I. Three Poles, One Provincial Structure

In the geographic narrative of China's apparel industry, Liaoning rarely claims top billing. Guangdong has its ready-to-wear clusters, Zhejiang its fiber and fabric mills, Fujian its athletic footwear and sportswear, Jiangsu its silk and high-end tailoring. Liaoning tends to appear as a vague "Northeast apparel region" in industry overviews.

But when the Research Institute maps Liaoning's apparel sector location by location, a more interesting structure emerges: not a uniformly distributed provincial industry, but three poles with clearly differentiated functions — Xingcheng's swimwear export cluster, Dalian's premium bespoke suiting, and Haicheng's wholesale distribution system — each compounding advantages over decades in entirely separate competitive arenas. The three poles have no strong mutual dependency; their product structures, customer bases, and competitive logics differ fundamentally, yet together they give Liaoning a genuinely distinctive position in China's apparel map.

II. Xingcheng: A Coastal County's Global Swimwear Footprint

Xingcheng city is administered by Huludao, situated along Liaoning's western coastal corridor. The city's seaside climate is part of its geography, but what gives it national and global recognition is swimwear manufacturing.

Xingcheng's swimwear industry took root in the 1990s, building on local knit-fabric processing capacity and expanding from household workshops into a large-scale cluster over three decades. According to data disclosed by Xinhua News Agency and the Liaoning provincial government, Xingcheng produces approximately 170 million swimwear pieces per year, with annual output value surpassing 15 billion yuan, and more than 1,300 swimwear manufacturers operating in the cluster (source: Xinhua News Agency, Liaoning provincial government website, 2024).

Domestically, Xingcheng holds more than 40 percent of the national swimwear market. Internationally, its products reach over 140 countries and regions including Russia, the United States, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Africa — roughly one in four swimwear pieces sold globally comes from Xingcheng (source: China Daily Chinese website, April 2024). E-commerce has amplified this reach: 80 percent of China's online swimwear sales ship from Xingcheng, where over 40,000 swimwear storefronts operate digitally (source: Securities Times, 2023). In 2024, Xingcheng swimwear's regional brand value was assessed at 9.699 billion yuan (source: East Money and financial media citing the evaluation, 2024).

The competitive barrier Xingcheng has built is fundamentally supply-chain density under clustering effects: fabric suppliers, trimmings procurement, sampling factories, and operations teams are concentrated within a radius of a few dozen kilometers, compressing the lead time from design to delivery to levels that can match fast-moving swimwear fashion cycles. That same clustering model, however, carries its own tension — hundreds of small producers sharing overlapping product lines, limited brand premium, and competitive logic concentrated in "fast and affordable manufacturing." The extension toward original design is uneven across the cluster.

III. Dalian: From Export OEM to Premium Intelligent Bespoke

Dalian's position in Liaoning's apparel industry is fundamentally different from Xingcheng's. This is not price-sensitive mass-market territory; Dalian has long concentrated on the mid-to-high end of suit and formalwear export manufacturing.

Dayang Group is the most representative enterprise in this segment. Headquartered in Dalian's Pulandian district, it produces mid-to-high-grade men's suits, women's fashion, and bespoke garments for export, with annual suit exports of approximately 6 million pieces and a global sales network spanning 27 countries including the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia (source: Dayang Group official materials, CNR, 2024). The group's recent strategic emphasis has been intelligent bespoke manufacturing: over 200 million yuan invested in upgrading cutting, hanging transport, and warehousing systems; seven intelligent factories and 40 intelligent production lines built; annual comprehensive garment production capacity reaching 11 million pieces, with bespoke garment production volume ranking first globally for multiple consecutive years (source: Dalian Daily, China Textile News, 2023–2024).

Dalian's apparel manufacturing base extends beyond Dayang. Pulandian district hosts more than 400 textile and apparel enterprises, with annual comprehensive production capacity exceeding 82 million pieces, exporting to more than 40 countries and regions (source: China Daily, 2024). Enterprises such as Dalian Jinlian Garment Co. have long targeted European, Japanese, and Korean markets with men's suits and overcoats.

The core advantage of Dalian's export cluster lies in accumulated craftsmanship and management systems — decades of export OEM work have produced relatively mature quality control processes, while the pivot to intelligent bespoke is a proactive response to rising labor costs and increasingly fragmented order sizes. The challenge is that China's domestic premium bespoke market is still maturing, leaving high export dependency vulnerable to exchange-rate fluctuations and trade-policy shifts.

