An only slightly caricatured version of the cultural arguments of Mark Fisher could be expressed as follows: ‘the future ended in 1979’. In that year, there began a ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (a line from Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country, which Fisher attributed to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who had borrowed it without credit). It was in fact so slow that its effects weren’t fully felt until the start of the 2000s, when the formal innovations and novelties of popular music and Hollywood film finally dwindled to a trickle and then ceased entirely. This account mirrored Fisher’s wider contention about the effects of neoliberalism in smashing a ‘popular modernism’ that had productively linked aesthetics and politics for much of the twentieth century. It was an argument built largely around British and, to a lesser extent, American culture, and so it felt particularly strange hearing it discussed in Shenzhen, at the launch in January 2024 of the Chinese translation of Fisher’s first and most famous book Capitalist Realism (2009).

Shenzhen was, of course, founded in 1979, as the first of the ‘Special Economic Zones’ in which the People’s Republic of China could experiment with capitalism, built around the busiest border post between the PRC and the British colony of Hong Kong. It is, accordingly, the flagship city of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, and today one of the biggest and richest metropolises on earth. Shenzhen has more metro lines than London and a high-speed connection to Beijing – nearly 1,500 miles to the north – that has emerged in less time than it took to plan and build Crossrail in London, or the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan. It is impossible not to use the word ‘futuristic’ in appraising its cityscape: with its nighttime play of LED slogans and images, its seemingly endless ranks of skyscrapers, its flyovers and overhead walkways, its cleaning robots sweeping and mopping vast plazas, and its unexpectedly excellent public infrastructure, it fulfils the science-fictional promises of the 20^th century with the technologies of the 21^st. It is an entire future whose creation dates from the exact moment when the future was supposedly cancelled.

It also now has a distinct history, a series of past versions of itself. The first centre of Shenzhen was Luohu, a cluster of towers and bootleg retail outlets crammed hard up against the Hong Kong-PRC border. This area is now showing its age; the centre has long since moved to Futian, where an enormous square with the city’s municipal government at its heart is bordered by the towering headquarters of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises and tech companies, with vast art galleries and concert halls at ground level, designed by Japanese and Austrian celebrity architects. Pedestrians are above; cars are diverted underneath. There’s obvious symbolism in all this, as the city has transitioned from the chaotic, low-rent, low-regulation export processing zone of the Deng and Jiang eras into a more Singaporean, heavily controlled state capitalism based around ‘national champions’, under Hu and Xi. Because of this, the city’s obsolete futures have an ambiguous fate; many of Luohu’s 1980s skyscrapers with rooftop revolving restaurants now have peeling cladding and cracking tiles. The question of what to do with these superseded versions of the city is answered in the conventional way in the area – known as ‘OCT-LOFT’ – where the launch for the Chinese version of Capitalist Realism was held: ‘regeneration’ through culture and property development.

OCT-LOFT is a place where your conceptions of time, if you are a middle-aged European, go completely haywire – an entire industrial district that has been built, abandoned and regenerated in roughly the time you’ve been alive. The ‘OCT’ stands for ‘Overseas Chinese Town’, an inner suburb developed to encourage capitalists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia to invest here during the 1980s. The ‘LOFT’, specifically, is an area full of Taiwanese electronics factories, abandoned in the 2000s and 2010s as production, ever more automated, moved further out into the peri-urban Pearl River Delta. In OCT-LOFT my partner and I stayed in a hostel converted from the old workers’ dormitories (now very comfortable); a ‘creative cluster’ of startups, studios, cafés and the inevitable craft beer breweries occupy ‘lofts’ in rather elegant, almost Soviet Constructivist-style mid-rise blocks of the mid-1980s. Linking these together are squares and new buildings designed by the Shenzhen architectural firm Urbanus, whose work professes to put public spaces and public amenities into a city that was originally conceived as little more than a giant maquiladora on the edges of Hong Kong.

OCT-LOFT is very pleasant, lined with tall trees, and, crucially, unlike so much of Shenzhen’s housing, it isn’t formally gated. Nonetheless, a coffee costs what it does in London – four or five times the prices in the old centre Luohu. As we arrived at the hostel, a group of fashionably dressed Russians were checking out, carrying with them the tripods and cameras that are the means of production of the Influencer – presumably they were making the Russian equivalents of the many English-language videos in which 30-something TEFL teachers explain how SHOCKED they are by the amazing FOOD and INFRASTRUCTURE of a given Chinese city.

