I. Why Chongqing's Textiles Are Worth a Second Look

When people discuss China's textile industry, their gaze usually falls on Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian — the great provinces of weaving and apparel. Chongqing rarely gets named. Its industrial labels are automobiles, electronics, equipment, and materials, and textiles occupy only a small share of its industrial map.

But Chongqing's textiles carry an overlooked history. They were not always weak; they once reached the summit and then fell. During the War of Resistance against Japan, factories from the eastern coast relocated inland en masse. Major cotton mills such as Yufeng, Shenxin, Yuhua, and Shashi moved into Chongqing one after another. Within a few years the number of mechanized cotton-textile plants jumped from one to more than ten, looms grew from a few dozen to over five hundred, and Chongqing briefly became China's largest textile base of the time. This history is the true high point of Chongqing's textiles, and also the starting point of the structure that followed.

Today, the focus of Chongqing's textiles has shifted entirely. It no longer rests on rows of looms, but on three nodes far apart from one another: a world-largest spandex and adipic acid base inside a hundred-billion-yuan materials park in Fuling; sericulture and silk in Qianjiang that has ranked first in the municipality for years; and the ramie cloth that Rongchang has been weaving for over a thousand years. This trajectory — falling from a weaving peak, then regrowing weight from the upstream feedstock end — is what makes Chongqing's textiles worth looking back at. The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Chongqing's textiles as a regional sample not because it is large, but because it clearly shows how a value chain can be lifted up by an era, and then survive in a different form.

This report does not endorse any investment judgment. It does just one thing: lay out the real shape of Chongqing's textile industry, and honestly point out where its weaknesses lie.

II. The Wartime Peak and the Exit of the State Cotton Mills

The foundation of Chongqing's textiles was moved in during the war years.

Before the war, Chongqing's textile beginnings were not late. In the early twentieth century the city already had the rudiments of mechanized weaving plants and steam silk-reeling mills, with budding cotton trade guilds, dyeing, and reeling. But what truly made its scale surge was the wartime relocation of factories. To escape the fighting, plants from the eastern coast and the middle Yangtze moved upriver, and major cotton mills such as Yufeng, Shenxin, Yuhua, and Shashi settled in Chongqing. Together with the expansion of local supporting industry, by the early 1940s both the number of mechanized cotton mills and the number of looms in Chongqing had multiplied, with annual cotton cloth output counted in the hundreds of thousands of bolts. For a time it became a textile stronghold supporting the military and civilian needs of China's rear.

This momentum was consolidated after the founding of New China into a group of state-owned textile enterprises anchored by Chongqing Cotton Mills No. 1 through No. 7, spread across Tuwan in Shapingba, Qiaojiaotuo on the south bank, Dongjintuo in Hechuan, Beibei, Lijiatuo in Banan, and Changshou. For a long stretch, these mills were an important part of Chongqing's industry and a living coordinate for several generations of textile workers.

Yet cotton textiles are an industry that depends heavily on location, labor cost, and supporting industry. As the coastal textile sector rose again — with both raw materials and markets located elsewhere — inland Chongqing gradually lost its cost advantage. The old mills withdrew one by one amid urban renewal and industrial restructuring, and the state cotton mill group mostly became a historical term. This exit did not mean Chongqing's textiles disappeared; rather, it bid farewell to the old, weaving-centered form, waiting to find a new place in other links of the chain. Understanding this passage from peak to exit is the premise for grasping why Chongqing's textiles have grown into their present shape.

III. Fuling Spandex: A Textile Upstream Grown Inside a Materials Park

The weightiest entry in Chongqing's textiles today is not in a cloth mill, but inside a chemical materials park in Fuling.

In the New Materials Science City of Baitao, Fuling, the Huafeng group built an industrial base in Chongqing spanning several thousand mu and employing several thousand people. Its main business is polyurethane and polyamide new materials; mapped onto the textile chain, that means two key things: spandex, and adipic acid, which is upstream of spandex. The park has become one of the world's largest single-site spandex production bases, and at the same time the world's largest adipic acid producer, with adipic acid capacity reaching the million-tonne class.

