Fasteners are called the “rice of industry”: the bolts, nuts and screws that hold the built world together. A district in Handan is China's fastener capital, its largest production and distribution center, turning out around 6 million tons a year and, by its own count, more than half of all the fasteners sold in China.
A fastener, a screw or bolt or nut or anchor, is the humblest and most universal of mechanical parts; the Chinese trade calls it the “rice of industry.” Yongnian, a district of Handan in southern Hebei, is the Capital of Chinese Fasteners, the country's largest fastener production and distribution center. It turns out roughly 6 million tons a year worth about 42 billion yuan, accounts by various counts for over half of national fastener sales, and exports to more than 110 countries.
The trade is the place. Around 340,000 people, a third of the district's population, work in fasteners, across what was once nearly 10,000 workshops. The chain is complete and local: special steel, wire-drawing, cold-forging, heat-treatment, surface-finishing, packing and sale, all within the district. Yongnian can make, by its own boast, almost any fastener a buyer could name.
Yongnian's link to standard parts is old, but the modern story turns on a wartime improvisation: during the resistance against Japan, local workshops secretly repaired and made firearms, and in doing so produced what is remembered as Yongnian's first screw. After 1949 the craft industrialised, and after Reform and Opening Up the workshops multiplied, in the local phrase, like bamboo shoots after rain.
What truly sets Yongnian apart is not only making bolts but moving them. Its fastener logistics handle on the order of 20 million tons a year, approaching 100,000 tons on a peak day; it is the national bazaar where a buyer can source any standard part, under the collective trademark “Yongnian Fasteners.” That distribution role is why its share of national sales runs so high: the bolts of many other towns are sold through here too.
China has a second fastener capital, and it is Yongnian's opposite. Where Yongnian, in the north, is scale and distribution, the place that sells half the country's bolts, Haiyan, in the south, is strength and engineering, a smaller set of larger firms making high-grade, certified fasteners. The north moves the volume; the south makes the hard stuff.