An hour west of Shanghai sits China's richest county. It did not grow its own industry the way the other towns did. It imported one wholesale, across a strait — and at its peak made a third of the world's laptops.
Kunshan is not even a city in its own right; it is a county-level city under Suzhou, in southern Jiangsu, sitting on the flat ground between Suzhou and Shanghai about fifty kilometres from the latter. And yet for the better part of two decades it has been the richest county in China, top of the national county-economy rankings since 2005 and the first to pass two hundred billion yuan of output. Around two million people live there, and enough of them speak with a Taiwan accent that the place earned a nickname: Little Taipei.
What makes Kunshan unusual is that it had almost nothing to start with — no special-economic-zone status, no port, no resource, no famous craft. What it had was a location next to Shanghai and a local government willing to gamble. In 1985 the county built its own development zone with its own money, before it had any national approval to do so. That improvisation became known as the "Kunshan road": a poor farming county betting everything on its ability to attract investment it did not yet have.
The investment, when it came, was Taiwanese. The first Taiwan-funded factory opened in 1990; through the 2000s, as Taiwan's electronics industry moved assembly to the mainland, Kunshan became its base. By 2020 there were more than 5,300 Taiwanese companies and around a hundred thousand Taiwanese residents, and Taiwan-funded firms were tied to roughly thirty percent of the county's GDP, half its industrial output and seventy percent of its trade. Foxconn — Terry Gou's Hon Hai — built one of its great mainland complexes here; so did Compal, Wistron, Quanta and Pegatron, alongside the panel maker AUO. The technology, the brands and the know-how were Taiwanese; the land, the labour and the policy were local. In the Chinese phrase, Kunshan borrowed a boat to go to sea.
The result was a concentration with few parallels anywhere. At its height Kunshan turned out roughly a third of all the laptops on Earth, its contract makers building notebooks for Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus and Acer, plus iPhone parts, circuit boards and display panels. The dependence ran both ways: when COVID-era lockdowns shut Kunshan's lines, analysts warned of a global laptop shortage and rated the risk as larger than the closure of Shanghai itself. A single county had become a load-bearing part of the world's computer supply.
That is also the vulnerability. The model now faces real strain: US-China tensions, rising wages, and the pull of Vietnam and of cheaper inland cities such as Chongqing and Chengdu are drawing Taiwanese production away. Foxconn, locals say, is no longer the "golden bowl" it once was, and Kunshan is busy reinventing itself again — toward robotics, biopharmaceuticals and renewable energy. The pattern is the sharp one. Where Zheng'an, Songxia, Foshan, Dafen and Huaqiangbei each grew their industry from within — from skills, heritage, a single founder, or a merchant network — Kunshan grew it from without, importing an entire foreign industry across a strait. That made it spectacularly rich, and spectacularly exposed: cross-strait integration built Kunshan, and cross-strait friction is the thing it has most to fear.