"Hey, Kentucky," I said.

"Hey, how’d you know?," he said.

He was kidding, of course. I gave my twang away the precise moment I opened my mouth. It turns out we were both born in the same little area of south central Kentucky.

Neither of us had other people to meet for breakfast, so we ate together. Over fried eggs as good as the Waffle House can serve, we compared notes on why two Southern boys like us might have a chance meeting in a Shanghai hotel elevator.

At one point, it seems, the "Sock Guy" was the "Drug Guy." As a young man his first job was in pharmaceutical sales, driving all over south Georgia. (That’s another interesting story.) One of his best friends, in the sock business, was driving a much better car, so he decided to jump into that industry.

"I’m a great example," he said, "of youth and foolishness being a matched set."

He’s been in the brutally competitive sock business for roughly three decades now. (I admire him for that fact alone.) His company is a major supplier to several U.S. retailers, and at the time we met he had plants in Central America, Central and Southeast Asia, and Africa. He was in Shanghai to investigate buying or building a plant in China.

I asked him about the lifting of textile quotas, due to occur at the end of 2004, and what effect it would have on his various plants around the world. As for his plant in Africa, "it’s done," he said. The productivity in his operation there wasn’t high enough to meet the competitive pressure sure to come when Chinese companies had an open market in the U.S.

"What about your operation—and other plants owned by the competition—in Central America; will they make it?" I asked him.

"It will be tough," he said, a comment loaded with studied understatement. "But you’ve got to be flexible."

He went on to explain: he must have multiple plants across the world to be able to move production to the lowest cost, best quality location. The competition was too brutal. The retailers buying his product demanded it. They could move their business to another supplier if their prices were better or the quality was poor.

The reimposition of quotas on Chinese textiles announced last week by the U.S. Department of Commerce doesn’t apply to socks; they cover cotton blouses and knit shirts, cotton trousers, and both cotton and synthetic fiber underwear. Nonetheless, I thought about the "sock guy" when I heard about these quotas.

In her book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Georgetown Professor Pietra Rivoli estimates there are over 40,000 garment factories in China alone. How many of these plants have sister locations in other countries around the globe, knowing that the battle over textile trade is not a skirmish but a long-term guerilla campaign? How many of these plants in China are not actually Chinese-owned, but owned by a number of the same American companies asking for reimposition of quotas?

The Sock Guy personifies the answer. Flexibility is his watchword. It’s the key to survival in a brutally competitive global economy.

It also means that the world is a touch more complicated than the act of slapping limits on imports of Chinese-produced underwear would imply.