The town of Shengze, located at the southernmost tip of the province, is known as the oriental silk and textile hometown. In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, people in Shengze have spared no efforts to integrate production with diligence and wisdom to drive the innovative transformation for the making of the leading town in China's textile industry.
The town of 150 square kilometers is home to more than 2,500 textile companies and more than 7,000 trade companies with the annual output of silk fabrics exceeding 10 billion meters, which is enough to make a piece of clothing for everyone in the world.
Last year, Shengze’s regional GDP exceeded 40 billion yuan, and its fiscal revenue exceeded 7 billion yuan, ranking 10th among the nation’s top 1,000 towns.
Back in the 1970s, however, the annual output of Shengze silk fabrics was less than 10 million meters, and the fiscal revenue was only over 10 million yuan.
40 years ago, large-scale textile enterprises were virtually non-existent in the silk and textile town while every household used old-fashioned shuttle looms for inefficient textile production.
Since the country’s reform and opening up, the Shengze people started to take bold steps by launching township enterprises.
On July 24, 1978, Shengze saw the establishment of the country’s first enterprise to jointly produce silk by the industrial sector and the foreign trade department to bring about changes in the silk industry's production and foreign trade by transmitting the information of the international market directly to the factory.
In just a few years, Shengze’s collective economy has grown rapidly. By 1990, the total output value of Shengze’s township enterprises had exceeded 1 billion yuan. In the same year, it topped the list of China's top ten township enterprises.
The large number of township and village enterprises is energetic in nature but are generally small due to the absence of advanced technologies.
From the end of the last century to the beginning of this century, Shengze started to focus its attention on private capital and foreign investment. Many operators who have earned their first bucket of gold in the reform and opening up have responded to the government's call for investment in textile enterprises.
Through investment promotion, a large number of foreign capital and foreign private capital have also fueled the investment boom in Shengze. For a time, more than 1,000 private textile enterprises blossomed in Shengze with the annual investment growing from several hundred million yuan to several billion yuan.
However, with the rapid rise of private enterprises, problems such as environmental overdraft and extensive development have gradually emerged.
In order to get rid of the "high energy consumption, high pollution" predicament, Shengze began to carve out a comprehensive transformation path centered on green, technological, and informationized development. Entering the new era, Shengze has actively embraced the intelligence and digital tide with and a batch of intelligent factories mushrooming one after another.
Now in Shengze, even if the lights are turned off, the intelligent production workshops can still keep working to save labor costs by 80% and efficiency by 700%.
At the same time, Shengze also relies on the "mutually beneficial network +" platform to expand the market and build e-commerce and cloud manufacturing service platforms such as Yunfang City, Silku Network and Yibu.com, transforming a group of textile enterprises into Internet-based factories to be able to sell their products all over the world without leaving the workshops.
40 years of rapid development has yielded brilliant results for Shengze, as is evidenced by the numerous honorary titles such as China's textile industry's largest enterprise, the largest trading market, the world's largest fabric production base, and the 10th place in the country's comprehensive strength of top 1000 towns.
(Source: ourjiangsu.com)