What spandex is determines what this means for textiles. Spandex is what is commonly called elastic fiber; the "stretch" in swimwear, sportswear, underwear, and socks comes almost entirely from it. It is not cloth itself, but the most upstream chemical fiber raw material before weaving. By taking this link to the world's largest single-site scale, Chongqing occupies in the textile chain not the middle segment of weaving or dyeing, but the most upstream tier of chemical fiber feedstock. The park's differentiated spandex capacity has expanded continuously in recent years, advancing from the 100,000-tonne class toward a target of around 300,000 tonnes, with scale and cost advantages ranking among the industry's leaders.

What makes this special is that it has almost no lineage with Chongqing's old textiles. The state cotton mills did cotton-textile weaving, whereas Fuling's Huafeng makes synthetic fiber feedstock derived from petrochemicals; the two belong to opposite ends of the chain, on completely different technical routes. In other words, the strongest link in Chongqing's textiles today was not carried over from the old weaving mills, but regrown on an entirely new track, drawing on Chongqing's chemical and materials industry base. This explains why the total volume of Chongqing's textiles looks unremarkable, yet in the niche of chemical fiber feedstock it has gained a national, even global, voice.

IV. Qianjiang Silk and Rongchang Ramie Cloth: Two Old Foundations That Never Broke

If Fuling represents the rebirth of Chongqing's textiles, then Qianjiang and Rongchang represent two old foundations that never broke.

Qianjiang is the center of Chongqing's sericulture and silk. This district in southeastern Chongqing has nearly 100,000 mu of mulberry orchards covering most of its townships, with annual cocoon output that has ranked first in the municipality for years; both its mulberry acreage and cocoon output account for a considerable share of the municipal total, and it has won several national titles such as National Sericulture Bioindustry Base and Hometown of Chinese Sericulture. More notably, it does not stop at raising silkworms and selling cocoons, but carries the chain downstream: planting mulberry, raising silkworms, drying cocoons, reeling silk, weaving silk fabric, making garments and silk quilts, and on to the comprehensive use of mulberry-silkworm bioresources, forming a relatively complete value chain. Chongqing has folded sericulture and silk into its municipal plan, aiming for full-chain integrated output value of over 5 billion yuan by 2025, with Qianjiang as the center linking the southeastern districts of Wulong, Pengshui, and Shizhu. Chongqing's sericulture scale has long held among the nation's top ranks; this is the most agricultural and grounded part of Chongqing's textiles.

Rongchang's ramie cloth, or xiabu, is another kind of presence. Xiabu is a plain-weave cloth hand-woven from ramie fiber, an ancient fabric stretching back over a thousand years; Rongchang is known as the "Hometown of Chinese Ramie Cloth," and its weaving technique was long ago inscribed on the national intangible cultural heritage list. The market for this cloth lies not at home but abroad: Rongchang ramie cloth has been exported steadily to South Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia for years. In South Korea, ramie garments are worn at important life moments such as birth, coming-of-age, weddings, and festivals, giving stable demand. Rongchang once formed a scale of several hundred thousand bolts a year, dozens of product varieties, and tens of thousands of people employed. Today, while preserving its heritage craft, Rongchang ramie cloth is also transforming toward cultural-creative products, home goods, and apparel, finding a new way of life for an old cloth.

What these two foundations share is that neither wins by large-scale industrial weaving; each guards a distinctive raw material and craft — one silk, the other ramie. They cannot carry the total volume of Chongqing's textiles, but they give this chain two textures beyond the large factories.

V. Inheritance and Transformation: The Middle-Segment Attempts of Wanzhou and Others

The thinnest segment of Chongqing's textiles is precisely the one in which Jiangsu and Zhejiang are strongest — large-scale weaving, dyeing, and apparel manufacturing.

After the old urban textiles withdrew, Chongqing did not grow a weaving-and-dyeing cluster in the middle segment capable of rivaling the coast. Its recent remedy has been more about absorbing industrial transfer. Districts in northeastern Chongqing, represented by Wanzhou, have brought in apparel firms from Jiangsu, built garment order centers, and then radiated orders out to surrounding districts and townships, driving a batch of small and medium-sized garment-processing enterprises. The advantage of this model is a low threshold and quick results, catching a portion of the orders and capacity spilling over from the coast and solving some local employment. But it also means Chongqing plays the role of receiver rather than leader in this link, with the say over design, branding, and fabric still resting elsewhere.

