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Tales from the Development Frontier
Summary The story of Dieshiqiao International Home Textiles Market, a tale of the successful transformation of a quiet fishing village into a home textile hub, shows how the combination of strong entrepreneurship, dynamic local government, and innovative policy has enabled the home textile cluster to achieve rapid economic growth.
Warp Knitting Science and Technology Industrial Zone, Haining, Zhejiang Province Haining, in central Zhejiang Province, is China’s largest manufacturing base and distribution center for warp-knit fabric.8 Haining supplies 70 percent of the warp-knit cloth used in China in light box advertising and 40 percent of the cloth used in geogrids, a construction material. By 2010, Haining had more than 400 warp knitting enterprises (up from 3 in the 1980s), 235 of which had annual sales of at least Y 5 million ($0.7 million) each. Enterprises in Haining own more than 30 percent of the world-class warp knitting equipment in use and produce 325,000 tons of warp-knit fabric annually. Haining’s warp knitting industrial value has more than tripled since 2001, rising from Y 2.2 billion ($268 million) in 2004 to Y 7.7 billion ($1.1 billion) in 2008 (figure 5.2). The warp knitting industry began in China in the 1980s mainly in the production of apparel fabric and cloth for mosquito netting. The industry’s rapid development in Haining followed a visionary analysis that recognized the global changes in the industry. In the late 1990s, as the international warp knitting industry relocated from Europe and the United States to developing countries in Europe and Southeast Asia because of rising labor costs, market-sensitive Haining entrepreneurs began to purchase foreign equipment. The returns have been impressive. Warp knitting production and sales have grown substantially through the rapid upgrading of technologies and equipment, a diversifying product mix, and the clear advantages of clustering. Applications of warp knitting products include high-visibility construction projects such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway and the Shanghai-Hangzhou expressway. Half the flags at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 were made of highgrade warp-knit cloth produced by Wanfang Warp Knitting Company