I. A Necessary Clarification

Any serious look at Beijing's textile industry must begin with an honest acknowledgment: Beijing is no longer a textile manufacturing hub. Large-scale cotton spinning, woolen milling, and knitwear production have largely withdrawn from the urban core over the past three decades, relocating to suburban industrial zones in Shunyi and Tongzhou, or dispersing further to Hebei, Tianjin, and other provinces. Measured by the number of production workers or annual spindle output, Beijing is not a major player in China's textile manufacturing landscape today.

This does not make Beijing's textile story unimportant. Quite the contrary — the path Beijing has taken, actively shrinking its manufacturing footprint and pivoting to brand management and research and design, represents a trajectory that many large Chinese cities are following or will follow. Understanding how it happened, and what remains, is useful for anyone trying to map the real structure of Beijing's industrial economy.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute presents this account straightforwardly: the manufacturing contraction is real, and so is the residual weight of the brands and institutions that stayed.

II. How the Manufacturing Base Was Built: The 1950s Cotton Cluster

Beijing's textile industry reached its historical peak during the first national Five-Year Plan.

In the 1950s, the state concentrated three large-scale cotton textile mills in the Balizhuang area of Chaoyang District: the Beijing First Cotton Textile Mill (Jingmian No.1), the Beijing Second Cotton Textile Mill (Jingmian No.2), and the Beijing Third Cotton Textile Mill (Jingmian No.3). These three plants, together with steel and machinery works built in the same eastern corridor, formed the backbone of Beijing's planned-economy industrial base. At their peak, the three mills together employed tens of thousands of workers and held a recognized position in national cotton textile output.

The woolen and knitwear segments developed in parallel. Snow Lotus cashmere traces its origins to the Renli Trading House, established in 1919 and known for cashmere goods before 1949. The predecessor of Copper Bull Group, the Beijing People's Knitting Mill, was founded in 1952 and focused on knitted underwear and fabrics. These two lines, combined with the three cotton mills, formed the foundation of Beijing's textile industry — cotton spinning providing the fabric base, woolen and knitwear providing brand differentiation.

III. Relocation and Consolidation: Structural Contraction from the 1990s Onward

The structural reshaping of Beijing's textile industry began in earnest in the 1990s.

As the city expanded and urban land values rose sharply, the tension between industrial production and residential use became acute. In 1997, the three Jingmian cotton mills were merged into Beijing Jingmian Textile Group Co., Ltd. The new entity relocated its production facilities to an industrial park in Shunyi District, installing modern equipment sourced from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Japan — including ring-frame spinning lines and shuttleless looms. The geographic shift of manufacturing was complete.

The vacated factory sites in Chaoyang were repurposed for urban renewal. The most prominent example is the former Jingmian No.2 mill site: renovations began in 2008, with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma engaged to redesign the complex into 46 low-density garden-style studio buildings. The park opened as Laijin Cultural Creative Industry Park in September 2011 and was designated one of Beijing's first batch of municipal-level cultural and creative industry demonstration parks in 2015. More than one hundred enterprises are now based there. The former No.1 mill site followed a similar trajectory.

The departure of production and the conversion of factory buildings into creative parks mark the clearest historical turning point for Beijing's cotton textile industry. The sound of looms in Balizhuang belongs to the past.

IV. The Brands That Stayed: Snow Lotus, Copper Bull, and Beijing Fashion Holdings

The manufacturing retreat did not take everything with it. What remained in Beijing was brand equity, research capability, and organizational structure.

The institutional core is Beijing Fashion Holdings Co., Ltd. The company was formerly known as Beijing Textile Holdings and was renamed by approval of the Beijing Municipal Government in 2016, reflecting its repositioning from "textile holding" to "fashion holding." Its strategic focus now covers four segments: apparel and textiles, cultural and creative industries, arts and crafts, and information services. According to the company's 2023 departmental fiscal disclosure published by the Beijing State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, Beijing Fashion Holdings reported total assets of approximately 17.7 billion yuan, revenue of approximately 13.2 billion yuan, and total profit of approximately 210 million yuan that year.

Two brands under its umbrella stand out:

Snow Lotus Cashmere. The Renli Trading House, predecessor of Snow Lotus, was established in 1919. In 1964, its engineers developed China's first cashmere sweater; the Snow Lotus trademark was registered in 1965. After decades of state enterprise restructuring, Snow Lotus was consolidated into Beijing Snow Lotus Group Co., Ltd. in 2002, controlled by Beijing Fashion Holdings, with a declared focus on "brand operations and cultural creativity." Snow Lotus cashmere has been valued at approximately 27.3 billion yuan on China's annual ranking of the 500 most valuable brands and was named among the top 50 brands favored by female consumers in 2023. It remains one of the key reference brands in domestic premium cashmere.