Deep in OCT-LOFT is Old Heaven Books. Once a market stall in Luohu, Old Heaven is a record and bookshop with an events space and café attached. It has an avant-garde bent: here is where you can buy Chinese translations of Jameson and Lacan, select from a stack of pocket-sized Cultural Revolution-era comic books, and an extensive, eclectic selection of records, from Cantopop to free improvisation. Outside China, Old Heaven is known, if at all, as a record label, which puts out free jazz, experimental and ethnographic music in strikingly designed covers: stark, angular woodcuts drawing on the revolutionary Chinese tradition. Artists connected with Old Heaven sometimes play Café Oto, the experimental music space in London which their Shenzhen venue most resembles. Upstairs is an art gallery and shop selling aggressive, gnarly prints and posters drawing on 1950s American comic book art and the work of 1970s Japanese psychedelic designers like Tadanori Yokoo. It’s noticeable that in this seamlessly modernist city, the work which seems to interest its avant-gardists is noisy, jagged, oblique, irrational.

I was here because of an email exchange with Wang Liqiu, the Chinese translator of Capitalist Realism. Wang contacted me about a debate in the Sydney Review of Books on Fisher’s work, in which I took part. I have been very slowly writing a book about East Asian architecture, planning and developmentalism, and was planning to visit Hong Kong at the turn of 2024. Wang’s partner, meanwhile, lives in Zhuhai, a nearby city in the Pearl River Delta that is roughly to Macau what Shenzhen is to Hong Kong. We planned an event together, to be held at Old Heaven: Wang would talk about his translation, we would both talk about Fisher, and I would talk about the one book of mine translated into Chinese, Trans-Europe Express (2018), about social-democratic, state-socialist and neoliberal architecture in and around the European Union. The event was packed, with every seat filled and many people standing. Given that the last time I spoke in China, in Shanghai in 2010, I spoke to a captive and visibly bored group of students, I was impressed and intrigued by how engaged the Old Heaven audience was. Questions from the floor about both books kept coming well into the evening.

Wang clearly wanted most to ask me about knowing Fisher – something which always makes me slightly uncomfortable, as we had not, in truth, been friends for several years when he died in January 2017. I wanted most to ask Wang about how much Fisher’s book made sense in a country which seems, to the untrained European eye, to be the place the future moved to when it was cancelled in London, New York, Paris and Moscow. Wang’s answer – mediated through his partner, the translator Inez Zhou, who was doing the live interpretation, and designed a fantastic photomontage poster for the event – was partly political. China, he noted, has recently faced problems more familiar in Europe and the US, such as high youth unemployment, precarious work and the production of ‘graduates without a future’. But his argument, in the Fisher spirit, was also cultural: he pointed to the drabness and conservatism of contemporary Chinese cinema and music. In an email a few months later, Wang gleefully described the furore in China over the TV adaptations of Liu Cixin’s much-feted, fascinating but deeply politically conformist science-fiction trilogy The Three-Body Problem. Netflix rejected the Chinese adaptation, a janky, breathless, AI-filled epic produced by the streaming arm of the Shenzhen-based tech giant Tencent. Instead, Netflix created an Anglicised version of the series, in the process turning all but two of the book’s mostly Chinese characters into Europeans and Americans. This infuriated Chinese online nationalists, but for Wang, both adaptations – and the original books – are examples of an enormous failure of political and aesthetic imagination, cosmic kitsch that affirms the status quo.

Shenzhen, more than most Chinese cities, has been heavily affected by the Chinese property crash, and given the close interweaving of state and business, property affects everything else. As Keyu Jin points out in her recent boosterist study The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (2023), the majority shareholder in the especially troubled developer Vanke is Shenzhen’s state-owned public transport authority; the system is one in which a huge and growing public sector is deeply committed to the success of big business. China is patently capitalist, but it never made much sense to describe it as neoliberal in the 2000s, and it makes even less sense now. Yet an entrepreneurial state is not necessarily an egalitarian one. In our week in Shenzhen, my partner and I took the Metro out to Baishizhou, one of the city’s famous semi-formal ‘urban villages’. Here, the city’s majority population – working-class rural-urban migrants who lack the rights to housing and public services accorded by an urban hukou – live in mid-rise, densely packed concrete blocks, generally considered by Shenzheners to be livelier than the Corbusian high-rises in green space that comprise the city’s middle-class housing. But Baishizhou was half-demolished already, with forty-storey luxury housing developments rising out of the middle of the proletarian village.

After the event, Wang promised to send me copies of the Chinese edition of Capitalist Realism. Later in the year, it was awarded the Xingdu Book Prize for foreign literature, in its ‘Thought’ category. My copies arrived last autumn, ten slim volumes, one of which I kept, two of which I gave to friends who are learning Chinese, and the rest I donated to BOOKS, a left-communist bookshop in southeast London. The inside cover of each one was inscribed by Wang: ‘for Fisher and the spark of courage in us all’. And on the title page:

‘don’t be a realist – because reality is shit!’

Each of them also had a postcard inside, with an oil lamp on the front. On the back was written, in Chinese, words which, machine-translated, read:

‘do not obey those who deny the truth. They want you to obey, and they obey too’.

Different ways of expressing the same idea, no doubt.

Read on: Simon Hammond, ‘K-Punk At Large’, NLR 118.