Fumian District, Yulin City, Guangxi is an important commodity distribution center in history.

Since the reform and opening up, Fumian's social economy has entered the fast lane of development, especially the garment industry, which has become a leading enterprise and the largest garment production and processing base in Guangxi.

The annual output of clothing is 120 million pieces (sets), with an output value of 1.3 billion yuan. The main varieties include casual pants, jeans, trousers, children's clothing, etc.

The products are sold throughout the country, Hong Kong, Macao, Southeast Asia and other countries and regions.

?Fumian is not very well-known in Yulin, but it was published in a French newspaper last year: [French "Liberation" article on December 14] Title: Fumian-Pants Capital of the World (Special Correspondent Pierre

· Askey)? In a small town called Fumian in Guangxi Province, China, there is a very strange phenomenon: every day, a large number of porters carry bundles of trousers through the dusty streets.

, running from one house to another.

? Fumian was once just an ordinary rural town with a population of only tens of thousands, but now it has invested in an intensive production like the whole of China, and its product is: pants.

On the main street of the town, half of the houses are workshops. Each workshop has more than a dozen hardworking workers. A large number of pants waiting to be loaded and unloaded are piled on the tattered sidewalk.

Large trucks brought in bales of raw materials, which were then moved into the house by stevedores.

?If you leave the main street and take a look at the back streets, you will understand that the production here is not limited to this main street.

Every household in the town has an old-fashioned sewing machine.

We met an elderly woman whose job was to sew trouser pockets—assigned to her by one of the town's big manufacturers—while her son or a neighbor hemmed them.

In this way, the residents of the entire town were integrated into a huge informal production line, while their monthly salary was only a few dozen yuan.

Although it is pitifully small, it is a stable income after all, which can save a primitive peasant family from a tragic fate.

There are no labor regulations here, just long hours of work and meager pay...? Behind the town is an orderly system.

A small private business owner explained that the orders and customized styles he holds come from companies in Guangdong (more than 500 kilometers east of Fumian). These companies all have export qualifications and their own marketing networks.

The company keeps the purchase cost very low: the ex-factory price of a pair of jeans with butterflies embroidered on the back pocket is only 15 yuan in Fumian.

This is a price that others cannot compete with! The owner of a small private enterprise can only earn 1 yuan from it, so he can only hope to increase production.

Workers (whether working in workshops or working at home) account for 1 yuan in wages, and the rest is divided up by raw material merchants and logistics companies...? These jeans of average quality have a huge market: small stores in China,

Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East... This small business owner also exports jeans to South Africa. He said: "We are not planning to attack the European and American markets. Now it seems that the quality of our pants does not meet their requirements."?

In Fumian, the cheapest pants in the world swarm out from this huge and flexible production system: there are both rural handicraftsmen and small industries; there are both cruel capitalist spirits and those who shed blood and tears.

labor.

All of this is connected to foreign markets through a vast system of branches.

The same "model" has spread all over China, and it is making China's textile industry an opponent that makes all developing countries fearful.

?〈This article is reproduced from Fumian Bar〉? On December 14, 2004, a French newspaper published a piece of news about Yulin Fumian. The article called Fumian the "Pants Capital of the World". On December 21, "Reference News

》reprinted this report.

What is the reason that made the French media in Europe pay attention to a small town in the remote southwest of China?

With this question in mind, we visited Fumian.

Xungenfumian is a newly established county-level district in Yulin City with a long history in the garment industry.

As early as the 1920s, there were already a small number of families specializing in clothing production.

In the 1970s, Fumian truly entered the stage of garment processing.

In the 1980s, Fumian's clothing industry began to make great progress.

Villagers in Fumian, Fudong and Fuxi villages began to run full-time garment factories. Although the equipment was simple, the number and scale had doubled compared with the 1970s. Some bold manufacturers began to look for sales points in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

.

By the 1990s, Fumian's clothing industry had emerged. The large-scale introduction of advanced equipment and technology had greatly improved the quality of clothing. Major domestic and foreign brand clothing factories often came to Fumian to place orders for clothing processing.

At that time, 10 large trucks would come in and out of Fumian in one day, transporting fabrics into the town for processing, and then transporting the processed clothes out for sale.

At that time, nearly two-thirds of the stalls in Guangzhou Shahe Clothing Market were rented by Fu Mian's boss.

To solve the puzzle, Fumian today has more than 690 large and small clothing factories, which can produce more than 500,000 pairs of trousers a day. There are more than 200 styles of trousers, including three series of trousers, jeans and casual trousers.

It occupies a considerable market share in China, and its products are sold to more than 30 countries and regions in Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.