In-Depth Research | The Revitalization and Upgrading of the Traditional Textile and Apparel Industry in Tianmen City

Traditional industries form the bedrock of China’s modernized industrial system, accounting for more than 80% of the manufacturing sector. Accelerating efforts to optimize, transform, and upgrade these industries is both an important step for strengthening the resilience and security of industrial and supply chains and a prerequisite for advancing new industrialization and building China into a manufacturing powerhouse. It thus bears directly on the overall development of China’s modernized industrial system. 

In recent years, the textile and apparel industry in Tianmen, an administratively county-level city in Hubei Province, has risen against the tide, creating an industrial ecosystem that spans the full breadth of the cotton and chemical fiber spinning sector. The city’s apparel e-commerce transaction volume surged from 7 billion yuan in 2021 to more than 70 billion yuan in 2025. 

How can traditional industries escape “low-end lock-in” to achieve production factor agglomeration and coordination across entire industrial chains? How can county economies transcend geographic confines to link up, like beads on a chain, and plug into global markets? And how can regions across China continue to upgrade key industries and develop new quality productive forces tailored to local conditions? With these questions in mind, we traveled to Tianmen to see firsthand how the local textile and apparel industry has developed.

I. The new development features of Tianmen’s textile and apparel industry

Tianmen is known in China as the “home of cotton.” Its annual cotton output has topped 50,000 metric tons in 16 separate years—a record for a county-level city. It was this abundance of raw cotton that enabled Tianmen to cultivate a cotton spinning industry on a solid foundation. 

However, after the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, and especially after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the textile industry in coastal regions grew at a blistering pace. During this period, hampered by poor transportation links, inefficient logistics, weak market circulation, and other factors, many of Tianmen’s textile and apparel firms and skilled workers moved to the southeastern coast. What remained behind was slow to transform and upgrade, and for a time the industry came to a standstill. At the end of 2020, the sector’s more than 1,000 businesses recorded a combined output of just 10 billion yuan. 

In recent years, however, Tianmen has focused its energies on building textiles and apparel into a signature industry with distinctive strengths. Leveraging technology to break the impasse and policy to point the way forward, Tianmen has completely transformed and upgraded the industry in a relatively short period, realizing a shift from predominantly low-end contract manufacturing to an integrated model of intelligent manufacturing and intelligent marketing.

In Tianmen, the traditional textile and apparel industry now bears little resemblance to the old image of large-scale, standardized production. The companies we visited range from agile manufacturers, whose flexible production lines can turn out multiple products at once and rapidly adapt to new styles and materials in line with market demand, to family workshops with full order books that employ large numbers of middle-aged and older rural residents skilled in hand sewing. Some enterprises display the hallmarks of internet companies—asset-light, platform-based, and data-driven—monetizing online traffic by completing the entire process of design, pattern-making, sampling, and livestreaming in just one hour. Others resemble modern service businesses: experiential, customized, knowledge-intensive, and design-led operations that launch co-branded product lines with emerging international designers and artists. They can take clients’ measurements remotely from anywhere in the world and generate garment patterns in real time. Retaining the technical heritage and historical imprint of a traditional industry, Tianmen’s textile and apparel industry has taken on the defining traits of a new quality productive force in the digital and intelligent age: rapid technological iteration, significant market expansion, and cluster-based industrial development.

The opening ceremony of the 2025 Tianmen Garment E-Commerce Industry Conference, themed “Tianmen Yishang: Intelligence Weaving the Globe,” June 28, 2025. PUBLICITY DEPARTMENT OF THE CPC TIANMEN MUNICIPAL COMMITTEE, HUBEI PROVINCE

In terms of production factor flows, the enduring pull of hometown ties and inherited craft has emerged as a unique element driving factor agglomeration

Tianmen was once a major source of outward migration. After reform and opening up began, more than 300,000 Tianmen natives with garment-making skills left their homes for coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, where they worked as tailors, ran wholesale market stalls, or started their own businesses. Only in recent years has that tide begun to turn. In just over three years, more than 100,000 Tianmen locals who had left home have returned to seek employment or start businesses. The reasons for this are multifold: the push of industrial restructuring in coastal regions and the textile industry’s westward relocation; the boost from the shift of the textile and apparel market online, which has dissolved geographic constraints; and, above all, the unique pull of a craft passed down through generations and a deep attachment to one’s hometown. 

