There is a good chance the microwave in your kitchen was made in Shunde — whatever the badge says. This district of Foshan makes roughly half the world's microwaves and rice cookers, much of it shipped under names like Toshiba, Whirlpool and Black+Decker. Its two giants began as a bottle-cap workshop and a duck-feather trader.
Shunde, a district of Foshan in the Pearl River Delta, calls itself the hub of Chinese home appliances, and the claim is hard to argue with. Its firms make on the order of half the world's microwave ovens and half its rice cookers, the most electric fans of anywhere, and around a quarter of the world's split air-conditioners. A great deal of it leaves under other companies' names — so the microwave on your counter may well be from Shunde whatever the label promises.
Both of Shunde's giants began as something faintly absurd. In 1968, He Xiangjian and twenty-three residents of Beijiao town pooled about five thousand yuan to make plastic bottle caps; that workshop became Midea, today the world's largest home-appliance maker, a Fortune Global 500 company with revenue around forty-eight billion dollars. And in 1978 a company trading duck feathers reinvented itself, in 1992, around the microwave oven — that was Galanz, which by 2019 made roughly half the world's microwaves.
The numbers are startling for one district. Midea alone makes around 50% of the world's microwaves (some 30 million a year) and about half its rice cookers, is the world's number-one maker of electric fans, and builds one in four of the world's split air-conditioners; Galanz makes roughly half the world's microwaves on its own. Much of the cheap countertop microwave market abroad — including ovens badged Toshiba, Whirlpool and Black+Decker — comes out of these two. The appliance is Shunde's; the brand is rented.
Behind the giants sit more than three thousand appliance and supplier firms, packed so densely that perhaps eighty percent of any component can be sourced within a fifty-kilometre radius — so an entire washing machine or rice cooker can be built without leaving the district. Foshan's appliances reach more than two hundred countries. Shunde is one half of a national duopoly: "Shunde in the south, Qingdao in the north" — Haier's city — are the two poles of Chinese white goods. (Beijiao, Midea's home town, is also the ancestral home of Bruce Lee.)
Lately the giants have climbed the ladder. Midea bought Toshiba's appliance business and Germany's KUKA robotics, set up a chip subsidiary, and now earns more than forty percent of its revenue abroad; Galanz bought Whirlpool's China arm and once sent a microwave oven into space. The risk they name in their own annual reports is a shrinking home market as China's birth rate falls. Set beside the other deep dives, Shunde is the atlas's white-goods capital — the unglamorous, all-but-invisible maker behind half the world's kitchens.