Guandong Province in China is Global Leader in Toy Production

July 15, 2004, Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong, China: Wholesale market Guoji Wanju Cheng. There are four floors of toys, including a lot of unauthorized copies of licensed products. An Osama Bin Laden Action Figure, laden with weapons. China is the biggest exporter of toys in the world and the South China province of Guangdong is China’s leading toy manufacturing region. According to export statistics, companies in China now produce billions of dollars of toys a year, more than half of which are re-exported through Hong Kong. Between them they account for nearly 70% of the world’s toy trade. The business started with a collection of cheap plastic toys from the 1960s and 1970s: badly moulded spacemen; lumpy cars; ugly babies; cringe-inspiring golliwogs; and lots and lots of ray guns. For years, this was what ìMade in Hong KongÓ meant to the world. In the 1970s, toys were briefly Hong Kong’s main export. The toy factories spurred the development of supporting industries and crafts: model makers, sculptors, mould makers, suppliers of fake fur and child-proof pigments. Hundreds of trading companies linked the small Cantonese-speaking manufacturers with the big western buyers who controlled toy brands. But as Hong Kong grew, so did salaries and land prices. And by the early 1980s Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong in China’s Guangdong province, had become a Special Economic Zone, tariff-free and open to foreign investment. A few Hong Kong companies ventured across the border to test China’s proto-capitalism, cheap labour (as little as a tenth of Hong Kong wages at the time) and plentiful land for factories. Soon Hong Kong’s toy industry started to hollow out, with virtually all production moving to Guangdong province; Guangzhou, Shenzhen and now Shantou as well. On May 1, 2011, President Barack is scheduled to announce that Ossama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.. Credit: Alessandro Digaetano / Polaris