CCTV News (Focus Interview): Textiles have a history of thousands of years in China. It is a traditional industry and an indispensable part of the national economy. Since the reform and opening up, joining the WTO, and especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China has gradually grown from a textile power to a global textile power. From a fiber to the final garment, China has formed the most complete textile industry chain in the world. What kind of code is hidden behind this to lead the development of the industry?

In Beilun District, Ningbo City, a garment processing factory known as the world's largest, together with its factories in Anhui, Zhejiang and Southeast Asian countries, produces about 2 million garments every day. Many well-known sportswear brands in the world are produced by this company.

As the world's largest textile trade gathering place, Shaoxing Keqiao is where nearly 1/4 of the world's textile products are traded. In 2021, the Keqiao China Textile City market group, the online and offline market turnover exceeded 300 billion yuan.

Yaojiapo Village, located in Qiujiadian Town, Tai'an City, Shandong Province, purchases more than 30 tons of fabric every day, which are made into about 160,000 pairs of long johns. The total length of long johns produced here in a year can circle the earth's equator more than once, making it a veritable "long johns village".

Sun Huaibin, vice president and spokesperson of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, said: "We have the largest production scale. The total fiber processing volume is about 58 million tons a year, accounting for more than 50% of the world. The export of textiles and clothing last year was 316 billion US dollars, accounting for a little more than one-third of the world."

Chen Dapeng, vice president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council and president of the China National Garment Association, said: "According to the calculation of the China National Garment Association, the total retail scale of the Chinese clothing market now exceeds 4.5 trillion yuan, and online retail exceeds 2 trillion yuan."

From production, export, to consumption, it is the Chinese textile industry chain, which is the largest in the world, with the most complete supporting facilities and is constantly transforming and upgrading, that supports these huge figures.

Sun Huaibin said: "No country in the world has such a rich, systematic and complete textile industry chain as ours. We have upstream raw material supply, including petrochemicals and agriculture, and we have all the sub-industries in each textile chain, including industrial textiles, household textiles and clothing, as well as textile machinery and clothing machinery, which run through the entire industry chain."

From cotton to fiber, to weaving, dyeing and ready-made clothes, a piece of clothing needs to go through dozens or even hundreds of processes in the middle. Therefore, the textile industry has become the most representative labor-intensive industry. With the reform and opening up, especially after joining the World Trade Organization at the beginning of this century, the textile industry in China, which has a history of thousands of years, has released huge production capacity and continuously provided cheap and high-quality clothing to the world. With the continuous increase in scale and changes in the internal and external environment, new era propositions have been proposed for China's textile industry.

Sun Huaibin said: "We are already very large, and it is unlikely to make it run faster. Faced with changes in the market environment, environmental pressure, and rising labor costs, such a series of factors have forced us to transform and upgrade, and develop from big to strong."

Fully automated production lines, textile machine data sharing, and "smart brain" on one screen, in Zaozhuang, Shandong, this high-end new special yarn production plant, the scene of "thousands of people making yarn and tens of thousands of people making cloth" in textile enterprises has become history. Through the full use of information technology and the analysis of system big data, the company has achieved refined management. At present, only 35 people are needed to produce 10,000 spindles.

Li Lingshen, vice president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council and deputy director of the China Textile Standardization Technical Committee, said: "More than 30 years ago, a factory with 100,000 spindles had 10,000 people, which was equivalent to 1,000 people for 10,000 spindles. Through intelligent factories, labor productivity has been greatly improved, and the vision of unmanned textile factories at night has been truly realized."

In Changshu, Jiangsu, a huge automated vertical warehouse that can store 1.5 million boxes of clothes can lock a piece of clothing in 3 minutes, and automatically affix a courier order and send it to the transport vehicle. The daily throughput of the entire storage area can reach up to 1 million pieces, and the handling, sorting, distribution, and inventory counting are all completed by robots.

Every 6 seconds, the Chinese sales data on the enterprise big data platform will be refreshed, and real-time market trend analysis will be carried out.

Li Lingshen said: "After the industry's digitalization, networking, and intelligent iteration upgrades in recent years, the labor production efficiency, intelligent manufacturing level, and digital service level of the entire industry have been greatly improved, and labor productivity has been greatly improved."

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China's economy has shifted from a high-speed growth stage to a high-quality development stage, and the production mode of the textile industry has undergone revolutionary changes. It was during this period that a group of innovative textile companies accelerated their progress toward the higher end of the industrial chain through transformation and upgrading.

