Fifty years ago, this was a fishing village. Today it is the electronics manufacturing capital of the world, home to twenty million people, and the most dramatic development success story in modern history. Maybe in all of history.
The electronics markets are a physical manifestation of this. They have everything. They have everything ten thousand times. Consumer electronics (phones, drones, cameras) stacked next to raw hardware: motherboards, cables, processors. They stack phones like they’re playing Jenga. I needed a powerbank (my old one was seized by Chinese security, long story). The haul: charger, two euros. Cable, twenty cents. Powerbank, seven euros. The entire supply chain, from factory floor to your hand, compressed into a few city blocks.
It does something to you, if you study development economics. You read about Special Economic Zones in textbooks. You learn about Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the theory of export-led growth, the gradual liberalisation of factor markets. But standing in a city that was literally nothing within living memory, that went from fishing nets to semiconductors in a single generation, makes the theory physical. The power of economic policy, when it works, is staggering.