Yiwu: inside the World’s Biggest Mall
*Caroline Knowles
Alongside every conceivable manufactured item on the planet, fragments of a million stories are whispered like secrets in the gleaming corridors and open spaces of Yiwu’s Futian Mall. The most expansive and official of these stories come from the Deputy Party Secretary of Yiwu, who describes the Mall as the world’s biggest small commodities trade hub. It is Futian’s global reach, visible in the bodies and robes of African and Middle Eastern traders that roam the mall, that makes Yiwu China’s most cosmopolitan city, trading with 230 countries and regions: a number suggested by the Deputy Party Secretary’s calculations. One carton or a hundred containers, no sale is too big or too small. The goods are made in local factories and gathered at the mall before they are shifted all over the world.
Yiwu is just 90 minutes by fast train southwest of Shanghai. The mall’s 6.4 million square meters squat on the landscape looking like something from the future. It’s so big that National Geographic estimates that it would take 10 days of non-stop walking to pass each of its little shops. From a 35th floor hotel window the mall looks like part of an urban landscape from the Sci-Fi fiction movie Blade Runner. Yiwu is part of the Zhejiang Free Trade Zone (FTZ) which list two of the mall’s achievements in its top ten. Number one is the number of rail-freight routes linking Yiwu with Europe via China’s northwestern Xinjian Autonomous Uygur province: an impressive1,399 train trips a year pass through this region to Kazakhstan. Yiwu and its monstrous mall is a crucial junction in on the Belt-Road.
There are smaller stories too of course. One is a little strand that stretches all the way to my neighbourhood in east London. I first visited Yiwu with a German Architect who was researching the mall in 2018. Later, I began to recognise goods I had seen there turning up in my local pound shops and supermarkets. Things like birthday balloons that say ‘30’ or ‘40’ — feature in London restaurants’ more raucous gatherings. I began recognising the plastic sparkly crowns and silky sashes worn by hen parties out on the lash, pots and pans, plastic containers, cheap plastic toys, flip-flops, plastic clogs, trainers, the kinds of inexpensive leather shoes that are heaped on stalls in London street markets. Could it be that the mall quietly supplies the stuff that fabricates the everyday lives of Londoners? I had to go back. I arrive at Yiwu Station, which is doing brisk business, in a fine warm rain.
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Small stories told by local people in Yiwu reveal the significance of the mall in shaping their lives. Having walked several kilometres around the mall and beginning to tire I take the seat that is offered by a well-dressed young man in his thirties. He is sitting next to piles of woven plastic sacks waiting to be collected. He says that he makes a living buying hair clips, beads and other decorations in the mall, which he assembles — adding to their value — and then sells online as fancy hair decorations for women. This makes him enough to live on. I hear a different story from a man who used to have his own café but gave it up to buy pens in the mall, which he resells online. At first café man made a decent living. But as more locals started catching on to the same idea — each specialising in their own niche — his income dropped, and he took to taxi driving to supplemented it.
As Yiwu got more expensive to live in, the taxi driver’s family decides that the benefits of life in Yiwu are not worth the costs. They are returning to Yunnan, a city in southwest China and the place of their ancestors, where life is simpler and cheaper and they have good connections. The taxi driver’s son has already secured a job in Yunnan and moved. Now the family are waiting for their daughter to finish high school so that the rest of the family can move together. The taxi driver has lived in Yiwu for a decade without an official residents’ permit (Hukou). This creates its own daily difficulties and exclusions while it secures a cheap insecure urban labour force. The mall circulates people as well as things.
The fragments of stories I collect in the mall reveal diverse circumstances and all kinds of insecurities as things open windows onto lives. A woman selling smart leather shoes tells me she has had her shop at the mall for thirty years. She polishes a green plum and gives it to me as she explains that the shoes she sells — for 60RMB (£6) a pair — are made in the factory her husband owns. Some factories have direct or even family connections with the mall, selling what they make and shortening the chain. Other factories sell direct to the mall’s shopkeepers who then shift them on to traders by the carton. The mall, it seems, organises an entire web of stuff, circumstances and stories.
Chewing on the shiny green plum, I drift off across the mall with its neat sections — household, electrical, plastic toys, shoes and so on. I walk past grannies with small children who stop to play with displays of toys or climb the stairs, wondering if I can follow some of these goods all the way along the Belt-Road to local pound shops in east London. Anyway it’s time to move northwest to my next Belt-Road stop in Xian. Can I can make it all the way to Xinjian Autonomous Uygur province and on to Kazakhstan? It’s time to get back on the train.
*Caroline Knowles is an urban sociologist and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, published by Penguin (2022) https://seriousmoneybook.com and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
