Henan Today: Wheat, iPhones, and More
- andrewsingerchina
- Sep 15
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 17
Andrew Singer Talks About China and America
Central China’s Henan Province is a national breadbasket and a hi-tech hub, helping to fulfill the government’s desires to promote food security and economic independence.
My flight from Shanghai descended into Zhengzhou, the capital of inland Henan Province, late on a Wednesday night. Below us, vast agricultural fields stretched dark and silent. The young woman sitting next to me talked proudly, in rapid Chinese, about Henan’s economic prowess, about the factories of Foxconn and BYD and others that are often neither dark nor silent at this hour. We were landing in the heart of China’s drive both for food security and economic independence.
Henan is home to more than 98 million people, larger than the population of Germany packed into a space about the size of Wisconsin. The province is a leading Chinese breadbasket, most notably producing one-fourth of China’s wheat crop.
When a Chinese person digs into a bowl of noodles, takes a bite of a steamed bun or pops a dumpling into her mouth, chances are good that these staples were made with Henan wheat. For the past eight years, its fields have annually produced more than 65 million tons of wheat, an amount greater than the entire United States harvested last year. Henan is an anchor of China’s food security strategy.
But Henan is more than just farmland. Much more. Occupying spaces that were in many cases themselves agricultural fields in times not long past, mighty assembly lines hum. Already operating the world’s largest iPhone factory near the international airport in Zhengzhou, Foxconn is now building a 753,000-square-foot global headquarters here as it expands into electric vehicles, semiconductors, AI, and digital health products. The same province that feeds China also designs and produces its technological future.
Henan’s industrial ambitions don’t stop with Foxconn. Among thousands of other industrial and manufacturing companies, another giant has landed. BYD, the global leader in electric vehicles, is building a factory in Zhengzhou so massive it’s been called a “city.”
Emerging from surrounding farmland and covering nearly 50 square miles, an area larger than San Francisco, the BYD complex includes production hubs, high-rise housing, schools, sports fields, and entire logistics networks. It will produce one million cars a year and is redefining “industrial scale.” Tesla’s gigafactories pale in comparison.
Henan’s economic power isn’t new. In fact, this Chinese heartland has been a center of commerce for 4,000 years. The Shang Dynasty, China’s second, rose here. Wang Hai, the seventh leader of the early Shang tribe, is honored as China’s “Merchant Ancestor.”
He is celebrated at a cultural heritage park in the ancient capital of Shangqiu in the eastern part of the Province, where the history of commerce and trade are on display. Several modern Chinese business words, shangye (commerce), shangpin (commodity), and shangren (merchant), still use the Shang character.
This blend of ancient legacy and modern ambition makes Henan remarkable, and evolving. Challenges certainly loom. Climate change threatens crop yields. Nationwide economic slowdowns, exacerbated by a tariff war, ripple through its factories and markets. These notwithstanding, Henan is a success story. As China works toward food security and technological independence, Henan is quietly, and not so quietly, doing both.
Henan has been feeding China for thousands of years. It now also powers the devices, vehicles, and technologies shaping the world. The province has come a long way since the P.R.C.’s first tractor factory was opened near the ancient capital of Luoyang here in 1958.
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