Only then can we be considered truly successful. Wenzhou people’s Shanghai complex: only the success of Shanghai’s “Big Wharf”

In the past, the relationship between Shanghai and Wenzhou was a bit like relatives who were neither close nor far away.

In terms of spatial distance, it is not close, because Wenzhou is at the southernmost tip of Zhejiang, separated from Shanghai by mountains and rivers, and the distance is four to five hundred kilometers; it is not far, because for a long period of time in the 20th century, Wenzhou people traveled to all parts of the country. Even to go to Hangzhou, you have to take a ship to Shanghai for transfer. For Wenzhou people, the passenger ship bound for Shanghai was the first stop on their journey across the world.

In terms of the relationship between people, lack of closeness means that Shanghainese and Wenzhou people once vaguely "looked down" on each other. In the eyes of Shanghai's "natives", the image of Wenzhou people was "local" and "nouveau riche", while In the minds of Wenzhou people, the Shanghai people's personality is "stingy" and "AA-style"; not far away, it is because in fact, Shanghai people have to be convinced by the Wenzhou people's bold and enterprising personality, especially the "Wenzhou model", which was once Full of curiosity and imagination. Wenzhou people, on the other hand, secretly admire Shanghai people's standard of conduct and are fascinated by the big stage of Shanghai. Needless to say, it goes without saying.

Nowadays, the distance between the two places is no longer more than 20 hours by passenger ship. The fastest train only takes 2 hours and 45 minutes. The upcoming Hangzhou-Wenzhou high-speed railway will further shorten the time and space distance between the two places. Today, the sense of boundaries between Shanghai and Wenzhou in various dimensions has been completely broken. Against the background of higher-quality integration in the Yangtze River Delta, the two cities have long become friends in a circle, talking about innovation and development.

Wenzhou people's perception of the city of Shanghai is complicated, especially for Wenzhou people living in Shanghai, and Lu Lin is one of them.

Lu Lin, who was born in 1974, has lived in Shanghai for 23 years, but his temperament is still typical of Wenzhou people - lean and capable appearance, Mandarin with a slight accent, but he still can't understand Shanghai dialect. He summed up his relationship with Shanghai in six words: "rooted, but not integrated." When talking about his relationship with Shanghai, he wanted to start from the early 1990s.

In 1992, Lu Lin, who had been idle in middle school, went to Anshan, Liaoning to attend a technical secondary school. Every time he returned to Wenzhou, he had to take a train to Shanghai first, find a small hotel to stay near the new passenger station, and rush to No. 1 Jinling East Road early the next morning to buy a boat ticket. While waiting for the boat, he wandered around the Bund, Nanjing Road, and Yu Garden, and became familiar with the landmarks in the city center.

After graduation, Lu Lin worked as a screwdriver in a fishing boat repair factory in Wenzhou for three years. During this period, he studied hard on his own and was admitted to a university in Beijing. While he was in college, the Jinwen-Wenzhou Railway was opened, but he still liked to take the ship from Wenzhou to Shanghai. He could enjoy the sea breeze and look at the moon along the way, which was leisurely and comfortable. In Lu Lin's memory, the boat ticket from Shanghai back to Wenzhou has always been very tight. The fourth-class ticket price of more than 7 yuan can be doubled in the hands of scalpers.

When Hu Chengzhong, a native of Wenzhou, first established the Yueqing County Qiujing Switch Factory in 1984, he traveled to Shanghai many times to hire experts, and he also had to take a one-day and one-night ship ride. At that time, countless small factory owners and self-employed people like Hu Chengzhong were rushing to buy ferry tickets. Wenzhou people were always among the long queues at the ticket office at No. 1 Jinling East Road on the Bund.

When Lu Lin was admitted to Fudan University as a graduate student in 2001, Hu Chengzhong had already named the new factory Delixi, moved into Shanghai, and started construction of a modern production base in Qingpu. This year, Hu Chengzhong was also selected as one of China's top ten "most watched entrepreneurs".

