The Rise and Fall of Dongguan, as a Microcosm of China

choi

Andrew Browne, Mr Xi's Trump Moment; The economic shocks of globalization have triggered social and political tensions in China just as they have in the US. Wall Street Journal, Oct 22, 2016.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinpings-trump-moment-1477056486

My comment:
(a) The essay talks about the decline of Dongguan, which is something I am unaware of. The author is a reporter, who may be observant on ground zero (Dongguan), but his only statistics is its population falls from 12 million to 7 million today. But that alone can be explained by possible success by Beijing to move manufacturing inland so that farmers there do not have to migrate.

(b) "Just about a century ago, the Boston merchants who had helped to build the textile town of Lowell, Mass, into the cradle of the American industrial revolution started pulling out. * * * Lowell's heyday as an industrial center lasted from the 1820s to the 1920s. Situated at the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, the city was the manufacturing wonder of its day. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier called it 'a city, springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian Tales.' It was organized around boardinghouse mills, which provided decent-paying jobs initially for New England farm girls, along with a place to stay. They operated spinning machines based on a design stolen from Britain. * * * Even now, after decades of fighting decline, Lowell is still not fully back. Cambodian [who have moved there] and other immigrant communities have brought new life, but the old Boott Mills, where New England farm girls once toiled, is now a cultural heritage site for drawing tourists, and another old industrial landmark serves as a business incubator.  Lowell's city fathers * * * like to tell an optimistic story of 'rainbows and unicorns.' But there is another, darker narrative—of aging factory workers cast aside. They are out of place in a renovated downtown colonized by artists, movie producers and tech entrepreneurs."
(i) "Situated at the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers"

Merrimack River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_River
(etymology unknown; map)

The accent of Merrimack is on the first syllable.
(ii) "Incorporated in 1826 to serve as a mill town, Lowell[, Massachusetts,] was named after Francis Cabot Lowell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cabot_Lowell_(businessman)

There is a Thorndike Street in Cambridge, Mass, but I did not learn of the name sake until today.
(iii) John Greenleaf Whittier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Greenleaf_Whittier
(1807 – 1892; born in Haverhill, Mass and died in New Hampshire; He took editing jobs with the Middlesex Standard in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the Essex Transcript in Amesbury until 1844; section 5 List of works: Prose: 'The Stranger in Lowell; Tales and sketches' (1845) )

'The City of a Day' is an essay within that work, written in 1843.
library, University of Massachusetts Lowell
http://libweb.uml.edu/clh/all/jgwhi.htm
(iii)
(A) "During the Cambodian genocide, the city took in an influx of refugees, leading to a Cambodia Town and America's second-largest Cambodian-American population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell,_Massachusetts
(B) list of US cities with large Cambodian-American populations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li ... merican_populations
(2010 US census: Long Beach, California (18,000) / Lowell, Mass (13,319) )
(iv) Boott Mills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boott_Mills
(Kirk Boott)
(v) Neal Whitman, Rainbows and Unicorns: A Linguistic History. The Week, Feb 26, 2013.
http://theweek.com/articles/4673 ... -linguistic-history
("hen it comes to referring to impossibly perfect conditions where everyone's happy and nothing goes wrong, we're living in a golden age of RBUs": rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns)

(c) "Industries that once flourished in New England eventually ended up here [Dongguan], along with their tools and technology. Dongguan was Lowell ('Spindle City'), Waterbury ('Brass City'), Leominster ('Plastics City'), Gardner ('Chair City') and Holyoke ('Paper City') all rolled into one."
(i) The nicknames following New England cities and towns are for those, not for Dongguan.  Few in America foresaw this wholesale devouring of the country's [china's] manufacturing heartland [Guangdong, I guess]."
(ii) Waterbury, Connecticut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbury,_Connecticut
("Throughout the first half of the 20th century Waterbury * * * was the leading center in the United States for the manufacture of brassware (including castings and finishings), as reflected in the nickname the 'Brass City' and the city's [Latin] motto Quid Aere Perennius? ('What Is More Lasting Than Brass?'). It was noted for the manufacture of watches and clocks")

(d) 'At its peak in 2007, says Lin Jiang 林江 [岭南学院财政税务系主任], an economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University's Lingnan College 中山大学岭南学院, Dongguan's population reached 12 million. (The official census data is unreliable.) Then the global financial crisis struck, and China’s exports dried up. Dongguan has never recovered. Its population has shrunk to just seven million, Mr Lin estimates, a loss equal to the combined populations of Chicago [2010 census: 2,695,598] and Houston [2010; 2,099,451]."

Lingnan University (Guangzhou)  嶺南大學
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingnan_University_(Guangzhou)
("Originated from Lingnan University, a private university in the early 20th century, Lingnan (University) College was reestablished in 1988 within [public] Sun Yat-sen University")

(e) "Between 1991 and 2007—the 16-year period when Dongguan was on a roll—the value of US goods imported from China increased by a staggering 1,156%, according to research by the economists David H Autor, David Horn and Gordon H Hanson. US exports to China grew much less."

David H Autor, David Horn and Gordon H Hanson, The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States. American Economic Review, 103: 2121-2168 (2013).
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6613