In China Mao’s opponents won: it did not matter who ran the factory (“whether the cat is white or black as long as he catches mice”) provided production was maximised. Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, where Foxconn (notorious for a spate of suicides among its workers) is located, became the fastest-rising urban conurbation in the world: from 321,000 inhabitants in 1980 to almost 12 million in 2016. Today only 8 per cent of Americans work in factories against 43 per cent of Chinese. And where once Westerners produced mainly for Westerners, many Asian factories now produce for the West; assembling trainers in Vietnam for companies such as Reebok and Adidas, and electronics components in China.
