Liuzhou
Guangxi's industrial capital runs on cars and fermented snail noodles — luosifen went from street food to a ¥76 billion industry chain in a decade.
A fermented snail soup that smells like drain water generated ¥76 billion ($10.4 billion) for one Chinese city in 2024. Liuzhou, a prefecture of 4.2 million in Guangxi, is the autonomous region's industrial capital — with one-twelfth of Guangxi's population, it produces one-quarter of its industrial output. Wikipedia leads with karst mountain scenery and Tang dynasty poetry. What it undersells is that Liuzhou runs two economies simultaneously: one that builds cars, and one that packages a street food so pungent it divides the internet.
The automobile story came first. SAIC-GM-Wuling, a joint venture between SAIC Motor, General Motors, and the local Wuling Group, is headquartered in Liuzhou and has produced over 2.5 million new energy vehicles. NEV output surged 110% year-on-year in 2024. The factory that builds the Wuling Mini EV — once the world's best-selling electric car — sits in the same city centre that reeks of fermenting bamboo shoots.
Luosifen, the snail rice noodle, is the second story and the stranger one. Until 2014, it was a purely local street food — sour, spicy, fermented, served from roadside stalls. That year, the first packaged version appeared. By 2022, pre-packaged sales alone hit ¥18.2 billion. By 2024, the entire industry chain — snail farming, bamboo shoot fermentation, chilli processing, packaging, logistics — reached ¥76 billion in total revenue, a 13.4% annual increase. The industry has generated over 300,000 jobs and lifted 28,000 people out of poverty. Exports reach 30+ countries, growing 28.5% by value in 2023.
The biological parallel is yeast — an organism whose value lies entirely in fermentation. Yeast transforms simple sugars into something disproportionately more valuable: bread, beer, wine. Liuzhou performs the same economic fermentation. It takes humble inputs — river snails, rice flour, pickled bamboo — and through a city-scale fermentation process involving 300,000 workers across the supply chain, converts them into a ¥76 billion industry that no one predicted a decade ago. The fermentation is not a metaphor. It is literally how the product works, and it is literally how the economy works.