It was just over a year ago that Huang Fajing, 55, was struggling to keep his company afloat. The president of lighter manufacturer Wenzhou Rifeng Lighters Co., Huang was forced to send his roughly 500 workers home early as a result of the global economic crisis. He himself had little to do but watch television in his luxury apartment in the eastern Chinese industrial city of Wenzhou.
Now, a year later, business is back in full swing in Wenzhou's factories, which supply the world with inexpensive goods, from buttons to electric cables to, of course, lighters. At Rifeng, workers wearing gray uniforms press tiny metal parts into the lighter shells, which are then sold to smokers in Europe, the United States and Japan.
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