The beginning of a Chinese factory town is always the same: in the beginning nearly everybody is a
construction worker. The growing economy means that everything moves fast and new industrial
districts rise in several stages. Those early laborers are men who have migrated from rural villages and
immediately they are joined by small entrepreneurs. These pioneers sell meat, fruit and vegetables on
informal stalls, and later, when the first real shops appear, they stock construction materials. After that,
cellphones companies arrive: China Mobile, China Unicom. They sell prepaid phonecards to migrants,
in the south-eastern province of Zhejiang, one popular product is called the Homesick Card. When the
factories start production, you start to see women. Young women have a reputation for being hardworking.
After the arrival of the women, the clothes shops appear. An American poet once described
an industrial town in the USA as “springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it
were in a single night.”