You know, I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd actually get a lot out of a blog post on 'how to open a foam recycling plant in China.'

Strangely, this reminds me of some sci-fi story, "First Contract".

In a nutshell, aliens buy Jupiter (most of the mass in the solar system) for the space-colonial equivalent of shiny beads, wrecking the world economy with an influx of tech-goods. One down-on-his-luck CEO struggles to get Earth out of "third world" (solar-system?) status by--how else--using cheap labor to export kitschy crap :p

Thanks for the comments.

Yes there are some of these places that are not "underground" but obviously there are the suppliers and areas that are less known and more used by traders like me as opposed to the more touristy types.

Regarding bitcoin, yes it does away with the payment issues but thats not the only problem with ordering from china i guess, things like ensuring the product is the correct quality, arranging freight on large consignment orders and needing to buy from multiple suppliers are why a lot of buyers like this guy buying the tv's come to china in person.

Thanks again.

Daniel

Pretty good read. I'd love to go down there and visit some of these shops, just for the hell of it. I buy quite a lot of accessories from AliExpress myself

The server seems to be down/extremely slow to load. Try the Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UevJZk_...

The AHAMAY outboard motor is worth the scroll.

The Zhong Fa Electronics Market in Beijing looked like I imagined the DigiKey warehouse to: resistors stall, oscillators stall, FPGA stall, etc.

Photos (note: less crowded because I went on a Sunday morning):

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6vx0hWnq-f-V3Z5M0FR...

Unfortunately, the author seems to be doing a bit of hocus-pocus hand-waving to make these "underground" malls seem like some mystical place. If it's too inconvenient for any of you to make it into China, you can always stop by Hong Kong.

In the district of Wan Chai (a fairly touristy area of Hong Kong), there's a fairly well known place known simply as the "Computer Centre". In it, you'll find two floors of a giant warehouse packed floor to ceiling with shops selling everything from a refurbished matte black MacBook from 2006 to an "iPhone 7". I do have to say that the vast majority of the products are legitimate, but there are booths which cater to the less-discerning customers. The great benefit of buying in Hong Kong is that you'll often find products from the mainland side and from the factories in Taiwan.

Funny that, just purchased one of those fake iPhones. Looks and feels the same, runs an android OS that replicates iOS perfectly. Pretty good fake if you ask me. The lower price genuine android phones will dominate the lower priced foreign markets in my opinion.

This is mislabeled. It's about Guangdong (likely mostly Guangzhou and Shenzhen specifically), not about China in general.

Chinese markets in general are about the domestic market, with very few exceptions in some border regions (a few regularly sell to Russia and Mongolia in the northeast, Southeast Asia in the southwest, and Central Asia in the far west).

Guangdong by contrast cut its teeth on export during the glory days of the Shenzhen special economic zone which began in 1980.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_reform_in_the_People%2...

Ha. The bit about Poland reminds me about what my dad used to do. He would drive a van delivering things to Germany/Netherlands/UK and bring it back full of second hand things to sell in Poland - usually at 4-5x the value, because after the fall of communism people would buy literally anything in any quantity. Good times.

good article, thanks. What are the prices usually like on these wholesale markets, can you give some examples to get a sense of what the retail margins could be like?

Then shipping - containers? Costs? I have a feeling a lot of Chinese ebay retailers (the ones who ship from the UK, probably have a warehouse here) don't pay import duty/taxes - how do they get around it?

This is exactly like alibaba in physical form.

Looking at this blog I feel a little reminded of Ultima Online. Everybody's out there doing their own little business.

Very skeptical of any article that begins with "The truth behind..." Also, a little annoyed by the authors misused of "underground" here -- these malls are not underground at all, and are often far more popular than the 'real' shops.

"Like this guy below who has travelled here to buy two hundred 32” lcd tv’s his boss needs for the hotel bed rooms in his latest development because there is no place where they come from to buy such things. Many times I have shown them the price in the UK on my ipad and they have been close to jumping on a plane to make a call into an Argos store."

This seems like a problem that will be solved by Bitcoin. The reason people like this can't just buy 32" LCD TV's from Amazon or Overstock right now is becausue of the payment fraud risk. Bitcoin removes that.