One out of every five sweaters worldwide is produced in Dalang, Dongguan. This small town in the Pearl River Delta has built an industrial empire with an annual output of 900 million knitted garments and a total industry chain transaction volume exceeding 72 billion RMB in 2025. The 10th Textile Intangible Cultural Heritage Conference, held here on June 25, 2025, sent a clear signal: the deep integration of traditional intangible heritage with the world's largest knitting industry cluster has become a key experimental field for cultivating new quality productivity in the textile sector.
Industrial Foundation Meets Heritage Genes
Dalang's knitting industry started in the 1980s as a processing base for foreign companies. After more than four decades, it has formed a complete ecosystem covering design, production, sales, and logistics. The region now hosts 30,000 market entities in the knitting sector, employing over 200,000 people. This scale means that any injection of cultural or technological genes can generate significant market resonance.
During the conference, Deng Xiaoding, second-level inspector of the Consumer Goods Industry Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, explicitly defined the living inheritance of textile heritage as 'an important path for cultivating new quality productivity and building a modern industrial system.' The background to this judgment is that when heritage protection enters the stage of 'living inheritance,' museum-style preservation alone can no longer meet the needs of industrial upgrading. A connection point with large-scale industrial clusters must be found. Dalang provides exactly this interface—its complete industry chain means the path from design to finished garment, from exhibition to shelf, is naturally short for heritage elements.
Data-Driven Industrial Logic
Sun Ruizhe, President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, positioned textile heritage in his keynote report as 'an important resource for enhancing industrial value' and 'a key carrier for increasing cultural influence.' This argument is supported by clear economic logic. Local Dalang companies such as Impression Plateau (focusing on high-end cashmere), Tongmen Apparel (integrating Chaoshan traditional hand-hook techniques with modern computer knitting), and Zhouhong Apparel (emphasizing the deep integration of aesthetics and knitting) demonstrate that heritage techniques are no longer decorative cultural symbols but core drivers of product premium and brand differentiation.
Two achievements released at the conference further reinforced this trend. The '2025/2026 China Textile Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Report' systematically reviewed annual progress in industry integration. The 'Heritage·Origin—China Non-heritage Youth Design Support Project' targeted the critical pain point of talent gaps. Professor Guo Ruiping from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology emphasized that the key to heritage transformation is 'multi-dimensional and multi-level cognitive enhancement and reshaping,' requiring 'contemporization, fashionization, lifestyle integration, and industrialization.' This means that the integration of heritage and industry is not a simple pattern transfer but a full-chain transformation from material selection and production processes to marketing scenarios.
From Single Product to Ecosystem: Commercial Transformation Pathways
In the salon session on 'Commercial Transformation Pathways and Applications of Textile Heritage,' Ning Manli, Chairman of Guizhou Danzhai Ninghang Batik Co., proposed a binary division model: 'let those who understand the craft keep the roots, and let those who understand the market open the doors.' This directly addresses the core contradiction in heritage commercialization. ByteDance's CSR department shared a practical case of empowering Zhuang brocade commercial transformation through the Douyin platform's heritage styling campaign—platform traffic combined with heritage products effectively shortened the conversion cycle from cultural value to market value.
On the design innovation side, Chen Cheng from the Nanjing Yunjin Museum shared practices in activating Yunjin in contemporary design, aiming to 'bring Yunjin into ordinary homes.' Chaoshan embroidery inheritor She Xulei analyzed the integration of traditional techniques with modern fashion from a layered perspective. These cases collectively point to a trend: heritage products are shifting from high-end gift positioning to penetration into daily consumer markets, and Dalang's large-scale production capacity provides the cost-controllable manufacturing foundation for this penetration.