Putian

A city of 3.2 million people whose clan networks control roughly 80 per cent of China's private hospitals, a substantial share of its gold jewellery retail, and one of the world's largest counterfeit sneaker operations. Three industries with nothing in common except the kinship-based business model that built them — and the Fujian coastal city that exported them.

Putian's commercial diaspora works like adaptive radiation. Four founding clans — Chen, Zhan, Lin, and Huang — diversified from a single ancestral population into radically different economic niches. The logic is kin selection: relatives cooperate because shared genes make the benefit of helping family exceed the personal cost, and clan trust scales where contract law cannot. The hospital system began in the 1980s when one family's scabies remedy became a franchise model, eventually growing into more than 8,000 private clinics specialising in cosmetic surgery, fertility treatment, and dermatology. The shoe industry — over 4,200 factories employing roughly 500,000 workers — grew from OEM contracts with Nike and Adidas, then pivoted to high-fidelity counterfeiting after the 1997 Asian financial crisis shifted legitimate orders to Vietnam. The gold jewellery network, dominated by merchants from a single township called Beigao, placed clan members behind the counters of franchise stores in every major Chinese city.

Darwin's finches arrived on the Galápagos as a single species and radiated into roughly eighteen, each with a beak shaped by a different food source. Putian's clans did the same thing — one ancestral population, three radically different industries, each shaped by the economic niche it exploited.

The aggressive mimicry is what makes the pattern dangerous. Putian hospitals mimicked legitimate medical institutions well enough to become Baidu's largest advertising category, at their peak spending an estimated 12 billion yuan on search ads in a single year. The shoe factories produce counterfeits so precise that even brand inspectors struggle to distinguish them. In both cases, trust is the resource being exploited — patients trusting search results, consumers trusting logos.

The deepest irony sits forty kilometres offshore. Meizhou Island, administered by Putian, is the birthplace of Mazu, the sea goddess worshipped at more than 10,000 temples by over 300 million devotees worldwide — a UNESCO-recognised cultural export built entirely on faith. Putian's commercial exports run on the same fuel: networks of trust, extended across oceans, anchored to a single origin point.