Jason Woodard

We've emailed since 2011 when both living in Singapore, but this was our first time meeting. Lived in Singapore from 2005-2015 (his 30s), two kids born there, same age as mine. Moved to Massachusetts but now on a one-year sabbatical, so his family of 4 visited a few locations and chose Shenzhen. Here for one year, arrived three months ago.

Kids in international school that teaches in English, but they are among the only Western foreigners. Most of the rest are overseas Chinese, many from Hong Kong.

Met at 8am and nothing around here was open until 10am, not even coffee shops. We walked to the Talent Park nearby and intended to get drone delivery of drinks from a kiosk in the park, but it was temporarily out of service.

He's advising at a tech startup incubator here, but surprising that the students all don't want to focus on the Chinese domestic market, wanting to focus internationally, giving various reasons, but I suspect it's because it's a self-selected group that signed up to meet with this visiting American, so they had an irrational preference for that already. Shenzhen is amazing for turning ideas into physical realities quickly, then scaling it up if needed.

Of Shenzhen, people often say "40 years ago it was a sleepy fishing village until government laws made it boom" but according to The Shenzhen Experiment, those same free-trade laws have been applied to hundreds of cities worldwide without as much success.

Historical illegal immigration from elsewhere in China was true origin of now-famous phrase "Once you come here, you're a Shenzhener." When it was made a special economic zone, they had checkpoints around the city. Now inside Shenzhen there's a new SEZ area: Qianhai New District. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianhai

Lots of people in China lost their savings because they invested into real estate projects that went bankrupt as real estate market crashed over the past few years. Current economy is struggling with high youth unemployment.