American psychologist Frank Russell suggested Shenzhen should build itself into a city with its own strong identity before becoming an international city.

Russell hails from Bozeman, a small university town nested in the Rocky Mountains in Montana of the United States. He moved to Shenzhen about two years ago after teaching psychology in the Montana State University in Bozeman for more than 20 years.

“Before I moved here, I knew nothing about Shenzhen, but I decided to come over to have a look on the strong recommendation of a friend of mine who is now teaching English in the city,” Russell said.

Russell, 61, is now teaching English in a training center in downtown Shenzhen.

Russell believes Shenzhen and Bozeman face the same problem of identity crisis as both going through a time of rapid urbanization and modernization. “It’s not easy for me to describe Shenzhen to someone in the United States who’s never been here just as it is hard for me to describe Bozeman to some in China who’s never been there,” he said.

“This is because the process of urbanization and modernization has made every town and city all cross the world look identical almost in every aspect,” he said.

Russell said he was deeply impressed with the peculiar identity of some old cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, which he had traveled to over the past two years. “Compared with other old cities in China, Shenzhen lacks a background of history, which has made it more difficult to determine its identity in a time of rapid changes today,” Russell said.

Russell said he had no objection to the city government’s goal of building Shenzhen into an international metropolis in the years to come.

“But before achieving that goal, one more important thing is to build Shenzhen into a city with its own strong identity, which will make it look different from any other cities,” Russell said.

(Shenzhen Daily June 6, 2005)