“Time is Money, Efficiency is Life”
So declares one of the oldest propaganda slogans in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Put up on a simple painted billboard in the 1980s in one of the first industrial zones created after the death of Mao, the slogan docu- ments the exciting and radical nature of the reinvention of the political economy of China in the early years of Reform. Back in the 1980s, it was a slogan that proudly promised the opportunity to transform time, value, and social relations as China emerged out of central planning and into a market-economy mode of life. It summarized the spirit by which a whole new city and its integration with the global capitalist system was con- structed—when construction teams proudly declared they could build tall buildings at the speed of ‘‘three stories a day.’’
in representations, 136, 2016
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