Dongguang, with 245 factories closed during these few years, may not live up to its reputation 'World Factory'. Meanwhile, Chenghai, a district of Shantou, China, has been rising up in the toy manufacturing industry and taken place of Dongguang and become the biggest toy manufacturing center in the world.

  For many years,  Chenghai had left an impression to many people that, the factories use old modules, produce plenty of toys yet not improve or innovate their products. That impression might be correct given that China had just started opening export policies and Chenghai was just a very young manufacture district.

 However, while the numbers of Guangdong Province toy industry were declining since 2008 economic crisis, Chenghai toy industry withstood the impact and even had a trend of developing. In 2015, the production value of Chenghai toys was 395,000,000 yuan and exporting value was 280,000,000 yuan.

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 Though Chenghai toy industry is now promising, it had its difficult times. Since the China reform and opening-up policy was carried out, Dongguan was more preferred than Chenghai because of Dongguan with geographical advantage and government policy preference. However, the lack of big amount investment did not stop Chenghai's development in toy industry. 

 Chenghai is a district of Shantou which has very big popularity within a small territory. Many citizens chose to leave Chenghai because of the difficulty of finding a job and tough competition in job market. The development of toy industry accually 'saved the day'. Producing toys for sales was a rare chance for people in Chenghai to make a fortune. Since then, more and more people started toy manufacture business. They started with just a few machines and a small workshop. By now, there are about 6,500 registered manufacturers and 129,000 employees in the industry. 

 Most of Dongguan factories were in big scale, with about thousands of workers. What's more, they had only limited product lines. On the other hand, Chenghai factories have lower labor cost and more flexiblity in production schedule and more various product lines. 

 The success of Chenghai toy industry lies in the ability to react, respond to changes, including changes from customer need, market trend, financial situation, labor market etc. With the rapid development in these years, some Chenghai factories have even enter the market of high-end toy products.