Dongguan in 2010 was a story setting brimming with tension. On the surface was the manufacturing glory of the “world’s factory,” while beneath it lay the pains of transformation after the financial crisis. The old “three processing types and one compensation trade” model was fading, and hot money was searching everywhere for an outlet. That year, the Growth Enterprise Market had just opened, small- and mid-cap stocks were restless, and the broader market was struggling to find a bottom. A group of bosses who had “traded their wash basins for farmland,” armed with compensation from factory demolitions and the final payments on their orders, plunged headlong into the red-and-green world of candlestick charts, carrying only a hazy vision of the capital markets.
