[AnotherGoodName]

This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).

You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.

The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.

The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.

[numpad0]

But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?

I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.

It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.

I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.

The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.

[starky]

This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.

I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.

[arjie]

I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.

[dpark]

I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t.

Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.

[justsomehnguy]

The thing is what you can't get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente in a such places.

Between a fully capitalist American model or a [fully capitalist in all but the name] Chinese one I chose %he one where I can get a basic level without it just by being a citizen.

[kjkjadksj]

Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.

[torginus]

Yeah I have a friend who does this as a livng, and it sounds insane. They do stuff like where a director approves a piece of concept art for a prop, before he gets on the plane for a 12 hour flight for the shoot.

In the available time, they have to model, 3D print, paint and wire up every piece art, so by the time the director gets there, its ready for the shoot. There's no room for mistakes, as each of these processes takes long enough that a repeat is not feasible.

Yet everything he does works, and he does it every time. Even if I pulled off that stuff once in the amount of time given, it would be something I kept bragging about for the rest of my life.

[robertlagrant]

Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?

[AnotherGoodName]

There's 'sourcing agents' whose job is to coordinate the garages. They don't work for any of the garages but as a westerner you'll get in touch with the "electric motor guy" who knows all the factories to contact for that particular purpose. They'll meet you at the airport gate and you essentially pay them as a guide to negotiate the shanghai business environment.

[vpcs111fm]

Yay and nay. That's only for very small manufacturing stuff. To assure the quality control and lower the price, it will eventually head to the large scale factory. The difference between what happened before and now is that, the minimum order quantity has gotten so low (thanks to CNC and computerization etc), now bigger factories can even handle MOQ down to 100.

I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.

[Animats]

That's what Naomi Wu really did while producing influencer type maker videos. "She knows Shenzhen like the back of her hand." Someone who bought her services describes her leading them confidently into sketchy alleys and up back stairs to unmarked doors, behind which were people making the thing they wanted.

She has a book about how to get electronics done in Shenzhen.[1] There was a previous edition published by a westerner, but Wu, a Shenzhen native, updated it. In ten years, Shenzhen changed a lot.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/machinery-enchantress/the-new-es...

[Taniwha]

It's not really so much a book on how to get electronics done, more sort of an electronics specific phrase book, full of the names of things you can point at when looking for stuff in the markets.

The original was written by Bunnie Huang (a name to be sneezed at in his own right) who (I assume) grew up speaking Mandarin at home. Naomi is a local though and probably has broader local knowledge.

The original Shenzhen markets are still there (I've been going for a decade or so, they haven't changed that much), they're getting a bit crowded out by consumer electronics - I can still go and buy great tools in HQB at same places I was 10 years ago, reels of resistors at the same places, people will still sell you cut tape from part reels on the street - the big change are the electric bikes, you take your life in your hand each time you turn around :-)

[numpad0]

Probably the first factory you walk into? That one would become the prime contractor that manage suppliers and subcontractors - I think those are the terms they use in multimillion aerospace and defense programs, but I believe the concepts are the same.

For aerospace programs, you sign a contract with e.g. Boeing for a 787 to be delivered 5 years for $500m, to be delivered to your company pilot at the Boeing Everett facility to be signed off and flown to accepting aircraft maintenance facility for your fleet. They then start dispatching fuselages and wings and parts to various aerospace kilo-corporates. They occasionally call you for confirmations and approvals for important items like engines and small overruns.

I guess the same in Shenzhen happens as a mostly-verbal order for a motor against Shenzhen Suchandsuch LLC in 3 days for $15k delivered the back of the factory on a shop table, with their chief machinist there to get you through the artifact and to help you with bubble wraps and duct tapes. But the overall structure is the same.

[jimnotgym]

China scales its approach to demand. It can build mega- factories or it can build small batches. Small batches require the dextrous artisans you mention.

A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it