in China told me about a U.S. academic who toured his factory and was horrified to see young female workers chained to their stations. What she saw was actually the grounding wire that is mandatory in most electronics plants. Each person on the assembly line has a Velcro band around her wrist, which is connected to the worktable to avoid a static-electricity buildup that could destroy computer chips.
That so many people are in motion gives Shenzhen and surrounding areas a rootless, transient quality. The natural language of southern China is Cantonese, but in the factory cities the lingua franca is Mandarin, the language that people from different parts of China are likeliest to share. “I don’t like it here,” a Chinese manager originally from Beijing told me, three years into a work assignment to Shenzhen. “There are no roots or culture.”
“For the first few weeks I was here, I thought it was soulless,” Liam Casey says of the town that has been his home for 10 years. “But like any fast-moving place, the activity is the character. It’s like New York. You arrive at the airport and go downtown, and when you get out of that cab, no one knows where you came from. You could have been there one hour, you could have been there ten years—no one can tell. It’s similar here, which makes it exciting.” Casey told me that, to him, Shanghai felt slow “and made for tourists.” Indeed, I am regularly surprised to find that people stroll rather than stride along the sidewalks of Shanghai: It’s a busy city with slow pedestrians. Or maybe Casey’s outlook is contagious.
A nother great flow into Shenzhen and similar cities is of entrepreneurs who have come and set up factories. The point of the Shenzhen liberalizations was less to foster any one industry than to make it easy for businesses in general to get a start.
Many entrepreneurs attracted by the offer came from Taiwan, whose economy is characterized by small, mainly family-owned firms like those that now abound in southern China. Overall, mainland China’s development model is closer to Taiwan’s than to Japan’s or Korea’s. In all these countries and throughout East Asia, governments have used many tools to maximize industrial output: tax policy, trading rules, currency values, and so on. But Japanese and Korean policy has tended to emphasize the welfare of large, national-champion firms—Mitsubishi and Toyota, Lucky Goldstar (or LG Corp.)and Samsung—whereas Taiwan’s exporters have been thousands of small firms, a few of which grew large. China is, of course, vaster than the other countries combined, but its export-oriented companies are small. One reason for the atomization is pervasive mistrust and corruption, plus a shaky rule of law. Even Foxconn, China’s largest exporter, was only No. 206 on 2006’s Fortune Global 500 list of the biggest companies in the world. When foreigners have trouble entering the Japanese or Korean markets, it is often because they run up against barriers protecting big, well-known local interests. The problem in China is typically the opposite: Foreigners don’t know where to start or whom to deal with in the chaos of small, indistinguishable firms.
For me, the fragmented nature of the Chinese system is symbolized by yet another of the stunning sights in Shenzhen: the SEG Electronics Market, a seven-story downtown structure whose every inch is crammed with the sales booths of hundreds of mom-and-pop electronics dealers. “Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the U.S., reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night!” Andrew “bunnie” Huang, a Chinese American electronics Ph.D. from MIT, wrote in his blog after a visit. “My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t suppress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.” As he noted, “within an hour’s drive north” are
That so many people are in motion gives Shenzhen and surrounding areas a rootless, transient quality. The natural language of southern China is Cantonese, but in the factory cities the lingua franca is Mandarin, the language that people from different parts of China are likeliest to share. “I don’t like it here,” a Chinese manager originally from Beijing told me, three years into a work assignment to Shenzhen. “There are no roots or culture.”
“For the first few weeks I was here, I thought it was soulless,” Liam Casey says of the town that has been his home for 10 years. “But like any fast-moving place, the activity is the character. It’s like New York. You arrive at the airport and go downtown, and when you get out of that cab, no one knows where you came from. You could have been there one hour, you could have been there ten years—no one can tell. It’s similar here, which makes it exciting.” Casey told me that, to him, Shanghai felt slow “and made for tourists.” Indeed, I am regularly surprised to find that people stroll rather than stride along the sidewalks of Shanghai: It’s a busy city with slow pedestrians. Or maybe Casey’s outlook is contagious.
A nother great flow into Shenzhen and similar cities is of entrepreneurs who have come and set up factories. The point of the Shenzhen liberalizations was less to foster any one industry than to make it easy for businesses in general to get a start.
Many entrepreneurs attracted by the offer came from Taiwan, whose economy is characterized by small, mainly family-owned firms like those that now abound in southern China. Overall, mainland China’s development model is closer to Taiwan’s than to Japan’s or Korea’s. In all these countries and throughout East Asia, governments have used many tools to maximize industrial output: tax policy, trading rules, currency values, and so on. But Japanese and Korean policy has tended to emphasize the welfare of large, national-champion firms—Mitsubishi and Toyota, Lucky Goldstar (or LG Corp.)and Samsung—whereas Taiwan’s exporters have been thousands of small firms, a few of which grew large. China is, of course, vaster than the other countries combined, but its export-oriented companies are small. One reason for the atomization is pervasive mistrust and corruption, plus a shaky rule of law. Even Foxconn, China’s largest exporter, was only No. 206 on 2006’s Fortune Global 500 list of the biggest companies in the world. When foreigners have trouble entering the Japanese or Korean markets, it is often because they run up against barriers protecting big, well-known local interests. The problem in China is typically the opposite: Foreigners don’t know where to start or whom to deal with in the chaos of small, indistinguishable firms.
For me, the fragmented nature of the Chinese system is symbolized by yet another of the stunning sights in Shenzhen: the SEG Electronics Market, a seven-story downtown structure whose every inch is crammed with the sales booths of hundreds of mom-and-pop electronics dealers. “Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the U.S., reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night!” Andrew “bunnie” Huang, a Chinese American electronics Ph.D. from MIT, wrote in his blog after a visit. “My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t suppress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.” As he noted, “within an hour’s drive north” are
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