Fenshui makes the pen on your desk. A town of about 51,000 people in the hills of Tonglu, it turns out more than 8 billion pens a year, with capacity for some 18 billion, from nearly 900 firms; three of every five ballpoint pens sold in Europe and America once came from its workshops. And the one part it long couldn't make, the tiny ball in the tip, became a national obsession.
Fenshui, a town in Tonglu county about ninety kilometres from Hangzhou, has been the “hometown of pen-making in China” by formal title since 2002, and is now branded a “smart pen town.” Nearly 900 pen and accessory firms turn out more than 8 billion pens a year, with installed capacity for around 18 billion, and ballpoint pens from Fenshui make up roughly 35% of China's market; a local Party secretary once claimed three of every five ballpoint pens sold in the United States and Europe came from the town's workshops. Pens are about two-thirds of the local economy, and the work reaches everyone: among the hundreds of family “assembly points,” eighty-year-old grandmothers sit assembling pens eight hours a day.
The trade began in 1977, and the timing was everything. Villagers found that the bamboo on the local mountains was ideal for pen barrels, just as China restored the national college entrance examination, the gaokao, and demand for cheap pens surged across the country. From bamboo barrel workshops the town built outward into whole pens, and over the next few decades assembled a complete chain on its own doorstep: raw materials, mold processing, component manufacture, assembly, packaging, logistics and trade, all inside one valley.
The economics are brutal in the way this atlas keeps finding. A Fenshui pen sells in bulk for well under a yuan, and the maker keeps as little as two fen, two hundredths of a yuan, on a low-grade pen, a dime at most on a good one. Without brands of their own, the factories sell into Yiwu's wholesale market or make pens under other companies' names for export. Rising Zhejiang wages and an aging workforce now squeeze the family workshops; the young have better-paid options, and a pen assembler earns a few hundred yuan a month.
Here is the twist. For decades the single component Fenshui, and all of China, could not make was the tiny precision ball in the pen tip and the special free-cutting steel it sits in; those were imported from Japan, Germany and Switzerland. It became a national embarrassment, openly discussed at the top of government, that the country making most of the world's pens could not make a pen ball. In 2016 a Chinese steelmaker finally cracked “pen steel,” and Fenshui firms now machine tips as fine as a quarter of a millimetre in-house. The humblest object in the office had exposed a real gap in precision manufacturing, and the country closed it, the same plot as the carbon fibre under a Weihai fishing rod.