+ SOLDERING ON: Trump and his veep, Mike Pence, left, have vowed to keep jobs in the U.S., and create new jobs.
EARLY one evening in January 2009, Xiao Hongzhi walked down a nearly deserted street in the eastern Chinese city of Dongguan, to the door of the factory at which he had until very recently worked. It was shuttered now, and a note on the gate told former workers they should go to the local party office, where they would receive some compensation. Xiao shrugged, and headed off, relieved that he’d at least get something.
Dongguan, in the coastal province of Guangdong, was arguably the epicenter of what Western economists now call the China Shock: the massive impact, for good and for ill, of Beijing’s emergence as the world’s factory floor. It became, in the years since China’s economic opening to the world, home to factories that made almost everything imaginable— and, for the most part, exported those goods to the rest of the developed world.