Huizhou
Produces one-sixth of China's mobile phones and a quarter of the world's guitars — a Pearl River Delta node that grows by absorbing whatever manufacturing overflows from Shenzhen.
Huizhou produces roughly one-sixth of China's mobile phones and one-eighth of the world's — a staggering concentration for a city most people outside Guangdong have never heard of. Forty-three miles north of Hong Kong in the Pearl River Delta, this city of over 6 million has grown almost entirely through in-migration, adding population at 2.8% annually between 2010 and 2020.
The Zhongkai Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone, China's first national electronic information industrial base, anchors an ecosystem where TCL was founded in 1981 as a cassette tape recorder factory and grew into a multinational television and electronics manufacturer. The supply chain completeness is the real story: mobile communications, panel displays, automotive electronics, and LED manufacturing all cluster within the same zone, creating the self-reinforcing density that makes relocation prohibitively expensive for any single firm.
Huizhou produces one-sixth of China's mobile phones, but what makes it irreplaceable is the supply chain completeness — every component within a 50-mile radius.
But Huizhou isn't only electronics. It produces approximately 25% of the world's guitars — an unlikely pairing with smartphone assembly that reveals the city's deeper pattern of absorbing whatever manufacturing the Pearl River Delta generates. The Daya Bay Petrochemical Zone processes 22 million tons of oil annually and ranks among China's top petrochemical-refining complexes, adding heavy industry to the electronics-and-guitars mix.
The port handles over 80 million tons of cargo yearly, and export to Hong Kong alone accounts for 15% of the city's total exports. Huizhou functions as a node in the Greater Bay Area network, the second-largest mainland city by area in the cluster, absorbing the overflow from Shenzhen and Dongguan as those cities' land and labour costs rise.
This is preferential attachment in physical form: success attracts more success, each new factory making the next one more likely. Huizhou grows not because of any master plan but because the gravitational pull of an existing cluster is stronger than the friction of distance.