With the rapid development of aircraft routes and railway flights, passenger ships from Shanghai to Wenzhou have been suspended. The long, salty sea breeze has become the golden years in the memories of many Wenzhou people.

More than 30 years ago, like Hu Chengzhong, there was also his son who frequently traveled between the two places. Hu Chengzhong once wrote in his autobiography that in the early days of reform and opening up, many entrepreneurial families in Wenzhou sent their children to foster families in Shanghai to enjoy better educational resources. He also carefully selected a scholarly Shanghai family for his son.

In 1990, some media reported on this phenomenon. Some successful Wenzhou bosses spent thousands of yuan a month to foster their children in the homes of teachers in Shanghai and hire additional tutors. It can be seen from this news: Wenzhou bosses are very busy, very rich, and they also yearn for education in Shanghai.

During the period of great development of the consumer market in the 1990s, "Wenzhou bosses" sprouted up in various shopping streets and roads overnight like mushrooms after a spring rain in Shanghai.

Beijing East Road Production Material Street once became a "golden mountain" for Wenzhou tourists. Around 1991, the rent per square meter of shops on Beijing East Road from Sichuan Road to Xizang Road even exceeded that of Nanjing Road; on Qipu Road, Wenzhou bosses built A decent wholesale mall has been set up, becoming a distribution center for Wenzhou products in Shanghai; there are also dozens of "Wenzhou Shoe Malls" on Xietu Road, large and small, which are very lively. Even Hualian, a local supermarket familiar to Shanghainese, has had the highest proportion of Wenzhou people joining the franchise for a long time since it started franchising in 1995.

In 1997, "Liberation Daily" used the title ""Wenzhou Legion" Marches into Shanghai" to report that nearly 150 companies in Wenzhou, with a number of famous brand products, established a "Wenzhou Mall" on Jiujiang Road for long-term display and sales.

In the early 1990s, Jiujiang Road was known as the "No. 1 Fashion Street in Shanghai". The first group of self-employed people to open stores on Jiujiang Road were mainly Wenzhou bosses. In the days when Shanghai department stores were still using wooden counters, well-informed Wenzhou bosses had already begun decorating their facades with large glass windows, marble floors, and neon dark lights. They were quite fashionable and sophisticated. The store sells Montagut clothing for nearly a thousand yuan, making a lot of money. At that time, "the first person with a blue-printed household registration in Shanghai" was a self-employed person from Jiujiang Road Fashion Street in Wenzhou.

Smart Wenzhou people carry dark handbags under their arms and hold up mobile phones in their hands, shining behind the counters of shops, shopping malls and shopping streets in Shanghai——

On the surface, Shanghainese are somewhat "envious" of these "interlopers", but deep down they "sympathize with each other". This spirit of daring to take risks and fight is also evident in Shanghainese, but in a different form. Wenzhounese started from scratch and set up large family workshops; while among Shanghainese, a group of them chose to leave their warm small families, scrape together some money, and venture to Japan, North America, and Europe... Deep down, Shanghainese understand and appreciate the courageous and resourceful Wenzhounese.

There are mainly two types of Wenzhou people who come to Shanghai to make a fortune, one is to open a store, and the other is to set up a factory.

The bosses who set up factories would not go to Shanghai empty-handed to rent land to set up factories. They often set up small family-style factories in Wenzhou first. After becoming bigger and stronger, Shanghai will be the first choice to develop and expand.

In the early days of reform and opening up, small family-style factories had sprouted everywhere in Wenzhou. On May 12, 1985, the front page of "Liberation Daily" published the report "333,000 people in Wenzhou are engaged in household industries" and published a commentator article "Inspiration from Wenzhou". This was the first time the "Wenzhou Model" appeared. in the media. Soon, a wave of research on the "Wenzhou Model" emerged in Shanghai and even across the country.

In the summer of 1986, Shanghai Travel Agency even teamed up with local travel agencies in Wenzhou to organize a "Visiting and Inspection Group on Wenzhou Regional Economic Model." At that time, Shanghai and Wenzhou had inextricably linked economic exchanges and cooperation. A large number of Wenzhou products were exported through the Shanghai port, such as Xishan brand floor tiles and Qindiao brand condensed milk, and many Wenzhou retail brands were exported to Shanghai department stores. Hold a trade fair and open up a new situation of selling well all over the country.

