Apparently the Shenzhen authorities have the same schizophrenic attitude to the illegals that many Germans do - they're tolerated as long as they're convenient.

Many Shenzhen residents would, of course, love to get across the river into Hong Kong, which has its own such neighborhoods. And many residents of Hong Kong are scrambling to get passports from Canada, the US, or the UK. Once they've secured non-PRC passports, they frequently come back to Shenzhen to start and manage businesses, staying in luxury condos built specifically for them by the city fathers. Seen through all these concentric barriers, the Overseas Chinese (ethnic Chinese returning to their homeland) must seem infinitely remote to the peasants being turned away at the Second Border. Locals call them the "spacemen."

Shenzhen is touted as an experiment in free enterprise, both by the government of the PRC and by an especially fatuous breedof Western free-market evangelist - people who think that a free market will lead to a free society. This gets us into some awkward questions of just what we mean by the word "free."

I wasn't able to get out to any of the slave labor camps, where many Chinese are hard at work cranking out exportable trinkets, but I did meet plenty of real-life indentured servants. After June 4th (which is how the Chinese always refer to the crushing of the Tiananmen demonstration) the government instituted a new program whereby any student who graduated from college was deemed to owe the government five years of service, at a place and in a job to be chosen by, you guessed it, the government. Needless to say, this is a handy way for the government to control the behavior of that frisky Tiananmen generation, while also giving government enterprises, and Sino-foreign joint ventures, a handy recruitment system.