We found that many Tianmen families have been involved in garment-making since the days of their elders and relied on it as the primary means of making a living. Among women aged 30 to 40, more than 80% have worked in the garment-making sector at some point. The craft of textile and apparel making runs in the blood of nearly every Tianmen native. Small wonder, then, that many first-generation entrepreneurs and second-generation apparel professionals have eagerly thrown themselves into the apparel industry. Moreover, most of those working away from Tianmen have spouses, children, and parents who still reside there. Their hometown thus remains an emotional anchor, creating a bond that endures despite the distance.

In terms of production methods, organizational innovations have underpinned cheaper and more efficient collaboration

To grow rapidly, an industry must choose organizational methods and production models that are compatible with its current stage of development. Tianmen’s garment enterprises have not blindly pursued the path of automated production or “lights-out manufacturing.” Most have opted instead for a three-tier collaborative model: headquarters in industrial parks, branch factories in townships, and workshops in rural households. The headquarters are responsible for planning and layout, product development and design, and quality control. They serve as a “one-stop” shop for the operational needs of enterprises, knitting production, living, and the industrial ecosystem into a single coordinated system. Township branch factories fill standardized orders through existing facilities, so that regional capacity can be coordinated and efficiency enhanced. And in rural areas, households set up family-based operations by turning idle farmhouses into workshops. 

One garment enterprise we studied has opened 47 satellite factories in townships across five surrounding counties and cities. Its park headquarters adjusts production plans in real time based on sales figures. It breaks down each garment into standardized components, such as collars and cuffs, and delegates their production to township branch factories and rural household workshops. The completed components are then gathered for centralized assembly. This approach has shortened the production cycle for best-selling items by 40% and reduced overall enterprise costs. It has also generated substantial employment and boosted the local economy.

In terms of market expansion, e-commerce platforms have become a vital avenue for broadening market space

Tianmen’s offline sales channels, such as wholesale trading and retail stores, have traditionally been characterized by fragmented, low-end distribution. Our research shows that virtually every new e-commerce format in the apparel sector can be found in Tianmen today, with over 13,000 registered shops on e-commerce platforms, as well as overseas warehouses established in Malaysia, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere. Each day, more than 3 million garments are shipped from Tianmen to destinations across the country, and over 800,000 garments are shipped overseas. In many of the enterprises we visited, one theme kept surfacing: their close collaboration with cross-border e-commerce platforms such as TEMU, TikTok Shop, and SHEIN. Evidence of this was everywhere we looked, from cross-border orders flashing up in real time in livestreaming rooms to “Made in Tianmen” garments neatly stacked in overseas warehouses. In this vibrant atmosphere where anyone can livestream and any household can engage in foreign trade, we came to see Tianmen apparel in an entirely new light. 

One apparel enterprise we studied had relocated back to Tianmen from Guangzhou. The founder candidly told us that it was cross-border e-commerce that had enabled the company to grow from a team of just over 10 people to more than 2,000 in a mere few years, with annual sales exceeding 300 million yuan. This leap has made it one of the fastest-growing top-tier apparel suppliers in Hubei Province.

In terms of industrial ecosystem, AI has become the core engine reshaping the landscape

The intelligent transformation now revitalizing Tianmen’s textile and apparel industry is not simply down to more investment or equipment upgrades. Rather, it has come about by using AI to integrate manufacturing and services, resulting in a systematic restructuring of the entire chain from design and production to supply and sales. 

During our research, we found that some enterprises have dramatically shortened the design cycle by using AI to analyze consumer demand and identify promising design directions with precision. This has enabled the generation of multiple style proposals in mere seconds, which are then rapidly screened using 3D virtual fitting technology. Other enterprises have put in place flexible supply chains capable of responding swiftly to market shifts by producing frequent runs of small product batches. This new production model based on small-batch trial production, data validation, and replication of successful products has effectively driven the shift from “production determining sales” to “sales determining production.” Still other firms have built cloud factories that are fully synchronized with their physical production lines, with algorithms analyzing and responding precisely to global order demand in real time. As a result, the minimum initial order quantity has been reduced to 50 pieces, the time to shipment to 3 days, and order fulfillment time has been cut from 3 days to just 4 hours, creating a nationally leading rapid-response system capable of “manufacturing on demand.”

With the aid of AI, Tianmen’s apparel sector has replaced experience-based judgment with data-driven decision-making and batch contract manufacturing with flexible production. The average inventory turnover rate for apparel enterprises has risen to 12 times per year, a threefold increase over the traditional model, effectively resolving the problems that have plagued the conventional apparel industry, including inventory backlogs, slow capital turnover, and sluggish market response.

