Zhengzhou

One in seven smartphones sold worldwide was assembled in Zhengzhou. That fact alone would make this city interesting. But the deeper story is why Foxconn chose Henan's capital in 2010: Zhengzhou sits at the only point in China where the north-south and east-west railway networks cross twice—a 'double cross' junction that makes it the country's supreme logistics node.

The location has attracted power for 3,600 years. Around 1500 BCE, the Shang dynasty built their capital Ao here—a walled Bronze Age city whose rammed-earth foundations still stand in downtown Zhengzhou, possibly the oldest visible urban infrastructure in continuous use in China. The site chosen for its position on the Yellow River floodplain became a node under the Sui and Tang dynasties when the New Bian Canal connected it to the Grand Canal trade network. But the modern city's defining moment came in 1903-1909, when the Beijing-Hankou railway (north-south) and Longhai Railway (east-west) intersected at Zhengzhou. A slime mold, given food sources at Chinese cities, will independently rediscover China's rail network—Zhengzhou is where the mold's tendrils always converge, because geography makes it unavoidable.

Foxconn's arrival transformed that logistics advantage into manufacturing dominance. The Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone now employs over 250,000 workers producing more than 100 million iPhones annually. China-Europe freight trains have completed over 15,000 trips from Zhengzhou since 2013, offering an alternative to maritime shipping that cuts transit time by half. The city's GDP reached 1.45 trillion yuan in 2024, growing 5.7%—at the forefront among China's trillion-yuan cities. Total imports and exports hit 820 billion yuan, ranking in the national top ten.

Zhengzhou was designated China's eighth National Central City in 2017, formalizing what geography determined millennia ago. Like a spider at the center of a web, the city doesn't need to move—it simply needs to exist where the threads cross. The network effects compound: each new rail line, each new factory, each new freight route reinforces the junction's gravity. The risk is the same one the Shang faced: when you depend on being the center, any bypass is existential.