How to meet people in Shenzhen when you've just moved there

Shenzhen's slogan is on the walls: 来了就是深圳人, "once you arrive, you are a Shenzhener". It is a marketing line, and it is also a census fact. Almost nobody here was born here. The average age is barely past thirty, and everybody you meet had a first month in this city with no one to eat with.

That changes the question. In most cities you are the outsider trying to get in. In Shenzhen there is no inside. There are only people who arrived earlier.

The city exercises together

Shenzhen Bay Park is the eleven-kilometre seafront on the west side, and after dark on any weekday it is a river of runners and cyclists with Hong Kong's lights across the water. It is where this city goes at nine at night instead of a bar, and "Shenzhen Bay, 8pm, easy pace" is the most ordinary plan a stranger can post here.

The hills are the weekend. Wutong Mountain is the highest, and the local tradition is to start climbing at two in the morning to be on top for sunrise, which is exactly as sociable as it sounds. Nanshan, the small one by the bay, is an hour up and down before work. Dongxichong, the coastal trek in the far east of the city from one beach to the next, is the classic all-day group outing. The frisbee fields, badminton halls and board-game cafés do the rest; Shenzhen took up ultimate frisbee with more enthusiasm than any city in the country, and a pickup game is a group of strangers by definition.

Beef hotpot is not a meal for one

The food that defines this city came with the people who moved here. Chaoshan beef hotpot, the hand-cut, thirty-second-boil kind, is ordered by the plate and eaten by the table; three is the minimum that makes sense. Hunan and Sichuan places are the same. Rice-noodle rolls for breakfast are for one; dinner is for a group, and that is your opening line.

Where the newcomers already are

Shekou, on the west coast, is where the foreign residents have always lived, around Sea World and its bars; if you are new and not from China, that is the shallow end. OCT-LOFT in Nanshan is the converted-factory creative park with the cafés, the weekend market and the crowd that has time. Nanshan's tech park empties into the restaurants around it at seven. Futian is the office core; Luohu, around Dongmen, is the old centre, cheaper and louder. The bike-share bikes get you between all of them; the metro runs until around midnight; DiDi after.

Hong Kong is thirty minutes away through the Futian or Shenzhen Bay crossings, and "Hong Kong on Saturday, hike then dim sum" is a plan people here make constantly.

Practical

May to October is hot; spring brings 回南天, the weeks when the walls sweat; typhoons close the city a few times a year, announced well ahead. Shenzhen is very safe. The usual rules still apply: first meeting in public, tell someone where you are going, keep your own way home. The safety page has the rest.

Where MeetMap fits

MeetMap is a map of small plans happening soon near you, and it is on the mainland App Store and works here without a VPN. Each pin has a time, a place and a number of seats; take one and you are in the group chat. In a city where everyone arrived last year, the plans are simple: "Shenzhen Bay run, 8pm", "Beef hotpot near the tech park, 7, needs two more", "Wutong sunrise Saturday, leaving 2am, don't ask".

If the map is quiet, post the first one. Everybody here remembers their own first month. Two weeks of that is the whole method.