Hard times for China’s micro-industrialists

THERE ARE lots of upsides to making bikes for kids, explains Mr Li, a young entrepreneur from Pingxiang, a scruffy county in northern China that has become a centre for the children’s bicycle industry. For one thing, they are easy to build, he says, nodding at a toddler-sized machine parked near his desk, held upright by tiny stabilisers. Teenage mountain bikes are a bit fiddly, but smaller ones “need no special machinery at all”. Also, he grins, children grow. Sell a three-year-old their first ride and two years later their parents have to buy a bigger one, and so it goes on for years to come. The downside? China is running out of children.