One out of every five sweaters produced globally comes from Dalang, Dongguan. This processing hub, which started with a 'three-plus-one' trading mix forty years ago, has grown into a knitting industry cluster with 30,000 market entities and 200,000 employees. In 2025, the entire industry chain's transaction value exceeded 72 billion yuan—a figure that underscores both the urgency of industrial upgrade and the immense potential for commercializing textile intangible cultural heritage.
On June 25, the main conference of the 10th Textile Intangible Cultural Heritage Conference was held at the Dalang Knitting Trade Center. When a thousand-year-old weaving tradition meets the world's largest knitting cluster, both sides seek an answer: how can traditional craftsmanship avoid being locked in museums and instead become a value-added link in the modern industrial chain?
Industrial Foundation: Dalang's Data and Ambition
Dalang's scale provides natural soil for heritage transformation. An annual output of 900 million sweaters means that any design tweak can be rapidly market-tested. More critically, a group of benchmark enterprises have emerged: Yinxiang Prairie focuses on high-end cashmere, Tongmen Fashion integrates traditional Chaozhou hand-hooking techniques with computerized knitting, and Zhouhong Textile emphasizes the deep fusion of aesthetics and knitting craftsmanship.
These experiments show that heritage is not a cultural label pasted onto products but can become the core of differentiation. When Dalang aims to build a 100-billion-yuan knitting cluster, heritage offers not just cultural added value but a springboard to move upstream toward branding, avoiding homogenized price wars.
From a chain perspective, integrating heritage techniques forces coordinated upgrades across upstream yarn R&D, midstream knitting processes, and downstream sales channels. For instance, the complex structures of traditional hand-hooking demand higher yarn strength and elasticity, directly driving functional yarn development. The combination of high-end cashmere with heritage patterns requires stronger narrative capabilities at the brand end.
Policy and Pathways: Balancing Preservation and Innovation
Deng Xiaoding, a second-level inspector at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Consumer Goods Division, proposed four suggestions: preserve the fundamentals, empower through culture, innovate scenarios, and collaborate. These essentially address the thorniest contradiction in heritage commercialization—how to maintain authenticity while adapting to modern consumption scenarios.
Sun Ruizhe, president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, further deconstructed the pathway in his keynote. He noted that heritage is a lifestyle requiring content transformation, a cultural asset needing value management, and a regional identifier demanding unique positioning. This means heritage cannot be simply replicated; it must be localized. Professor Guo Ruiping's case study from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology confirmed this: she combined the 24 solar terms with indigo dyeing to create the 'White Dew as Frost' series, emphasizing that heritage transformation must be contemporary, fashionable, livable, and industrial.
Two outcomes from the conference provided operational guidance. The 2025/2026 China Textile Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Report systematically reviewed annual achievements and a decade of progress, while the 'Heritage·Origin—China Intangible Heritage Youth Design Support Project' aims to solve the succession gap. Jointly launched by the CNTAC Heritage Office and Beijing Fashion Week, the project provides a platform for young designers, pushing heritage from 'passing the torch' to 'continuous growth.'
Commercial Transformation: From Product to Lifestyle
In the salon on 'Commercial Transformation Paths and Applications of Textile Heritage,' Ning Manli, chairwoman of Guizhou Daning Hangzhou Batik, captured the key: 'Let those who know the craft keep the roots, and let those who understand the market open the door. The roots cannot be lost, and the door cannot be closed.' This highlights the biggest pain point: artisans lack market sense, while brands often lose craft essence.
Dalang's enterprises offer several viable models. Yinxiang Prairie builds a heritage product system extending from single items to lifestyle categories like home and accessories, boosting average order value and repurchase rates. ByteDance's case shows the amplifying power of platforms: during a heritage fashion campaign, Douyin (TikTok) successfully drove commercial conversion of Zhuang brocade through short videos and livestreams, proving that scenario innovation is an effective market entry point.
For buyers and foreign trade firms, this means heritage is no longer a 'passion business' but a data-supported incremental market. Dalang's scale advantage of 900 million sweaters annually, combined with the premium of heritage design, can create differentiated competitiveness in high-end European and American markets.