II. Breakthroughs in upgrading traditional industries at the county level

In essence, Tianmen’s textile and apparel industry has transformed the region’s resource endowments and advantages into industry-wide momentum. Thanks to the efficient coordination of talent, technology, data, and other production factors, it has sustained development across the entire industrial chain, from weaving, fabric and accessory production, and garment manufacturing upstream to the downstream distribution channels of e-commerce marketing and cross-border logistics, all of which are underpinned by clusters of enterprises of all sizes. 

How in just a few short years has Tianmen managed to draw back the industrial production factors that had previously drained away, concentrate them anew, and build a bigger and stronger industry? What opportunities did it seize, and what bottlenecks did it resolve? What specific goals did it focus on, where did it achieve breakthroughs, and how, from there, did it forge a path for the transformational upgrading and systematic rise of a traditional industry at the county level? The key to this success has been as follows.

Policies have been adopted by capitalizing on emerging trends to bring talent back

Facing the issue of talent outflows to the southeast, Tianmen did not choose to simply roll out preferential land and tax policies. Rather, it precisely judged the window of opportunity provided by both coastal industrial adjustment and the general yearning for home that emerged post-Covid-19. With the “Returning Geese Project” as its main policy lever, it turned the experience, technology, and market resources accumulated by over 300,000 Tianmen natives working outside their hometown into a powerful engine for industrial upgrading. Tianmen built a talent ecosystem to ensure that skilled personnel could be attracted back and truly thrive. This included entrepreneurship support in the form of subsidies for rent, loan interest, social insurance, employment, and training, along with start-up grants and tax and fee relief, financial backing via the Tianmen Garment Industry Loan scheme, targeted skills training, and full-cycle services covering children’s schooling, housing, and rights protection. 

Each year, the government earmarks 200 million yuan for industrial development support to help enterprises pursue technology innovation and upgrading, recruit and retain workers, and transform their operations. These efforts have seen a large number of returning industry participants, bringing orders, technology, and management experience in tow. It also provides training in livestream operations, short video editing, cross-border e-commerce, and other areas to local textile and apparel workers, young people returning to start businesses, and mid-career workers seeking a change. With almost 3,000 professionals in apparel and related fields receiving training each year, these initiatives have enabled a large wave of returnees to find work and start businesses. The homecoming of over 100,000 first-generation entrepreneurs and second-generation apparel professionals means much more than the return of workers. It represents the systematic inflow of capital, technology, information, and business models, all reflected in the striking dynamic of skilled workers returning to villages, factories relocating to towns, and industries clustering in Tianmen. 

Platforms have been built to ensure enterprises stay and thrive

Industrial restructuring requires not only complete industrial chains, but also efficient spatial coordination. Tianmen has moved beyond the traditional industrial park-building model that is characterized by fragmented expansion and low-level redundancy. Instead, it has adopted a park-led development approach featuring multi-point coordination. On this basis, it has created a layout for the textile and apparel industry centered on a single core with multiple towns working in collaboration.

For example, China (Tianmen) Garment E-commerce Market covers a total area of 107.33 hectares and now houses over 260 enterprises. It has integrated all stages of the full value chain from fabric and accessory supply, design and pattern-making, and manufacturing to product livestreaming and smart warehousing. It serves as the primary hub for the clustering of Tianmen’s garment e-commerce sector. Baima Garment E-commerce Industrial Park hosts nearly 400 enterprises spanning various links in the industrial chain. Here, orders placed during upstairs livestreams can be packed and shipped from the floor below the moment they come in. Drawing on the existing assets of towns such as Jiuzhen, Yuekou, and Zaoshi, Tianmen has built distinctive anchor points such as Jiuzhen Garment E-commerce Industrial Park, Yuekou E-commerce Cultural Creative City, and Longteng Garment Town to provide standardized production and support services. This has given rise to a three-tier cooperation framework with headquarters in industrial parks, branch factories in townships, and workshops in rural households. This layout, defined by a single core, three towns, and many anchor points, not only leverages the agglomeration effect of industrial parks, but also activates the potential production factors of towns, leading to a tighter spatial alignment and smoother industrial chain operations. At present, Tianmen’s textile and apparel sector boasts over 13,000 market entities, including over 6,800 garment-specific enterprises, and employs 160,000 people.

Aerial view of the China (Tianmen) Garment E-Commerce Market, February 20, 2026. The market, covering a total area of 107.33 hectares, has attracted over 260 enterprises and become the primary hub for the clustering of Tianmen’s garment e-commerce sector. PUBLICITY DEPARTMENT OF THE CPC TIANMEN MUNICIPAL COMMITTEE, HUBEI PROVINCE

The industrial chain has been extended and weak links shored up to make local manufacturing feasible

The completeness and coordination of an industrial chain have a direct bearing on the core competitiveness of an industry and its ability to resist risks. A local leader in Tianmen recalled that the city was previously trapped in the plight of having an industry without a complete chain and products without the necessary support services. Production cycles in Tianmen were up to half a month, as 90% of fabrics and accessories needed to be externally sourced and even a single button or inch of cloth had to be bought from either Zhejiang or Guangdong. With key links in the industrial chain missing, Tianmen ran up against serious bottlenecks. Rather than simply accepting piecemeal processing work, the people there resolved to overcome the predicament by building from scratch the upstream sectors their place lacked.

