City Culture—Experimental and Entrepreneurial DNA

This chapter examines the welcoming and open-minded Shenzhen city culture as China’s unique “immigrant city.” Similar to America’s California Dream and Go West, Shenzhen dream represents individual ambition, possibility, independence and modernity in China in the early 1980s when the rest of the country was still under planned economy. The entrepreneurial and risk-taking culture in Shenzhen differs from the measurement of diversity index theorized by western scholars which stimulate intellectual debates on the role of diversity in technological innovation and creativity.