I. Why Liaoning's Textiles Deserve a Closer Look

When people discuss China's textile industry, their attention usually falls on Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian. Liaoning rarely gets named. That is no surprise. As one of China's old industrial bases, Liaoning's long-standing labels are steel, equipment, petrochemicals, and automobiles, and textiles occupy only a small share of its industrial map.

Yet skipping over Liaoning's textiles would mean missing two rather special cases. One is Xingcheng, a small coastal city in western Liaoning with a permanent population of under 500,000, which has nonetheless built a swimwear cluster responsible for one out of every four swimsuits sold worldwide. The other is Liaoyang, a city built on petrochemicals, which wove China's first domestically made polyester half a century ago and remains a source of chemical fiber feedstock to this day.

These two cases sit at opposite ends of the textile value chain — one connected to finished consumer goods, the other to chemical raw materials. The most common middle segments, weaving and dyeing, are by contrast relatively weak in Liaoning. This pattern — clear at both ends, sparse in the middle — is what makes Liaoning's textile industry worth studying. The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Liaoning's textiles as a regional sample not because it is large, but because its structure is distinctive enough to reveal which links of a value chain can take root and which fail to hold.

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

II. Xingcheng Swimwear: A Hundred-Billion Cluster Cut From a Foot of Cloth

The part of Liaoning's textile industry that cannot be ignored is Xingcheng swimwear.

This industry began by chance. In the 1980s, vacationers arriving at the seaside brought their demand for colorful swimwear to this small western Liaoning city. Residents started out doing contract work for one yuan a garment, and gradually turned the trade into something of scale. More than forty years later, Xingcheng has grown into a cluster with an annual output value of roughly 15 billion yuan, with more than 1,300 swimwear-related enterprises across the city and an average annual output of about 170 million swimsuits.

What better demonstrates its weight is its market share. Xingcheng swimwear holds over 40% of the domestic market and over 25% of the international market, with products reaching more than 140 countries and regions. Put more vividly: for every four swimsuits sold worldwide, one comes from Xingcheng. In a city of fewer than 500,000 permanent residents, about one-third of the population is connected to swimwear — a depth of binding between an industry and a city that is uncommon nationwide.

The thickness of the industry is rising too. In 2024, the regional brand value of Xingcheng swimwear was assessed at 9.699 billion yuan, up 1.042 billion yuan from the year before. That brand value was not conjured out of thin air; behind it is the climb of local firms from pure contract manufacturing toward cross-border e-commerce, in-house design, and smart manufacturing. Cross-border platforms such as Amazon and Shein have become important channels for going abroad; automatic cutting beds, automatic spreading machines, and digital printing equipment have entered the workshops; and some firms have extended their R&D reach overseas. A city that began with hand sewing is now shifting its added value from stitching labor toward design and branding.

Xingcheng's story matters because it proves one thing: the formation of an industrial cluster does not necessarily require natural resource endowments. Through extreme focus on a single niche category, a global node can grow in an unremarkable spot on the map.

III. Liaoyang Petrochemical: The Source and Backbone of Fiber Feedstock

If Xingcheng is the terminal end of Liaoning's textiles, then Liaoyang is its source.

Liaoyang Petrochemical has an unusual origin. In the 1970s, the state built what was then North China's largest petrochemical fiber enterprise on the banks of the Taizi River in Liaoyang. It was the largest in scale and most equipment-heavy of China's four major chemical fiber bases, importing technology and equipment from France, Germany, Italy, and Japan; about 65,000 people took part in its construction. Imported units began trial runs from October 1979 and passed state acceptance and started production in November 1982. On the eve of that startup, in January 1979, Liaoyang Petrochemical produced the first batch of fiber raw materials that could be woven into polyester-cotton fabric, and China formally announced the birth of domestically made "dacron" fabric. In an era when cloth still had to be bought with ration coupons, dacron changed how a whole generation remembers getting dressed.

Half a century on, Liaoyang Petrochemical is far more than a piece of history. Its aromatics and derivatives capacity ranks among the country's leaders. It currently has an annual capacity of roughly 700,000 tonnes of paraxylene, 400,000 tonnes of benzene, 800,000 tonnes of purified terephthalic acid, 300,000 tonnes of polyester, and 200,000 tonnes of ethylene glycol. Strung together, these figures form the key links of the polyester chain's main axis — paraxylene to purified terephthalic acid to polyester — while polyester and ethylene glycol are the direct raw materials of polyester fiber. In other words, what Liaoyang supplies to downstream fiber-making and weaving is the most upstream feedstock backbone of the entire chain.

This business is still moving toward greater scale. Liaoyang Petrochemical is pushing a transition from a fuel-type refinery to a materials-type chemical operation, planning to build a production pattern of ten-million-tonne-class refining, million-tonne-class ethylene, and two-million-tonne-class aromatics. For a textile chain whose backbone is polyester, expansion and stability at the upstream feedstock end mean the downstream is less exposed to the price swings of imported raw materials.