Fuling's plans, by contrast, reveal another line of thinking: building on its existing advantage in high-end synthetic materials, extending downstream into mid-to-high-end chemical fiber and the textile chain, with a focus on technical textiles, differentiated fibers, and mid-to-high-end fabric. If this path works, Chongqing has a chance to extend its upstream "spandex feedstock" advantage a step downstream into "differentiated fibers and technical textiles," so its upstream strength is not left isolated. This is harder than simply absorbing apparel orders, yet more likely to mend the very segment Chongqing's textiles most lack.

VI. Risks and the Institute's Judgment

Pulling these threads together, Chongqing's textile industry shows a most unusual shape: it once had a weaving peak brought by wartime relocation, and then experienced the wholesale exit of its state cotton mills; today, what truly carries weight is upstream chemical fiber feedstock — Fuling's world-class spandex and adipic acid — together with two old foundations guarding distinctive raw materials, Qianjiang silk and Rongchang ramie cloth, while the most common weaving-and-dyeing middle is the thinnest link of all.

Its risks are equally concrete. Fuling spandex is strong, yet deeply bound to the cycles of petrochemicals and to the adipic acid and spandex price spreads; it serves more as a feedstock supplier to the national and even global textile market than it couples tightly with Chongqing's own weaving terminal. Qianjiang silk and Rongchang ramie cloth are limited in scale; sericulture is constrained by agricultural cycles and labor costs, while ramie cloth depends heavily on overseas markets, so a swing in orders hits hard. The middle-segment apparel absorption, meanwhile, leaves the say elsewhere and carries low added value. In other words, Chongqing's textiles have a world-class strength upstream and irreplaceable specialties on the wings, but upstream, middle, and downstream have not yet truly meshed into a local closed loop.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's judgment is this: the point of interest in Chongqing's textiles is not whether it can recreate the weaving scale of the relocation years, but whether it can play the cards now in its hand into a single line. Fuling has proven that, drawing on a chemical base, Chongqing can reach world-class scale at the most upstream tier of chemical fiber feedstock; Qianjiang and Rongchang have proven that the distinctive silk and ramie raw materials are still here, and the crafts have not broken. What truly decides how far Chongqing's textiles can go is that thinnest middle segment — whether differentiated fibers, technical textiles, and local weaving can catch the upstream feedstock advantage and keep the value in Chongqing. The height of a value chain could once be lifted by the relocation of a war; but whether it can stand for long depends, in the end, on whether it can reconnect the link that was broken. This is harder than reminiscing about the old mills, yet it is more worth doing.

For upstream manufacturers supplying the textile industry — whether selling chemical fiber, fabric, dyes, or textile machinery — reaching Chongqing's textile and apparel factory customers in bulk is possible on Tianxia Gongchang, where you can filter precisely by region and industry to find directories of Chongqing textile factories and the contact details of their decision-makers, turning upstream sales prospecting from one-by-one inquiry into following a map.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directories and industry data of Chongqing textile factories)
  • Chongqing Archaeology: The Four Major Cotton Mills Relocated to Chongqing During the War of Resistance; A History of Chongqing's Garment Processing Industry
  • Banan District Government, Chongqing: Lijiatuo 1937 (records of the state cotton mill group and relocated textiles)
  • Fuling District Government, Chongqing: Reports on Huafeng Chongqing Spandex; Introduction to the Chongqing Huafeng New Materials Industrial Park
  • Chongqing Municipal Government: Chongqing's First Hundred-Billion-Yuan Materials Cluster, in Fuling
  • China Textile News and Sina Finance: Huafeng Chemical's Differentiated Spandex Expansion Project and Capacity Progress
  • Chongqing Municipal Commerce Commission: The 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Chongqing's Sericulture and Silk Industry
  • Qianjiang District Government, Chongqing: Building the Chain Around Mulberry and Cocoon; Reports on Qianjiang's Sericulture and Silk Value Chain
  • Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs: Chongqing's Sericulture Industry Improves Steadily, Ranking Among the National Top Ten
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network and China News Service Chongqing: Reports on Rongchang Ramie Cloth Weaving Technique and Its Going Abroad
  • Chongqing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology: Replies on Wanzhou's Garment Industry Absorption and Order Center