Various economic ties have strengthened the determination of many Wenzhou businessmen to go to Shanghai - to do business, only success in Shanghai, the "big wharf", can be considered a real success. The Shanghai complex of "starting a business in Wenzhou and developing in Shanghai" has always been the consensus of Wenzhou businessmen.

In the years around 2000 alone, more than 5,000 enterprises were established by Wenzhou people in Shanghai. Many manufacturing enterprises acquired land in the suburbs of Shanghai to build industrial parks, such as Tianzheng, Delixi, Red Dragonfly, and Juneyao. The top 10 enterprises in Wenzhou at that time all entered Shanghai. After Hu Chengzhong went to Shanghai to develop, Delixi seemed to have taken off with wings. In 2005, the output value exceeded 10 billion yuan. In 2010, a large number of intelligent products developed by Delixi entered the World Expo venues, and Hu Chengzhong also stood on a broader stage.

After many Wenzhou enterprises develop and expand in Shanghai, they will return to their hometown to invest and expand factories, forming a win-win situation for Shanghai and Wenzhou.

Take Shanghai Kaiquan Pump Co., Ltd. as an example. It was originally a little-known private enterprise in Wenzhou. Around 1995, company boss Lin Kaiwen, who wanted to become the "king of China's pump industry", moved to Shanghai. By 1999, the company's total output value ranked first in the national pump industry. After developing in Shanghai for 6 years, Kaiquan Group invested 120 million yuan in 2001 to set up a new factory in Yongjia. In 2005, Lin Kaiwen was rated as a "Model Zhejiang Businessman Returning to Hometown Investment" by the Economic and Technical Cooperation Office of the Zhejiang Provincial People's Government and other departments.

Thousands of Wenzhou businessmen are doing business and setting up enterprises in Shanghai. As the company grows in strength, it will feed back its hometown in different forms. In early 2004, Delixi Group signed a contract with Shanghai Qingpu District to invest 2 billion yuan in Qingpu and acquire more than 1,000 acres of land to build a large electrical manufacturing base. In August of the same year, strong typhoon "Yunna" hit Yueqing, and Delixi immediately donated 500,000 yuan to the disaster area.

Today, similar stories continue, but the scripts are richer and more diverse. The labels of regions and cities are constantly being broken and blurred in the process of integration of the Yangtze River Delta. The relationship between Wenzhou and Shanghai has changed from "relatives neither far nor close" to "comrades in the trenches". They coexist in the Yangtze River Delta, connect the world, and move to the world stage together.

In 2019, Wenzhou built a "science and technology innovation enclave" - ​​Wenzhou Science and Technology Innovation Park in Jiading District, Shanghai, to connect enterprises with high-end science and technology innovation resources and promote the transformation and upgrading of Wenzhou's industries. Since then, Wenzhou and Shanghai have made another agreement on integrated development. Today, a total of 46 high-quality companies and teams have settled in the first phase of Wenzhou Science and Technology Innovation Park, promoting more than 200 industry-university-research projects. In a new era, there are too many new stories of this kind.

Ma Jinlong, an economist from Wenzhou, said that 40 years ago, it took a day and night to go to Shanghai by boat. But today, the more than 2 hours of train travel has made the two places more "integrated". If he wants to go to Shanghai, he only needs a day and a round trip. It's easy; Lu Lin, a native of Wenzhou, has a happy family in Shanghai and bought two large houses in Shanghai through his own efforts, but every weekend, he wants to go to Wenzhou whenever he has time; Hu Chengzhong is now The chairman of the board of directors of Delixi Group, his son took over the position of president 6 years ago. A few days ago, Hu Chengzhong attended the opening ceremony of Delixi Electric New Quality Productivity Innovation Research Institute in Shanghai.

When distance is no longer distance, Shanghai and Wenzhou, in the circle of friends in the Yangtze River Delta, are just like being in the same world, laughing and talking about the future.