Suzhou and Shenzhen are among the top cities in China by GDP, and both have performed exceedingly well in terms of cultivating technological industries and attracting foreign investment. This is in spite of the fact that neither city is a provincial capital nor a centrally administered city like Shanghai and Beijing. Yet, the two cities embody very different administrative models with respect to their relationship with the provincial and central governments. Shenzhen, in particular, has a closer relationship with the central government than almost any non-centrally administered city in China, whereas Suzhou is a city that remains closely in coordination with the provincial government even as its economy has grown by leaps and bounds. This begs the question of which city's model will prevail moving forward: the Shenzhen model, typified by "re-centralization" of power, or the Suzhou model, which represents more of the conventional regional decentralization model that has been prevalent in China since the 1980s. The article attempts to argue that even though Shenzhen is of pivotal importance to the central government's policies, it will remain an outlier for the time being so as to avoid disturbing the delicate balance between the central and provincial governments, barring an unforeseen economic or political crisis.