This pulsating new world is full of strange new sights and sounds, like some massive new planet straight from the mind of George Lucas.
Against a backdrop of tower blocks, between the sea and sweeping expressways this massive port never rests. Huge metal containers are neatly stacked up, one on top of the other, row after row after row, like some monstrous supermarket.
Giant machines preside over these containers, mechanical monsters staking out their territory. War of the Worlds meets Bladerunner.
The huge cranes run on rails, their massive legs either side of the rows of containers. One in front of us slides regally up to a heavy container, plucks it up into the air and plonks it onto a waiting, long, gaunt trailer.
The lorry’s chassis shudders under the impact; in this land of giants large trucks seem tiny, one of hundreds of automobile ants scuttling around the crowded loading bays, in a constant rush to keep their Queen fed.
She waits at the dockside - an enormous gantry crane.
This leviathan, one of many lined up along the waterfront, dwarfs even the picker cranes, her operator, high up in his cabin, a mere speck in the sky.
With a pull of a lever his charge reaches down and relives the lorry of its burden, whisking a 40 foot container high into the air, his cabin shooting out over a waiting container ship, and swiftly lowering the cargo into the bowels of the boat.
Another container loaded - a few thousand to go.
A few hours sailing up the coast, from the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong to ‘the mainland’ proper and the port of Yantian, the scene is repeated. Great containers taken on board, others unloaded.
Yantian is the port for Shenzhen - one of China‘s maritime gateways to the world. As we waited at the dockside I mused on our recent visit to this city.
Back in the 1980s, in the days of Deng, the enlightened Premier opened up this little settlement, on the borders of the British-held New Territories to outside economic forces.
Back in the 1980s, in the days of Deng, the enlightened Premier opened up this little settlement, on the borders of the British-held New Territories to outside economic forces.
As one of his Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen was allowed to wander down the path of the ‘capitalist running dogs’, to experience the pleasures and pains of capitalism relatively unhindered - something unthinkable only a few years before.
Shenzhen rocketed in size, from a town of 30,000 in 1970 to the present bulging megalopolis of some 14 million. It’s ballooning was such that, by 1990 the city had even outgrown the local energy supply, requiring the construction of a brand new nuclear power station.
Today other Chinese cities have caught up and share the same appearance as Shenzen. Booming metropolises in this overstuffed duvet of a country.
There’s less to distinguish them from each other (and perhaps from many elsewhere in the world?) as they tend towards the universal blueprint from which many local authorities seem to take their cue.
They’re becoming identikit cities, as if they are constructed from some massive ready-to-assemble pack. Cram your steel and glass skyscrapers into the centre; thread your huge, radiating freeways out to the edges.
We hurried headlong through Shenzhen into Hong Kong, crossing the border into Lo Wu.
A filthy little river, strewn with rubbish and framed by barbed wire and huge hoardings for the latest electronic gadgets denotes the border. You cross it via an enclosed pedestrian walkway, through shopping arcades and following signs reading ‘please leave the country by [the] lift’.
By doing so we followed in the footsteps of millions of immigrant Chinese who once left their homeland in search of a better life in the West.
Back to the present, on board the Hugo, I considered how these migratory patterns are changing, as the balance of economic power in the world shifts East.
China’s ’economic miracle’ is by no means unheard of back home. It’s origins are dissected in the Sundays and Newsnight specials, its knock-on effects muttered about down the pub and the gym.
It’s expanding its economic muscles, growing in confidence and might.
From the 50 million containers it moves annually at present this is projected to grow to a gobsmacking 100 million in 2020.
This region is right at the forefront of this.
I need look no further than the scene in front of me, unfolding before us. Mountains of manufactured goods, all bagged up and ready to be shipped, direct to our doorsteps.
Indeed here in Shenzhen are produced all the world’s ipods and apple computers (surely then without this city our global civilisation would take a terrible tumble).
Yet it seems strange that this is occurring in a country where half the population lives below the poverty line, where people still pull handcarts.
Economic progress in China it seems comes at different speeds for different people.
Still the giant - or perhaps more appropriately, the dragon - is awake, he’s fully alert and throwing all his muscle into it.
The forces of global power are shifting, revolving around pivots such as Yantian.
In the West we seem to delight in prophesizing our doom here, scaring ourselves silly. Of course that doesn’t stop us relocating our factories and services here, or buying their products, in our desperate lust for a bargain.
Nor does it allow for there the argument that perhaps there is room for more than one economic superpower in this new world order.
Must the international order follow the laws of Newtonian physics, where the rise of one will see the consequent decline of the other?
In this other power, the United States of course, there’s considerable concern: talk about power already seeping away; the inevitable end of the American hegemony, the inexorable decline of US might.
Is this the true picture of what’s happening? We’ll soon find out for ourselves as we travel between these two great countries.
Uncle Sam’s up next but in the meantime there’s the small matter of a great Ocean to cross.
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