Starting in 2021, Tianmen has set its sights on the new arena of chemical fiber textiles, planning and building a chemical fiber textile industrial park with a total investment of over 15 billion yuan. To date, 28 enterprises have moved into the park, among them Yongchang, Shenghe, Yima, Guanglun, and Chuyao. Once full production is reached, annual output is expected to exceed 30 billion yuan. By bringing in internationally leading equipment from Japan and Germany, Yongchang New Materials is now producing 100,000 metric tons of high-performance nylon filament a year, successfully filling the local gap in nylon raw materials. Relying on Yongchang’s nylon filament, Sanyuan Textile is using circular weft knitting machines to produce high-quality nylon fabric. At full capacity, its more than 10 production lines can deliver an annual output of up to 50,000 metric tons. In 2025, two eco-friendly dyeing and printing enterprises, Jinhuang and Youmei Jupin, settled in Tianmen, shoring up the key links of dyeing and finishing within the industrial chain. 

With this, Tianmen has built a complete industrial loop, covering everything from the production of a single filament of synthetic fiber to the weaving, dyeing, and printing of a bolt of fabric, and finally to the manufacturing of garments. With an annual production capacity of 1.5 million metric tons of nylon, spandex, and polyester, the city has established a development framework underpinned by an industrial park of over 100 hectares, investment of more than 10 billion yuan, and production capacity surpassing a million metric tons.

Opportunities have been seized and markets expanded to boost global sales

Market returns are the ultimate benchmark for industrial upgrading. By deftly seizing the opportunities arising from the shifts from traditional e-commerce to livestreaming and then to cross-border sales, Tianmen has helped its enterprises move from traditional production to digital and globally oriented operations. By deepening cooperation with mainstream e-commerce platforms such as SHEIN and TikTok Shop, Tianmen has expanded its sales channels beyond traditional wholesale and retail into international markets, thus realizing the vision of “selling to the world through a single internet connection.”

For micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), the barriers to going global are steep. To address this issue, Tianmen has invested a total of 2.36 billion yuan to improve cross-border e-commerce infrastructure and accelerate the development of a global network of overseas warehouses. With facilities in ASEAN, North America, and Japan coming online, over 90% of garment enterprises now enjoy seamless access to international markets. Tianmen has also pioneered a fast-track channel for cross-border trade in services, which has helped boost service efficiency by 40% and cut overall logistics costs by 18%. A particular pain point for e-commerce is a high return rate. In response to this problem, Tianmen has guided enterprises in using AI tools to offer virtual try-on experiences, which have helped narrow the gap between the product on display and the actual fit, thus lowering the return rate at the source. At present, cross-border shipments from Tianmen exceed 800,000 items a day, with products reaching more than 150 countries and regions around the world. Traditionally known as the “hundred-li home of cotton,” Tianmen has now become a wardrobe for the world and is striding onto the global stage of the textile and apparel industry with newfound confidence.

III. Insights and reflections on revitalizing and upgrading traditional industries

At present, breakthroughs in the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation are emerging at an accelerating pace. For China’s traditional industries, optimization and upgrading is no longer a matter of choice, but a necessity for survival and growth.

The development of Tianmen’s textile and apparel industry shows us that industrial development must be anchored in local strengths. Far from being a burden, traditional industries are a foundation and a rich repository. For Tianmen’s traditional industries, the key to achieving a new-quality leap has been digital technology: it has helped re-energize production factors left idle and join up fragmented links in the industrial chain, thus enabling old industries to branch out and injecting fresh dynamism into established chains. All this has steadily given rise to advanced productive forces. In Tianmen, new quality productive forces have taken root in the intelligent production lines of 386 textile large enterprises. They are thriving thanks to the flexible, fast-response workshops of over 2,700 MSMEs and are being consolidated through the addition of 1,200 patented technologies and process standards each year.

To cultivate and grow county-level industries that benefit local residents, it is essential to adapt to local conditions and leverage distinctive strengths

Adapting to local conditions essentially means seeking truth from facts. It means that we should neither cling to outdated development models nor glorify new-fangled industries. To strike a balance between the old and the new, localities need to accurately position themselves and identify distinctive industries that work to their strengths.