Ultrafine fibers are widely used in high-end clothing, home textile fabrics, high-performance filter materials, clean materials, high-end automotive interiors and other fields. In layman's terms, a 10,000-meter-long ultrafine fiber monofilament weighs less than 0.028 grams, which means that a 112-gram ultrafine fiber monofilament can circle the earth's equator. Only under a high-power electron microscope can the internal morphology of an ultrafine fiber be clearly seen. In fact, there are a total of 2,664 monofilaments distributed in such a fiber monofilament. This "island microfiber" with a diameter of only 1/100 of a hair is the result of the company's research and development from laboratory to industrial mass production. Today, the company's annual output of microfiber products accounts for about 60% of the world's total, making it an important production base.

Adhering to a differentiated route and making products that others cannot make is the key to the company's transition from following to leading the industry. In the past decade, the company has invested nearly 100 billion yuan to open up the upstream and downstream industrial chain of chemical fibers, and the number of new technology products has maintained an average annual growth rate of more than 10%. In addition to constantly challenging the limits of microfibers, recycled fibers made from recycled plastic bottles have also become their main research and development direction and source of profit growth.

A plastic bottle weighs about 20 grams, and 50,000 plastic bottles can be made into 1 ton of recycled fiber. The company can produce 250,000 tons of recycled fiber a year, digesting 12.5 billion waste plastic bottles, thereby reducing carbon emissions by about 500,000 tons. In 2020, Shenghong Group took the lead in establishing the National Advanced Functional Fiber Innovation Center, which is also China's first national-level innovation center led by a private enterprise. It aims to carry out public relations for key common technologies in the industry around key areas such as functional fiber new materials, high-end fibers and textiles, and cutting-edge fiber new materials. In April this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on the High-quality Development of the Chemical Fiber Industry", proposing to build a high-end, intelligent, and green modern chemical fiber industry system by 2025 and comprehensively build a chemical fiber power. Li Lingshen said: "Chemical fiber is the most important component of textile fiber materials. China's chemical fiber production accounts for more than 70% of the world. With such a high proportion and such a wide range of applications, the high-quality development of this industry is directly related to the sustainable development of the entire textile industry and the safety and controllability of the industrial chain and supply chain." At the end of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Engineering organized a number of academicians and experts to compare and analyze 26 industries in China's manufacturing industry and manufacturing powerhouses, and concluded that China has 5 industries at the world's advanced level, among which the textile industry is the leader. This also means that China's goal of becoming a textile power has been basically achieved. This is a milestone in the textile industry's promotion of high-quality development through transformation and upgrading. Technology, green and fashion are the industrial positioning of high-quality development of China's textile industry. The high-quality development of the textile industry production field responds to the increasingly affluent Chinese people's pursuit of changing from wearing warm clothes to wearing good clothes and wearing diverse clothes.

In addition to offline stores, a large part of the sales of a custom clothing company in Dalian comes from online orders, which means that consumers can not only choose fabrics and participate in style design online, but also measure their bodies remotely. They only need to take photos as required to intelligently display the size data of multiple parts such as collar circumference and waist circumference.

Chen Dapeng said: "The new development of digitalization, networking, informatization and intelligence has made large-scale personalized customization possible. Originally, when I went to the garment factory, the assembly line produced the same category of clothing, but by using different chips for each piece, after arriving at the assembly line, the workers on the assembly line can realize large-scale customization on the assembly line according to the different stitching requirements of each piece."

Personalized customization and flexible production meet people's diversified clothing needs and give birth to a large number of niche brands and more imagination space. The new form of live e-commerce has brought about tremendous changes to the traditional model of the clothing industry, from design to production, from wholesale to retail.

Chen Dapeng said: "The core is to shorten the distance with consumers and provide consumers with the best products in the shortest time, which is a consumer-centric development direction."

Over the past 70 years since the founding of New China, China's textile industry has integrated into the world, from catching up to keeping pace, and then leading the world. Behind the prosperous and colorful clothes are generations of textile workers. The courage to participate in international competition and constantly break through themselves is the Chinese people's unremitting pursuit of a better life.

Under the guidance of the new development concept, China's textile industry is not only growing bigger and stronger in all aspects, but also undergoing transformation and upgrading. The application fields involved in the textile industry are also constantly expanding. In addition to the clothing and home textiles that people are familiar with, industrial textiles have also been widely used in many fields of the national economy, from functional sportswear for Winter Olympic athletes, to special equipment materials for aerospace, to "bag dust removal" filtration technology used in industrial dust and air pollution control, etc. It can be said that today's textile industry has far surpassed the traditional concept of "clothing the world" and has become an important means of weaving the world. With the continuous expansion of application fields, and high-end, intelligent, and green becoming the foothold of enterprises, we also have unlimited imagination space for the future of China's textile industry.

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