Back in 2015 I was studying Urban Sociology in Amsterdam. Two months into the year each student had to choose the subject for his or her final thesis. Because I never went abroad during my bachelor or my master, the project group with the location of study being Shenzhen appealed a lot to me.
Wait what? Shenzhen 🤨,“what the hell is Shenzhen” you might be thinking, this was my first thought at the time as well. Well, Shenzhen is a city in southern China that is home to between 10 and 15 million inhabitants, it borders Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and is one of the many populous areas in the Pearl River Delta. Other Delta notables include Guangzhou and Macau.
I think it would serve us well to have a good understanding of this city before continuing, so let’s have a brief look at its history. In 1979 the visionary leader Deng Xiaoping made a bold step towards market-oriented reforms and planned to execute a capitalist experiment. A central point to his capitalist experiment was the plan to develop several Special Economic Zones. These zones were to be considered training grounds for local talent, but also to experiment with possible future economic management systems. Over the course of three phases, construction, restructuring and re-engineering, the Shenzhen Special economic zone was built up next to Hong Kong.
Where previously there were small fishing communities totaling an inhabitant’s figure of around 300,000, there now lays an Asian Megacity boasting head offices of Tencent, Huawei and the factories of Foxconn (Yes, those are the lovely people that manufacture your beloved Apple products). All this happened in the over the course of just 35 years.
Hopefully we now have a better idea of what a miracle of Chinese state structured planning Shenzhen is.
Let’s continue.
After being introduced to this thesis subject I was sold, my mind was set on visiting Shenzhen. I was accepted to the project group and had to start thinking about my final research question. Having never been to China, one of the things that puzzled me was the fact that the perception of this country I had in my mind, formed by popular movies and western media, was not aligned with the way Shenzhen was introduced to me. I started wondering what made this city special, and more specifically, what made it so attractive for young Chinese people to move there.
After a few months of preparation, it was time to do some fieldwork. So on we went, an interdisciplinary group of 18 students on a 7-week trip to Shenzhen. In between the Bajou and Tsingtao’s I managed to do 24 interviews and a focus group with young Chinese entrepreneurial urbanites. Their businesses ranged from importing wine 🍷, to running a company that produced LEGO-style do it yourself robot building blocks🤖, from being a professional wine taster, to developing an interactive TV remote control.
I spoke with a very diverse set of human beings and every single one of them was completely different than the media-based assumptions I had about Chinese young people. I expected them to be rigid, hard working people that value the state above personal experience. Everything for the collective, Assimilate; We are the Borg. On the contrary, they were passionate 🔥, driven, and had a capitalistic mindset which seemed unrivalled by my friends from the western-European cultures I grew up in at large.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to put a subjective valuation on capitalism, implying that it’s a good thing by default. However, the way my respondents embraced and lived by the capitalist economic model as opposed to their communist heritage almost made me believe it is an inherently good thing.
So there I was, making my way through the urban jungle called Shenzhen, going from skyscraper to hardware marketplace to winery, coming out of each interview even more baffled and inspired than the last. Their passion, vast domain specific knowledge, life experiences, and the fact that most of them were active in the technological scene creating hardware and or software made me feel like I was missing out on where the magic was happening. This became most apparent when interviewing an entrepreneur who was enrolled in the Shenzhen Haxlr8r program; a hardware startup incubator. After the interview I had a few minutes to look around the incubator. There were young people on every desk of the incubator. Each of them talking, building, creating, discussing and pitching their products in a virtuous manner. I knew there and then that I wanted/needed to learn how to code.👨🏽💻
Fast forward a few months later. After finishing my thesis and graduating from my Master in Sociology the things I saw in Shenzhen, the people I met there, and the culture I tasted lingered in my subconscious. Because of this toe that got dipped in the Shenzhen tech-pool, working as a Sociologist did not seem interesting anymore. But how could I ever make my entry into this landscape without any soft- or hardware knowledge?
Without a clear future plan I kept on working in the same bar I was working in throughout my study. Inspired by my interviews I started a small social enterprise with some friends. Whilst working on this project part-time and part-time in the bar, the stars ✨ and the moon 🌝aligned and I was handed the life changing opportunity to participate in a programming bootcamp. I did not hesitate and embraced this chance wholeheartedly. I would learn later that this bootcamp would not only train me to acquire the necessary skill-set to make my first steps into the tech-scene, but after gaining some experience as a developer, they would also offer me the opportunity to work for them as a teacher and increase my programming skills exponentially.
So there you have it, the story of how my Sociology degree led me to become a programming bootcamp teacher.