Can a single umbrella fabric support an entire industrial dream? Qiyang's answer: an annual output of 1 billion meters, capturing 60% of China's domestic market. In just over a decade, this county-level city in central Hunan has transformed from scattered grey-fabric workshops into the nation's largest umbrella fabric base. This is not merely an accumulation of capacity, but a sample of how a county-level industry can leap from low-end processing to a functional-fabric cluster.
From Scale Leadership to Structural Scrutiny
The rise of Qiyang's textile industry is first reflected in hard metrics. By 2025, the city had gathered 159 textile enterprises, including 41 above-scale companies and 25 specialized and innovative or high-tech firms, with a total industrial output of 8.094 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 18% of the city's industrial output. Between 2023 and 2025, the industry's total output grew at an average annual rate of about 11.5%, a pace not commonly seen in traditional textile regions. More importantly, its functional fabric cluster has been awarded national SME characteristic industry cluster status, and Baishui Textile Town has become the only textile-themed industrial town in Hunan.
But behind the scale leadership lies a clear 'dumbbell-shaped' imbalance in the industrial chain. Qiyang's weaving segment is strong—with about 6,300 air-jet and water-jet looms, and annual capacities of 1 billion meters for umbrella fabric, 300 million meters for bag fabric, and 300 million meters for tent fabric—but upstream raw materials like nylon and pre-weaving processing are clearly insufficient, while downstream high-value-added outdoor end-products such as down jackets and tents are scarce. This means Qiyang occupies a scale high ground in fabric manufacturing but lacks a voice at both ends of the value chain, leaving profit margins squeezed by upstream price fluctuations and downstream brand premiums.
Outdoor Economy: Policy Tailwind and Industrial Anchor
Qiyang's transformation window coincides with the outdoor economy being elevated as a national priority for expanding domestic demand. The '15th Five-Year Plan' for Expanding Domestic Demand and Promoting Consumption explicitly lists outdoor economy and sports consumption as key cultivation areas, opening a clear growth channel for functional fabrics. For Qiyang, this means its existing tent fabric and bag fabric capacities can directly align with procurement needs from outdoor equipment brands, without having to build a market from scratch.
Notably, Qiyang's locational and cost advantages in undertaking industrial transfer remain significant. Its comprehensive factor costs are more than 10% lower than those of coastal textile hubs, and it has already integrated into the three-hour economic circle of the Pearl River Delta, with plans to enter a '1.5-hour economic circle' in the future. This geographic dividend allows Qiyang to stay close to the consumer market and design resources of the Greater Bay Area while maintaining manufacturing cost competitiveness. For outdoor brands seeking alternative production bases, Qiyang is an option worth evaluating.
From 'Manufacturing' to 'Intelligent Manufacturing'
Qiyang's next step is to use technology and green production to solve the 'weak at both ends' dilemma. Take Dongjun Textile as an example: starting as a small factory in 2012, it now operates 4,800 high-speed water-jet looms and has expanded its production processes from single-stage processing to a full set of 16 processes covering spinning, weaving, printing, dyeing, and finishing. It has also built five DMF and toluene recovery towers, achieving near-zero waste gas emissions. This full-chain layout and environmental investment give Qiyang's functional fabrics more bargaining power when facing increasingly stringent sustainable procurement requirements from international clients.
Simultaneously, Qiyang is promoting digitalization and industry-academia collaboration. It has aligned with Hunan's 'Smart Empowerment of Enterprises' initiative, offering free digital diagnostics for enterprises, supporting intelligent weaving technology upgrades, and cooperating with universities like Central South University to tackle key technologies in outdoor functional fabrics. The essence of these measures is to transform dyeing and finishing processes that once relied on experienced workers' intuition into quantifiable and replicable data models, thereby improving product consistency and development efficiency. For buyers, this means that Qiyang fabrics may offer better quality stability than traditional clusters.
Challenges and Opportunities Coexist
Of course, Qiyang's transformation is not without resistance. Insufficient auxiliary material supply, lack of public testing platforms, and weak industrial design and brand channels are all realistic shortcomings that hinder its extension to end-products. Moreover, the outdoor sportswear market already has mature industrial clusters (such as Sanmen in Zhejiang and Changle in Fujian). As a latecomer, Qiyang needs to find a differentiated entry point—for example, leveraging its umbrella fabric technology to develop high-waterproof, aging-resistant tent fabrics or functional apparel fabrics, rather than directly competing in mass-market outdoor apparel.
For industry observers, the real value of the Qiyang case lies in demonstrating how a county-level textile industry can use the scale advantage of a 'single-product champion' to gradually climb to higher value-added segments. Whether its '1347' action framework can be implemented will depend on actual investments in soft environments such as talent attraction and brand incubation.