Shenzhen Grassroots Participatory Innovation: Let the People Make—Makers and Manufacturing

This chapter highlights Shenzhen’s crucial innovation feature and its regional technological competitiveness: grassroots participatory innovation. From the maker movement and maker innovation, the Hua Qiang Bei electronics market, to the comparison between Shan Zhai phenomenon in Shenzhen and hacker culture in the West, this chapter describes how global electronics production networks in Hong Kong and Taiwan shifted to the Chinese Mainland in the 1990s, which marks Shenzhen’s integration into a global manufacturing network. Shenzhen’s innovation upgrading, from a global copycat mobile phone hub to China’s leading technological cluster is carefully analyzed, which sheds light on lessons for other emerging innovation regions in the global south.