The SEZ designation of Shanghai was fiscally costly to the central government in a way that Shenzhen's was not. This is a second difference between Shanghai and the first-generation SEZs – the central government may have poured massive resources into Shanghai and taxed other regions of China to finance this resource transfer. In fact, one could reframe Deng's remorse as follows: The opening of Shanghai would naturally have to follow the opening of the other SEZs because the first-generation SEZs generated the resources to finance Shanghai.
