“China produces so much junk” - this is probably the most common phrase I’ve heard since living here for the past 5+ years and though you’re probably sick of stories about all the crap that this country makes (but which we all need of course - tooth brushes, socks, bras, ball bearings, pens and whole lot of plastic garbage), check out the article that Peter Hessler (author of “Oracle Bones” and “River Town”) wrote in National Geographic on the cranking-out of rubble in factories scattered throughout towns in Zhejiang.He says:

“One supercharged province (Zhejiang) cranks out light bulbs, buttons, and bra rings, as well as instant cities for the factory workers” and His descriptions of the people who work in the factories are as riveting as facts about the towns and plants themselves: “Wuyi manufactures more than one billion decks (of cards) 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.”

China Briefing enjoyed�Hessler’s�article�as well, posting some choice bits of it on their blog.

The piece is accompanied by 23 photographs by photographer Mark Leong, field notes from both Hessler and Leong, and a 2 minute slide show, with music, about the malls in Yiwu (the International Trade City) which has more than 30,000 stalls. Hessler says that “If you spend one minute at each shop, eight hours a day, you’ll leave two months later.”�

Peter Hessler is a Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker. A native of Columbia, Missouri, he studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book. After finishing his Peace Corps stint, Hessler wrote freelance pieces for Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times before returning to China in 1999 as a Beijing-based freelance writer. There he wrote for newspapers like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the�Boston Globe�and the South China Morning Post before moving on to magazine work for National Geographic and the New Yorker.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under Business, Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.