From Farm Tools to Electric Cars

Abstract

It is now recognised that China’s industrial clusters have played a particularly significant part in the prodigious economic transformations the country has experienced since the launch of reforms at the end of the 1970s. By studying the case of Yongkang, a county-level city in Zhejiang Province specialising in the manufacture of metal products, this article aims to increase understanding of how this rural area with a tradition of small-scale metal production has become, over the course of a few decades, an industrial cluster built around specific operations, and which economic, social, and political approaches have made these transformations possible.