The Chinese gold rush

Following up on my previous post criticizing free market capitalism with respect to the American health care system, an article from the June issue of National Geographic (China's Instant Cities, by Peter Hessler) is a fascinating portrait of China's boom economy. It reminds me of the American Gold Rush. Some excerpts:

Qiaotou's population is only 64,000, but 380 local factories produce more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards -- queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township akes one-third of the world's socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world's neckties are made in Shengzhou.

Everything is sold in a town called Yiwu... Yiwu's slogan is 'a sea of commodities, a paradise for shoppers.' Yiwu is in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from the coast, but traders come from all over the world to buy goods in bulk. There's a scarf district, a plastic bag market, an avenue where every shop sells elastic. If you're burned out on buttons, take a stroll down Binwang Zipper Professional Street. The China Yiwu International Trade City, a local mall, has more than 30,000 stalls -- if you spend one minute at each shop, eight hours a day, you'll leave two months later.