IV. Haicheng: Xiliu Market and Tongerbao Fur as Twin Distribution Engines

Haicheng's industrial logic is neither swimwear export nor high-end bespoke — it is circulation. The city's competitive advantage lies in assembling the most efficient wholesale distribution infrastructure in Northeast China for apparel and fur products.

Xiliu market is the center of Haicheng's distribution system. The Xiliu cluster has formed a textile and apparel industrial concentration anchored in trousers, padded jackets, plus-size womenswear, and fashion womenswear, integrating ten market venues and supporting parks including Xiliu Apparel Market, Xiliu China Commerce City, an international logistics park, and an e-commerce industrial park. The cluster has approximately 26,000 stalls, over 60,000 employees, and carries more than 20,000 product varieties across 40 major categories (source: Securities Times, 2025). In terms of production capacity, the cluster produces approximately 350 million pairs of trousers and 220 million padded jackets annually. In 2024, Xiliu's annual transaction volume surpassed 90 billion yuan, with goods reaching more than 120 countries and regions (source: Securities Times, People's Finance News, 2025).

Beyond Xiliu, Tongerbao township in the same Haicheng area forms a distinct sub-cluster in fur and leather apparel. Tongerbao holds the designation of "China's Capital of Fur" from the China Leather Industry Association, and has developed eight fur and leather processing industrial parks with a total built area of 540,000 square meters, annual production capacity of approximately 4 million pieces, and more than 30,000 people employed in industry-related work (source: China Leather Industry Association, 2023). In recent years Tongerbao has adapted to livestream commerce: by 2023 its e-commerce GMV had reached 3 billion yuan, six times the retail revenue of its commercial shopping complex during the same period (source: Jiemian News, 2023).

V. Shared Pressures and Structural Gaps

Each of the three poles has achieved meaningful scale in its respective arena, but all three face common structural pressures.

Xingcheng swimwear faces intense homogeneity within the cluster. With over 1,300 enterprises producing overlapping product lines, differentiation is limited and brand premium is thin. When fast-fashion platforms compress prices, the margin for negotiation narrows faster than the cluster can adjust. Transitioning toward original design and building proprietary brands is a persistent topic internally, but progress varies widely.

Dalian's suit cluster faces a structural gap between export dependency and market diversification. European, American, and Japanese client orders remain the primary revenue source, while domestic premium bespoke adoption is slower to scale. The space between the two cannot be filled quickly.

Xiliu's pressure comes from the bifurcation of online and offline channels. Foot traffic to physical wholesale markets has faced sustained headwinds as livestream commerce has grown, and converting traditional walk-in buyers into stable online customers is the most critical transition challenge facing Xiliu today.

For sales teams targeting factory customers in Liaoning's textile and apparel sector, Tianxia Gongchang provides factory directories and decision-maker contact information filterable by region and industry, shortening the cold-outreach targeting cycle.

VI. What Makes Liaoning's Apparel Industry Worth Watching

Liaoning is not a comprehensive apparel powerhouse, but it has accumulated genuine depth in several specialized arenas: roughly one-quarter of the world's swimwear supply originates here; the world's largest intelligent bespoke suit manufacturing operation is based here; Northeast China's largest apparel wholesale distribution center is here. Three poles, each holding its own, backed by more than three decades of continuous accumulation.

The more interesting question for Liaoning's apparel industry going forward is not which cluster posted the higher output figure this year, but how three functionally distinct poles — each facing different pressures from livestream commerce, intelligent manufacturing, and global supply-chain reorganization — are choosing their respective transition paths, and whether those paths are proving viable. That is a harder and more worthwhile question than any revenue headline.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Liaoning textile and apparel factory directory and industry data)
  • Liaoning Provincial Government website (Xingcheng swimwear annual output value and production data, 2024)
  • Xinhua News Agency (Xingcheng swimwear annual production of 170 million pieces, 2024)
  • China Daily Chinese website (Xingcheng swimwear global market share approximately one-quarter, April 2024)
  • Securities Times (Xingcheng swimwear e-commerce share; Xiliu market annual transaction volume, 2023–2025)
  • CNR (China National Radio) (Dayang Group intelligent bespoke factory construction, 2024)
  • China Textile News (Dayang Group bespoke garment production and intelligent production lines, 2023)
  • China Daily (Pulandian district textile and apparel enterprise scale, 2024)
  • China Leather Industry Association (Tongerbao "China's Capital of Fur" designation and industrial park area, 2023)
  • Jiemian News (Tongerbao e-commerce GMV versus commercial complex revenue comparison, 2023)
  • People's Finance News (Xiliu market country and region coverage, 2025)