China's instant cities -- jaw-dropping National Geo feature

National Geographic's award-nominated feature on China's "instant cities" is online. It's a fascinating feature about the massive coastal manufacturing towns that now house 140 million people who've moved from the countryside as part of the largest migration in human history. It's split across eight screens, and there's at least one jaw-dropper per screen.

From the airport, driving south along the coast, I started with hinges–a stretch of road where the vast majority of billboards advertised every possible variation of the piece of metal used to swing a door. A mile later, the ads shifted to electric plugs and adapters. Then I reached a neighborhood of electric switches, followed by fluorescent lightbulbs, then faucets.
Deeper in the province, the shrines became more elaborate. At Qiaotou, I stopped to admire the 20-foot-high (six meters) silver statue of a button with wings that had been erected by the town elders. Qiaotou's population is only 64,000, but 380 local factories produce more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards–queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township makes one-third of the world's socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world's neckties are made in Shengzhou.
Everything is sold in a town called Yiwu. For the Zhejiang pilgrim, that's the promised land–Yiwu's slogan is "a sea of commodities, a paradise for shoppers." Yiwu is in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles (160 kilometers) from the coast, but traders come from all over the world to buy goods in bulk. There's a scarf district, a plastic bag market, an avenue where every shop sells elastic. If you're burned out on buttons, take a stroll down Binwang Zipper Professional Street. The China Yiwu International Trade City, a local mall, has more than 30,000 stalls–if you spend one minute at each shop, eight hours a day, you'll leave two months later. Yiwu attracts so many Middle Eastern traders that one neighborhood has become home to 23 large Arabic restaurants, as well as a Lebanese bakery. I ate dinner at Arbeer, a Kurdish joint, with a trader from northern Iraq. He was

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Happy Mutants

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

travelina

@Highjumpman: the story’s been up on the NatGeo site since last year, but it’s just been nominated for a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors:
http://www.magazine.org/editorial/national_magazine_awards/winners_and_finalists/468.cfm
KokuRyu

The writer is Peter Hesler, one of the better journalists writing about China today.
latent_ravening_ferocity

No, nothing remarkable at all. America is full of 15-year-olds willing to “eat bitterness” for 40 cents a day. There is no way the Chinese will ever compete with the United States.
proto

From TFA:
“If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn’t make up their minds.”

So just imagine where customers and the rest of the world fall on that particular continuum.
Antinous

Ignore it at your peril

Also, stand in, under or near at your peril.
techdeviant

From the article (pg 3)

Director Wang told me that approximately one thousand peasants had been relocated, as well as exactly 108 separate mountains and hills.

Damn those hills, always getting in the way of progress…
highjumpman

Great article! It’s a pity that National Geographic waits ten months before they post it online…
Takuan

“Manufactured Landscapes” is also worth a watch
Spikeles

Wow, sounds like i’m reading Asimov’s Foundation series again and he’s describing Trantor.
DGHilton

Big whoop. It’s development. Just because it’s happening outside of the US of A and at a pace faster than the lumbering West is used to doesn’t make it remarkable. The pics are nothing special, unlike most from Geographic.
Takuan

the scale of this development has not happened before. Nor the speed. We are seeing something new.
Ignore it at your peril