Taizhou

Private firms account for over 99 per cent of all enterprises in Taizhou. This is not a rounding error. More than 10,000 plastic processors operate across the city, with the district of Huangyan — home to over 4,000 mold enterprises — at the centre of the largest plastics cluster in China, built without a state industrial plan. One in every eight residents is a registered entrepreneur. In a country associated with state-directed capitalism, Taizhou is the counterargument.

Weaver ants build elaborate nests by forming living chains of their own bodies — one ant grips a leaf edge, another grips the first ant's waist, a third reaches for the adjacent leaf, and the chain pulls the leaves together while other workers seal the seam with silk produced by larvae held in their mandibles. No blueprint exists. No individual ant understands the finished structure. The colony assembles architecture from swarm intelligence alone.

Taizhou assembled its economy the same way. The academic literature calls it the "Taizhou Model" — a bottom-up, private-sector-induced development path that contrasts with state-directed alternatives elsewhere in China. After the 1978 reforms, workshops proliferated in each district along lines of hyper-local specialization: Huangyan for plastic molds, Wenling for motorcycle and automobile components, Yuhuan for valves and plumbing hardware, Jiaojiang for chemicals. Each district functions as a module — self-contained but connected to a regional canopy. The modularity gives the system redundancy: if one district's industry falters, the others barely register the loss.

The most improbable output of this swarm is Geely. Li Shufu started in the early 1980s extracting precious metals from photographic waste, pivoted to refrigerator manufacturing, then motorcycles, then built his first car — a fiberglass body styled after a Mercedes E-Class, grafted onto a surplus Hongqi chassis — at a time when private companies were not legally permitted to manufacture automobiles. Geely received its full national production licence on 9 November 2001 — one day before the WTO voted to admit China, a coincidence Li had spent years engineering. Today Geely controls Volvo, Lotus, and Polestar, and co-owns Smart with Mercedes-Benz. This pattern of adaptive radiation — a single entrepreneurial culture radiating into dozens of specialized industry niches — defines the city. Taizhou also produced China's first privately controlled bank and co-financed the country's first majority-private high-speed railway. The ants never saw the blueprint. They never needed one.