Industrially speaking, the textile and apparel sector has traditionally been a pillar industry for Tianmen. An industrial chain covering spinning, weaving, and garment processing took shape in the place as early as in the mid-20th century. Geographically, the Jianghan Plain, home to Tianmen, sits in central Hubei Province, at the heart of the country. Shipping distances are relatively balanced nationwide, giving Tianmen a natural edge in e-commerce. In terms of its workforce, the region is home to over 100,000 people working in the apparel industry. This includes both first-generation entrepreneurs and second-generation apparel industry workers. The former have accumulated extensive experience in traditional clothing design, production, and sales, while the latter are actively embracing and applying e-commerce. From a social perspective, the local community widely regards textiles and apparel as an enduring industry that benefits residents. People thus take pride in being part of the sector.

It is on this basis that Tianmen has focused on doubling down on its strengths and sharpening the distinctive elements that set it apart. As a result, the textile and apparel sector has not only grown in scale but also attracted large numbers of rural workers by providing employment close to home. All this has given rise to a virtuous cycle where industry is attracting people, the influx of more people is leading to more consumption, and more consumption is revitalizing the whole place.

To revitalize traditional industries, it is essential to pursue technological innovation as a primary driver

Being traditional does not mean being backward. The development of traditional industries hinges on whether they can innovate sufficiently to break free from “low-end lock-in” and steadily nurture new quality production factors.

Seizing the opportunity created by deep integration between the digital and real economies, Tianmen has made innovation the core driver of industrial upgrading. Together with Wuhan Textile University, it has established an industrial research institute and developed a mechanism for industry-academia-research collaboration, in which enterprises submit requests for research, the government renders its help to the researchers and coordinates the efforts in solving the problems involved, and universities provide technical solutions. This framework has helped secure breakthroughs in eco-friendly dyeing and printing technologies and in the R&D of new materials. Using a model that marries traditional industries with emerging technologies and high-end application scenarios, Tianmen has deployed a wide range of cutting-edge technologies, including AI-assisted design, digital twins, IoT chips, and automated sorting systems, thus equipping production lines with digital brains and connecting sewing machines to cloud-based factories. With the innovation chain deeply embedded in the sector, the traditional textile and apparel industry has taken on the characteristics of a new quality productive force: high technology, high efficiency, and high quality. This is nothing less than a fundamental rewriting of the sector’s technological DNA.

To build new advantages in industrial competition, it is essential to develop distinctive industrial clusters in an integrated way

No industry can grow strong in isolation; cluster-based development is the key to winning in competition. For county economies, industrial clusters should form functional networks featuring close coordination between industrial and supply chains. In developing clusters, county economies cannot afford to simply pursue size or completeness; they must also focus on specialization, refinement, uniqueness, and innovation. They cannot concentrate solely on high-end forms, but rather must work to foster complementarity. Furthermore, geographic concentration alone is not enough; they must also pay attention to functional synergy.

Tianmen has actively addressed the gaps in its industrial chain and pursued differentiated development. It has focused on women’s apparel as a niche segment, identified e-commerce as its major sales channel, and pursued a three-tier collaborative production model. These moves have allowed it to extend the industrial chain, expand the industrial cluster, and optimize the industrial ecosystem. This has resulted in the establishment of a full-chain apparel e-commerce system encompassing spinning and weaving, fabrics and accessories, garment processing, e-commerce marketing, and cross-border logistics. A park-led development approach featuring multi-point coordination has now taken shape based on an industrial layout centered on a single core with multiple towns working in collaboration. 

Moreover, given that textile and apparel production is sensitive to site and labor costs and requires a substantial workforce, townships enjoy significant cost advantages in terms of production factors such as labor. Therefore, involving a large number of family workshops has become the optimal choice in the production stage. On the other hand, the design and R&D stages rely heavily on high-end professionals and an innovative environment—conditions that can only be met by leveraging the talent pool found in major cities. Accordingly, Tianmen’s textile and apparel enterprises have set up design and R&D centers in cities such as Guangzhou and Wuhan, while their industrial chains extend into neighboring counties and cities like Qianjiang and Xiantao. By effectively integrating the production factors and resources of the entire region, these firms have built a coordinated development mechanism in which manufacturing takes place in surrounding areas while online sales are carried out right in Tianmen. This has greatly enhanced the overall competitiveness of the industry.

This article was written by Guo Feiran, Liu Jianping, Zhu Xiaomei, and Hou Yajing.

(Originally appeared in Qiushi Journal, Chinese edition, No. 6, 2026)