Forests are inland, near Mongolia. Factory towns, such as Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, sit thousands of miles away on the country's eastern shoreline. Roads are often incomplete or not strong enough for hauling logs. It can be faster to ship them from Virginia. They employ enough workers to jam a small town.
Production lines run as long as the building.
The air swirls with sawdust and the sounds of giant blades chewing wood. In some older factories, workers still carve by hand. Forty or 50 people eye a model of a bedpost and furiously re-create it with elbow grease and curved knives. The midpriced furniture is likely to be hand-worked, Artz said. The cheaper stuff is all machined.