The city that encapsulates China’s economic stagnation

On a Typical evening Zhengzhou’s manufacturing district should be teeming with workers heading back to their dormitories. For more than a decade the city of 13m in central China has been home to Foxconn employees who assemble iPhones in a local megafactory—meaning activity at hole-in-the-wall eateries and dank internet cafés provides an informal gauge of the health of the local economy. But now one of the main dormitory areas is vacant. Labourers are stripping out what remains of internet cafés and hauling off sofas that once furnished dorms. Many workers fled, never to return, in October last year, escaping a lockdown that had confined them to their dorms, sometimes ten to a room, for weeks on end.