First, it's being priced out of the city, and going somewhere else. Land lease prices, and factory rents here are going past surreal.

Second, the global demand for electronics and light industry goods has, paradoxically, not increased much, and even went down for some product categories. I can say that with some surety as I have access to serious market research and statistics papers for which my employer pays up to $10k a pop.

The emerging markets have slided a lot, and developed markets never really recovered since 2008.

Local industry relied greatly on "Shanzhai" goods that were selling by tonnes to places like Africa, Middle East, and the rest of South and South East Asia.

There is now very little space left for such middle of the market goods in these markets. Consumer choice has now gotten much more polarised towards high and low end segments. On the low end, vertically integrated supergiants steamroll any competition, and on the high end, Western companies still have an overwhelming edge over Chinese domestic companies with their terrible marketing.

I think a lot of it is still nearby, in the Pearl River Delta. My friend's aunt took me to a PCB factory in Zhongshan (message me if you want the whole story). Everywhere from Dongmen to Guangzhou to Zhongshan to Zhuhai to Macau is developed, and there's factories with people from all over China working there.