Dongguan

One in every four smartphones on Earth passes through Dongguan's assembly lines before reaching a pocket. The city of 10.5 million sits in Guangdong Province between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, occupying the geographic centre of the Pearl River Delta — China's densest manufacturing corridor and the Greater Bay Area's industrial spine. Of those 10.5 million residents, roughly 8 million hold rural hukou registrations, meaning they power the city's ¥1.

23 trillion ($170 billion) economy without qualifying for its urban social services. They are source-sink dynamics made visible: young workers flow from inland provinces to Dongguan's dormitories in enormous seasonal pulses, filling 12-person rooms in factory complexes that operate around the clock. When global demand contracts — as it did during the 2008 financial crisis, when 117 factories shuttered in two months and owners fled overnight leaving 20,000 workers unpaid — the flow reverses just as abruptly.

23 trillion ($170 billion) economy without qualifying for its urban social services.

Dongguan's electronic information manufacturing cluster, anchored by Huawei's research campus, OPPO's global computing centre, and Vivo's 20,000-employee production complex, generates over ¥1 trillion ($138 billion) in output alone. BBK Electronics, the parent company of both OPPO and Vivo, shipped 56.7 million smartphones from Dongguan in a single quarter in 2017, briefly surpassing Apple and Huawei to become the world's second-largest phone maker behind Samsung.

This concentration is niche construction at industrial scale — each new component supplier that opens in Dongguan makes the next one more likely, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem where 10,000 foreign-invested enterprises cluster within a single prefecture. The biological parallel is exact: army ant colonies coordinate millions of individuals through chemical signals rather than central planning, producing collective output that no individual could achieve. Dongguan's factory districts operate on the same principle — decentralised production coordinated by supply-chain proximity rather than corporate hierarchy, where removing one factory changes nothing but removing the cluster collapses the system.