HONG KONG

Don't forget Shenzhen's proximity to Hong Kong.

Business Anon here, why is this important? Without doxing myself too much, we had an office in Guangdong province for a while, with an export license. What we found was that Chinese customs is a major SUCK. Full of a bunch of mindless drones who have no idea why or why not something should pass customs. The best way to handle any kind of shipment turned out to be through shipping "Forwarders", and most shipping forwarders were actually based in Hong Kong.

In fact, most of the businesses in Guangzhou / Shenzhen had their banking in Hong Kong. Another way of leveraging this close proximity is to send your parcel by courier service from the mainland to HK, where it is then shipped internationally to wherever.

So I can see why Shenzhen has received so much Q focus. Not only is it China's electronics nexus, but it shares a border with HK. They just opened a high speed rail between the two in fact.