IV. The Gap Between the Two Ends: Liaoning's Most Honest Weakness

Put Xingcheng and Liaoyang side by side and the structure of Liaoning's textiles becomes clear: there is chemical fiber feedstock upstream and a powerful terminal like swimwear downstream, but the weaving, dyeing, fabric, and accessory links that connect the two ends are surprisingly weak.

This is exposed most directly in Xingcheng. This small city, which has made swimwear for more than forty years, still sources most of its fabric and accessories from places like Zhejiang and Fujian; even auxiliary materials such as cardboard boxes and packaging bags largely come from outside the province. Weaving and dyeing have failed to grow locally, and the reason is not hard to understand: dyeing carries high environmental requirements, and the city has long struggled to obtain the corresponding environmental permits and supporting facilities. Out-of-province fabric suppliers often only set up a warehouse point or office in Xingcheng, where manufacturers pick up materials nearby as needed, while the actual production stays in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian.

This mismatch — terminal in Liaoning, raw materials elsewhere — means that every time Xingcheng grows, a considerable share of the upstream value flows out of the province. The locality has recognized this gap and is accelerating construction of a dyeing industrial park, trying to keep the fabric and dyeing link at home and fill in the most missing segment of the chain. How far this path can go depends on whether environmental thresholds, land, and supporting facilities can truly keep up, but the direction is right.

Seen from a higher level, Liaoning has also folded textiles and apparel into the overall plan for its consumer goods industry. Under the province's arrangements for promoting high-quality development of the consumer goods industry, by 2025 the major consumer goods clusters — textiles and apparel included — are to reach 500 billion yuan in above-scale operating revenue and 800 billion yuan in full-chain operating revenue, with explicit support for Huludao to build a global swimwear supply chain center and fashion hub. This means strengthening the chain is no longer just one city's self-rescue, but has been placed on the province-wide industrial chessboard.

V. Risks and the Institute's Judgment

Pulling these threads together, Liaoning's textile industry shows a sharply two-poled structure: an upstream where an old petrochemical player holds up the base of fiber feedstock, a downstream where a single small city carries global swimwear, and a weaving-and-dyeing middle that remains a link in need of long-term repair.

Its risks are equally concrete. Xingcheng swimwear relies heavily on exports and cross-border e-commerce; once overseas orders fluctuate, the blow to a cluster bound to an entire city is significant. Fabric and accessories are constrained by out-of-province supply, and local chain-building is stuck at the environmental threshold of dyeing, which cannot be achieved quickly. Liaoyang Petrochemical's fiber feedstock business, meanwhile, is tightly bound to the cycles of the entire petrochemical industry, to oil prices, and to the aromatics-polyester price spread; it serves the national fiber market as a feedstock supplier more than it couples directly with the province's own textile terminal. In other words, although both ends of Liaoning's textile chain have bright spots, they 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 Liaoning's textiles is not the total volume, but whether the structure can be completed. Xingcheng has proven that a single niche category can reach the height of a global node, and that is Liaoning's scarcest asset; Liaoyang has proven that the old industrial base still has its chemical fiber foundation intact. What truly decides how far Liaoning's textiles can go is that most unremarkable middle segment — whether dyeing and fabric can take root locally and keep the value that now flows away. This is harder than expanding swimwear output, yet it is more worth doing. The resilience of a value chain has never depended on its strongest end, but on how firmly its weakest link can be repaired.

For upstream manufacturers supplying the textile industry — whether selling chemical fiber, fabric, dyes, or textile machinery — reaching Liaoning's swimwear and textile factory customers in bulk is possible on Tianxia Gongchang, where you can filter precisely by region and industry to find directories of Liaoning 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 Liaoning textile factories)
  • Xinhua: Observing China's Economy Through County Samples — A Coastal City in the Northeast Producing 170 Million Swimsuits a Year for the World
  • Liaoning Provincial Government: Making Swimwear for the World — A Foot of Cloth Cuts Out a Hundred-Billion-Yuan Industry in Xingcheng, Liaoning
  • Banyuetan and Sina Finance: Liaoning Brand Value Ranking — Regional Brand Value Assessment of Xingcheng Swimwear
  • Qstheory: Liaoyang Petrochemical, the Old State Enterprise That Made Dacron
  • Jiemian News: A Forty-Year Retrospective on the Cornerstone of New China's Chemical Fiber Industry
  • Huizheng News: A New Million-Tonne Ethylene Project — Liaoyang Petrochemical Sets Off Again After Turning Losses Around
  • CBNData and Ebrun: Reports on Xingcheng Swimwear's Out-of-Province Fabric and Accessory Sourcing and Dyeing Chain-Building
  • General Office of the Liaoning Provincial Government, forwarding the Department of Industry and Information Technology's Guiding Opinions on Promoting High-Quality Development of the Consumer Goods Industry