An old saying circulates in the synthetic diamond industry: "For diamonds, the world looks to China; China looks to Henan; and Henan looks to Zhecheng."

Zhecheng County, in Shangqiu, Henan Province, is a flat agricultural county on the eastern Henan plain - no mountains, few mines, and no natural diamond raw material whatsoever. Yet this farming county has grown an industry that commands global attention: its diamond micropowder output and exports each account for more than 90% of the national total, its lab-grown diamond output exceeds 60% of the national total, and its diamond products span nine categories with more than 180 varieties. Hundreds of related companies cluster here, anchored by a national high-tech industrialization base for superhard materials and products - earning Zhecheng its titles as "China's Home of Diamond Micropowder" and the "Diamond Capital of China."

How does a county with no resource endowment get this "hard"? The answer lies in a forty-year industrial marathon.

Forty Years Ago: Four Mud-Brick Rooms and a Sieve

Zhecheng's superhard story begins in the early 1980s. In 1985, first movers Zhao Sanyou, Wang Zhanxi, and their peers founded the county's first private company dedicated to diamond wire-drawing dies.

"Four mud-brick rooms were everything we had to start with," Wang Zhanxi recalls. With no proper equipment, they ground with stone mills and sieved by hand; with no mature technology, they experimented and iterated on their own; with no customers, they traveled the country carrying their own dry rations.

From the first grain of micropowder shaken out of a hand sieve, to diamond crystals "born" under high temperature and high pressure in cubic presses (six-anvil hydraulic presses); from scattered family-workshop production to a cluster of hundreds of companies chained together - Zhecheng's diamond industry has run for a full forty years, sustained by the persistence of generations of Zhecheng people.

From "Carat Freedom" to Chip Manufacturing

In the R&D center of Henan Liliang Diamond Co., Ltd. ("Liliang Diamond"), a large single crystal weighing 247.82 carats gleams. After growing a 156.47-carat single crystal in 2025 to set a world record, Liliang Diamond has taken another technological leap and firmly holds the domestic lead in ultra-large single-crystal cultivation - locals joke that Zhecheng has achieved "carat freedom."

But the real value of Zhecheng's superhard materials reaches far beyond jewelry:

• Breaking foreign monopolies: Liliang Diamond's proprietary special-shaped octahedral diamond has lifted wafer-cutting precision to 0.1 micron, providing critical support for sub-7-nanometer chip manufacturing; the project won the Second Prize of the 2023 National Science and Technology Progress Award;
• A single-champion product: the synthetic single-crystal diamond micropowder developed by Huifeng Diamond Co., Ltd. is widely used in aerospace, optical instruments, and equipment manufacturing, and was certified by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in its sixth batch of national manufacturing single-champion products;
• An efficiency revolution: a self-developed micropowder grading method by Henan Houde Diamond Technology has compressed a sorting process that once took seven or eight months of manual work down to tens of minutes on automated machines, raising micropowder yield by 30% and efficiency by more than 10%.

Today, Zhecheng's companies are setting their sights on semiconductor thermal-management materials, optical windows, and other frontier fields, pushing diamond's role from tool material toward functional material.

One Park Chains an Entire Industry: Everything Within Zhecheng, Delivery in a Week

In Huifeng Diamond's workshop, hundreds of automated micropowder sorting machines run in ranks; not far away, the cubic presses at Liliang Diamond are "incubating" the next batch of diamond crystals under high temperature and pressure. The two companies each have their own specialty, yet inside the Zhecheng High-Tech Industrial Development Zone they share one supply chain: raw materials can be purchased and instruments calibrated within the park, and skilled workers flow freely among the resident companies.

"In the past, a customer's custom diamond had to travel half of China from raw material to finished product. Today the entire process is completed without leaving the development zone, and delivered within a week," says Liliang Diamond chairman Shao Zengming. This door-to-door collaboration model shortens lead times, cuts logistics and communication costs, and gives Zhecheng companies the confidence to respond quickly to international markets.

Zhecheng has now built a complete end-to-end industrial chain - from raw and auxiliary material sorting, single-crystal synthesis, and micropowder processing to product manufacturing and lab-grown diamond cultivation. The development zone hosts 1 national enterprise technology center, 18 provincial-level engineering technology research centers, 1 academician workstation, and the Henan Provincial Synthetic Diamond Quality Supervision and Inspection Center.

Under the 15th Five-Year Plan, Shangqiu City and Zhecheng County have designated superhard materials as a key pillar industry, with supportive policies landing in quick succession. Zhecheng follows a clearly articulated strategy - "refine the micropowder, strengthen the single crystal, scale up the products, and brighten the diamonds" - continuously extending, complementing, and reinforcing the chain while pushing into semiconductor chip materials and high-end precision machining. At the same time, the county is blending industry with tourism: diamond industrial tourism already draws several hundred thousand visits a year, from a growing list of countries of origin.

The Deeper Lesson: Chains, Not Mines

"Zhecheng's core competitiveness has shifted from capacity advantage to technology advantage - the critical turning point in a county-level industry's step up," observes Pang Aihong, general manager of Henan Houde Diamond Technology and vice president of the Henan Superhard Materials Association. The Zhecheng phenomenon, she argues, reveals a deeper law of county-level manufacturing: creating an industry out of nothing depends on the chain, not the mine. With no mountains and no mines, Zhecheng used chain-thinking - "bring in one seed, grow a forest" - to grow diamond from micropowder into single crystals, products, and lab-grown diamonds, closing the loop of a full industrial chain. For county economies, resource endowment is not the decisive factor; the completeness and coordination of the industrial chain are the real competitiveness.

A resonant pairing of "a proactive government" and "an effective market" has kept the industry advancing: from the return-home entrepreneurship calls of the 1980s, to building the industrial park in 2006 to "build the nest and attract the phoenix," to the cluster-cultivation policies of the 15th Five-Year Plan, the county government's forty years of unbroken industrial focus have given companies a stable outlook and sustained support.

As Xu Hongxing, president of the Henan Academy of Sciences, puts it: Zhecheng's value lies not in how many diamonds it produces, but in proving that a plain agricultural county without resource endowment can still inscribe its name on the global high-end manufacturing map - the most vivid expression of "stiffening the spine of manufacturing" at the county level.

The Road Ahead: 3,000 Presses and a National No. 1

Looking forward, county party secretary Xing Yufu says Zhecheng will seize the opportunities of the national 15th Five-Year Plan, accelerate construction of the Diamond Industrial Park, Diamond Jewelry Industrial Park, and New Materials Industrial Park, and focus on diamond thermal-composite materials and fourth-generation semiconductor applications. The goal: within three to five years, raise the number of cubic presses to more than 3,000 and rank first nationwide in total scale, letting the "Diamond Capital of China" shine on the world stage.