, there is such a boy, first do their own netizen, and then open MCN company, now the annual income of tens of millions of dollars, young ambition is inevitably frivolous, buy luxury goods such as groceries, live in Shenzhen Bay, a mansion, spending money like running water.
There are also some mysterious people, is to do all kinds of “gray industry”, such as smuggling “water customers”, not subject to legal protection of the underground financial, unknown digital currency and so on. These money comes and goes quickly, these people also have a little bit of doomsday mentality, like to throw money and have fun in time.They may buy a bunch of cool new products at a VIP event one month, and then disappear without a trace the next. Luxury sellers are not surprised that when the winds of policy crackdowns get tighter, the owners of the gray industry will scatter in fear or even “disappear”.
It’s a complicated side of Shenzhen, where these businesses that skirt the edge of the law can make people rich overnight or land them in jail.
Two Miracle Cities, One Miracle City
In today’s fast-paced Shenzhen, the old streets of Shekou are the most relaxing place to be. The vegetable market is full of dried seafood, the roadside is a small barbecue store and Chinese medicine store. The young Shenzhen has its own old town, the big boss with a lot of money, the family has a whole building to collect rent of the chartered public, will also wear a common big T-shirt, foot flip-flops, in the plastic stools to sit down, eat a bowl of pig’s feet rice. Shekou is the first stop of the “Hong Kong-Shenzhen convergence”, and over the past few decades, Hong Kong has had an enlightening effect on Shenzhen.
In 1981, the first duty-free store in China opened in Shekou wharf, and the “store” was a converted container. 1982, Hong Kong businesswoman “Mrs. Ma” Chen Huijuan opened the first import-export store in Shekou in a joint venture with mainland China, and on the opening day, 500 customers lined up early in the morning, and the glass windows were shattered. On the opening day, 500 customers lined up in a long line early in the morning, and the glass windows were shattered.Shenzhen’s Chung Ying Street, half Shenzhen and generally Hong Kong, is awash with colorful duty-free goods. in 1988, the street sold a crazy 1.57 billion yuan of gold jewelry.
Hong Kong’s watches and handbags have been attracting Shenzhen customers for a long time because of lower prices, better availability, and more experienced service. From buying a diamond ring and jewelry before the wedding, to one of their favorite handbags, many people in Shenzhen will make a special trip to Hong Kong.
Many luxury brands had already opened agencies in Hong Kong at that time and sold their goods bit by bit to Mainland China through agents, with Shenzhen serving as a transit point. Later on, luxury brands started to move their production to mainland China, with Shenzhen playing the role of connecting the brands with garment and leather goods manufacturing factories in the Pearl River Delta.
With luxury goods, there is a “water customers”, they will be from Hong Kong, watches, leather goods in the baggage in Shenzhen, shipped to all parts of the country, to sell at a lower price. This road is gradually blocked in the customs crackdown.The “Shui Ke Ke” is an alternative way to help the people of Shenzhen realize the enlightenment of luxury goods.
More than four decades have passed, and the relationship between Shenzhen and Hong Kong has quietly changed, with many luxury brands striving to narrow the price difference between Hong Kong and the Mainland.Some people choose to buy watches in Shenzhen because “Hong Kong stores cannot issue invoices”, some people find that some brand stores in Shenzhen are more abundant than Hong Kong stores, and some people just buy them at their doorsteps for the sake of convenience. At the same time, customs inspections are getting stricter and stricter, and people in Shenzhen are more and more reluctant to take the risk of paying back taxes.
Shenzhen Vientiane, which opened in 2004 in the Luohu district, has already gathered many first-tier brands. 2023 turnover has long been among the top 10 high-end shopping malls in the country, with more than 13 billion yuan. 2024, Hermès unveiled an expanded new store here, replacing an old one that had been open for 15 years.
It is based on Luohu Huaqiang North, Shenzhen has developed into today’s city of science and technology, and Nanshan District has become Shenzhen’s new “Silicon Valley”. Today, Nanshan District area of less than 15 square kilometers of Yuehai Street, the birth of Huawei, ZTE, DJI, Tencent and many other well-known science and technology companies, because of the cluster effect, other domestic science and technology factories come and go, Baidu international headquarters, Alibaba’s international operations headquarters are located here.
The manufacturing industry has a “smile curve” theory: upstream R&D and design, downstream branding services are the two high ends of the curve, and processing and manufacturing in the middle is at the bottom of the value chain. Nanshan District has been striving to move to both ends of the curve for decades, withdrawing from traditional industries and focusing on building corporate headquarters and R&D centers. 2023, Nanshan District’s GDP reached 856.6 billion yuan, even exceeding that of many Southeast Asian countries.
A large number of gold-collar workers have grown up in Nanshan District, and it is not uncommon for the middle and senior levels of large factories to earn three to four million dollars a year. Internet people are naturally interested in smart watches, and Apple Watch is their first choice when buying watches. Some of them know a little about luxury watches, and more of them wear them casually and how to be comfortable. The outside world jokes that IT men only know how to wear plaid shirts, but in reality, even if they raise their budgets, they are more inclined to choose Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, which are the most suitable for the Internet circle.
Today’s younger generation of Shenzhen IT people are not just struggling, when they have a breakthrough in their careers, hands become generous, they naturally began to upgrade consumption.
In 2018, the annual turnover of Luohu Vientiane City, which has been open for 14 years, reached 8.5 billion dollars. That year, Shenzhen got its second Vientiane City, which opened right in Nanshan District, adjacent to top offices and ultra-luxury residences. From Luohu to Nanshan, the two Vientiane Cities symbolize Shenzhen’s old money and new money respectively。
Shenzhen’s GDP reached RMB 2.4 trillion in 2018, surpassing Hong Kong for the first time.In the 2023 national GDP statistics, Hong Kong was at RMB 2.69 trillion and Shenzhen reached RMB 3.46 trillion.
Hong Kong has also noticed that the era of attracting mainland tourists with price advantages is gradually fading away. Over the past few years, Hong Kong has continued to tap the attraction of local culture and promote Hong Kong’s unique natural scenery, so as to attract tourists with irreplaceable charms and differentiate itself from Shenzhen in competition.
Today, Shenzhen is no longer the backyard of Hong Kong, but competes and cooperates with Hong Kong. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, comprising Hong Kong, Macao and nine Guangdong cities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, has become one of the most open and economically vibrant regions in China, with less than 1 per cent of the country’s land area and 5 per cent of the country’s total population generating 11 per cent of the country’s total economic output.
Born in 1993, the metal sculpture “Breakthrough” depicts a strong and powerful man who breaks the doorframe and walks forward, and is now placed in front of the old museum on Shennan Road in Shenzhen. The spirit of Shenzhen, represented by the word “break in”, is a harbinger of the city’s unlimited future. The economic miracle of Shenzhen is still continuing, and Shenzhen is gradually maturing, with its own culture, art, poetic and exquisite lifestyle.
(Shen Yihan, Ye Zhongwei, Xu Kang, Leng Xiaomo and Fang Jinlu are all pseudonyms in the article)