Copper Bull Group. Its predecessor, the Beijing People's Knitting Mill, was founded in 1952. The Copper Bull brand of knitted underwear has long ranked among the top domestic knitwear brands, winning designations including China Famous Brand and China's Top 10 Knitwear Brand. In recent years the group has diversified: its subsidiary Copper Bull Information Technology listed on the Shenzhen ChiNext board in 2020 and now operates in information technology services including state-owned cloud computing and data security, substantially reducing its manufacturing character. The group maintains knitwear and woven garment bases in Tongzhou and Miyun, with research, trade, and information centers in Beijing's CBD.

Beijing Fashion Holdings also holds a portfolio of additional old brands including Leimeng, Dahua, and Puli, as well as more than 20 apparel brands such as PURETOUCH, constituting a state-owned fashion industry cluster anchored by brand management and supplemented by creative park real estate.

V. A Second Asset: Textile Science and Research Capacity

Running parallel to the brand track is Beijing's accumulated strength in textile science.

China Textile Academy Co., Ltd. is headquartered in Beijing and stands as one of the country's foremost national-level textile research institutions. Its work spans high-value segments including technical textiles, functional fibers, and textile chemicals, and it holds a significant role in industry standard-setting at the national level. The presence of this institution means that even as Beijing's share of large-scale cotton and knitwear manufacturing has contracted sharply, the city retains a disproportionate influence over the industry's technical direction and regulatory standards.

This research capacity is one of the features that distinguishes Beijing's textile sector from purely manufacturing-oriented provinces.

VI. Remaining Challenges: The Costs of Deindustrialization

Transformation does not equal resolution. Several genuine difficulties characterize Beijing's textile situation today.

Supply chain vulnerability from thin manufacturing. Snow Lotus, Copper Bull, and other Beijing-based brands now depend heavily on outsourced manufacturing across the Jing-Jin-Ji region and beyond. This makes their supply chains susceptible to external shocks in ways that vertically integrated manufacturers are not. The thinness of local manufacturing capacity is a structural weakness that cannot be reversed quickly.

Old-brand vitality under pressure. Snow Lotus and Copper Bull carry strong name recognition but face a measurable gap in brand appeal among younger consumers compared with international fashion labels and new domestic brands. Beijing Fashion Holdings' 2023 profit-to-revenue ratio — approximately 210 million yuan profit on 13.2 billion yuan revenue — reflects the limited profitability of traditional channel-dependent old brands and the cost structure of state-owned enterprise management.

Creative park conversion has a ceiling. Laijin Creative Park, Copper Bull Film Industry Park, and Snow Lotus Bright Spot Creative Park resolved the question of what to do with vacated factory land, but their economics are primarily those of real estate repositioning, not of building deeper industrial capability. The creative park model has a natural upper bound.

Textile machinery as a residual growth pocket. Dahao Technology (Beijing) focuses on control systems for textile machinery, particularly computer-controlled embroidery machines, and maintains meaningful technical depth in this niche. It represents one of the few corners of Beijing's textile ecosystem still oriented toward manufacturing-adjacent growth, operating on a different trajectory from the cotton and knitwear legacy businesses.

VII. A Note for Upstream Sales Teams

For sales teams supplying upstream inputs to Beijing's textile-related enterprises, the practical implication of this structure is clear.

Beijing's actual procurement is no longer driven by bulk raw material demand from large production lines. It is centered on fabric sourcing and research-grade materials for brand companies, and on technical inputs — functional fibers, textile chemicals, specialized machinery components — for research institutions and the remaining suburban manufacturing bases. Decision-making is concentrated in headquarters procurement and R&D departments, not dispersed across factory floor purchasing teams.

Sales teams serving upstream suppliers to Beijing's textile-related companies can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter Beijing's textile enterprise directory and key contact information by region and industry segment, distinguishing between manufacturing-oriented base facilities in Shunyi, Tongzhou, and Miyun, and headquarters-type brand management entities in the urban core.

VIII. Closing Observation

Beijing's textile story is not the story of an industry that disappeared. It is the story of an industry that was deliberately reshaped by the pressures of a large city: land values, urban planning policy, and the logic of capital flowing toward higher-return uses. The mills are gone from Balizhuang; a creative park stands in their place. Snow Lotus has been making cashmere garments under the same name for sixty years; the factory behind the name has changed hands, moved districts, and contracted. What this looks like depends on which lens you use — contraction if you count spindles, continuity if you count brand registrations.

The honest reading is that both are true, and that Beijing's textile industry is now essentially a brand and research economy wearing the historical coat of a manufacturing sector.

Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Beijing textile enterprise directory and industry data)
  • Beijing Municipal Government State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, Beijing Fashion Holdings Co., Ltd. 2023 Departmental Fiscal Disclosure
  • Beijing Municipal Government official website, "65-year-old cotton mill weaves a cultural and creative dream," February 2021
  • China News Service, "Former Jingmian No.2 Mill Site Transformed into Creative Industry Park, Designed by Kengo Kuma," September 2011
  • Beijing Snow Lotus Group Co., Ltd. official website, corporate history and brand introduction
  • Beijing Fashion Holdings Co., Ltd. official website, brand portfolio and business overview
  • China National Textile and Apparel Council information center, report on the eastern Beijing cotton textile district industrial transition