Mechanic Luo fiddled with the control box. He theorized that the natural gas canisters might be too cold. The men adjusted the valves and began to rock the massive metal tubes. The temperature didn't rise. They shook the tubes harder; nothing happened. Somebody went to get a stepladder and boiling water.

Boss Gao looked even more skittish than usual; he'd never installed such a big assembly line. More than a decade ago, he had started his first workshop in the outskirts of Wenzhou. With his parents and two sisters, he produced the fabric that lines the waist of cheap trousers. Initially, profits were 50 percent, and the workshop steadily expanded. But the neighborhood became home to more than 20 other companies making trouser lining, and the margins dropped until Boss Gao finally quit. "It used to be that you'd try to find a product that nobody else was making," he explained. "But now everything is already being made by somebody in China."

That's one weakness of the Wenzhou Model. Entrepreneurs produce goods that require little capital and low technology, which makes it easy for neighbors to jump in. Boss Wang, the uncle, had slipped into the same pattern. Previously, he had manufactured the steel underwire for women's brassieres, and his profits had dropped steadily. When the two men joined forces, they decided to continue manufacturing underwire, but their goal was to find a more profitable main product.

Fortunately, the average bra is composed of 12 separate components. In a figurative sense, the men began their quest at the bottom, with the underwire, and worked their way up. They thought about thread; they looked at lace; they considered the clasp. But when they reached the top, where tiny 0- and 8-shaped rings adjust the bra straps, they found what they were looking for.

A bra ring consists of steel coated with high-gloss nylon, requiring a specialized manufacturing process. The key equipment is a computer-regulated assembly line, divided into three separate stages, each of which heats the object to over 500 degrees Celsius (930�F). Originally, Europeans produced the rings, but by the early 1990s Taiwan dominated the market. In the middle of that decade, a mainland Chinese company called Daming imported an assembly line.

After its arrival on the mainland, where production costs are much cheaper, "the Machine" essentially minted money. The boss got rich, and then a worker named Liu Hongwei got an idea. Despite his lack of formal education, Liu was a skilled mechanic, who worked closely with the Machine. Meticulously, he memorized the assembly line, piece by piece, and in secret he sketched out blueprints. When the plans were complete, he contacted a second boss at a company called Shangang Keji, in the city of Shantou.