1. An Industry Pulled Apart

In statistical terms, cultural, educational, sporting and recreational goods are a single industry category. But the moment it lands in Zhejiang, it gets pulled apart into several unrelated industries.

When writing about China's manufacturing heavyweights, the narrative usually finds a single thread: autos, textiles, chemicals — each typically backed by one dominant product line and one clear industrial belt. Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods are not like that. There is no single industrial capital; instead they are scattered across several counties, each doing its own thing: Tonglu's Fenshui town makes pens, Ningbo makes stationery, Fuyang's Shangguan township makes rackets, Lishui's Yunhe makes wooden toys, and Yiwu tucks cultural and sporting goods into its all-encompassing small-commodity network. These places are far apart and their products have nothing to do with one another; their only common trait is that each has reached the front rank — nationally or globally — in its own niche.

This report will not lump Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods into "one industry." Instead it will tell the story of each separate county cluster: how a pen, a racket and a wooden toy each grew up, where their moats lie, and what kind of customers they leave for upstream suppliers.

2. Tonglu's Fenshui: Making a Ballpoint Pen 30% of the Nation

The most representative card in Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods is the pen of Fenshui town, Tonglu county.

Fenshui is known as "China's hometown of pen-making." According to public reports, the town gathers nearly 900 pen and supporting-component enterprises, produces around 8 billion pens of all kinds a year — over 30% of national output — with annual output value exceeding RMB 6 billion. By 2024, Fenshui's annual pen output reached around 8.5 billion units, with output value of about RMB 8.06 billion. What better shows its weight is market share: Fenshui pens hold around 40% of the national market, while gift pens, by some reports, hold over 90% of the global market.

That a mountain town can make an unremarkable ballpoint pen at such density rests on a full supply chain it slowly assembled over decades: from raw materials, mould processing and component manufacturing, to whole-pen production, logistics and trade — every link can be found within the town or nearby. The chain's early weak point was the high-end pen tip — that tiny steel ball and ball seat long dependent on imports. In recent years it has begun to address this gap; in 2023 a high-end pen-tip maker settled and went into production in Fenshui, planning hundreds of millions of high-end tips a year, precisely to keep an upstream link that used to be a bottleneck local.

Fenshui's story, at its core, is "making something tiny to an extreme scale." It wins not on unit price but by pushing cost, supporting industries and capacity to a point others struggle to replicate, holding the mid-low and gift-pen markets through sheer volume. That also means its challenges always sit at two ends: cost on one side, and pen tips and writing quality moving upmarket on the other.

3. Ningbo: From a Pen to a Whole Cultural-Office Suite

If Fenshui took the single category of "the pen" to an extreme, Ningbo does the whole suite of "cultural, educational and office supplies."

Ningbo is known as "China's stationery capital." According to public sources, Ningbo's stationery industry accounts for about one-fifth of national output and about one-third of exports — one of the country's most complete and most export-oriented stationery clusters. Its hallmark is not a single-product breakthrough but several national champions running at once: Deli's pencil sharpeners, Guangbo's paper and cultural-office products, Beifa's pens and Kangda's art supplies each rank at the top among their peers; Beifa is called a leading pen maker in Asia by scale. Leaders such as Deli, Guangbo and Beifa have entered Ningbo's list of priority "10-billion-class" manufacturing firms to cultivate.

The difference between Ningbo and Fenshui captures the two paths of the stationery business. Fenshui is "single category, mass volume, supply-chain-driven"; Ningbo is "multi-category, brand-led, globalized." Ningbo's factories are not merely doing processing — a sizeable share already hold their own brands, channels and overseas customers, extending the business from contract manufacturing toward brand ownership, and from domestic toward global. A pen, in Fenshui, is one link in a supply chain; in Ningbo it may be the entry point to a brand portfolio spanning writing, paper, art and office.

The challenge of this brand path is the need to keep investing in design, channels and overseas markets rather than relying on cost alone. But its reward is holding profit and pricing power in one's own hands — which is exactly the confidence behind Ningbo's claim to being a "capital."

4. Fuyang's Shangguan: A Hometown of Rackets in a Mountain Township

Shifting from cultural-educational to sporting goods, Zhejiang's hardest block hides in a mountain township called Shangguan, in Hangzhou's Fuyang.

Shangguan is known as "China's hometown of rackets." It started making bamboo rackets in the early 1970s and gradually grew into the country's largest racket production base, covering badminton, tennis, table-tennis and beach rackets. According to public reports, Shangguan's annual racket output once topped 100 million pairs; badminton rackets alone in recent years have output value of about RMB 2 billion and output exceeding 100 million units. It holds roughly 80% of China's mid-low-end racket market and sells to more than 70 countries and regions.

Shangguan's evolution is a classic "material upgrade" route. It began with bamboo and wood rackets, relying on handwork and low cost; as carbon fibre, aluminium alloy and other materials arrived, rackets shifted from bamboo and wood toward polymer composites, and products extended from pure low-end toward mid-tier brands. That a mountain township could make rackets a national base rests not on some scarce resource, but on decades of accumulated forming, mould, stringing and assembly skills among its workers, plus the components and materials that grew up around rackets.

This industry's challenge is like that of all export-oriented manufacturing: holding cost and capacity advantages at the low-mid end while moving toward mid-high-end brands and material craftsmanship. Fuyang's rackets are stuck right at that threshold for their next step.

5. Yunhe Wooden Toys: Turning a Mountain County into a Global Toy Base

Zhejiang's fourth face of cultural-and-sporting goods sits in Lishui's Yunhe — a mountain county that took wooden toys to the world.

Yunhe is known as "China's hometown of wooden toys," and is among the country's largest and most varied bases for wooden-toy manufacturing and export. According to public data, Yunhe has over 1,300 wooden-toy production and sales enterprises; its wooden-toy output accounts for about 66% of national same-category output and about 40% of the world's. Province-wide, Zhejiang's wooden-toy output exceeds 55% of the national total, with Yunhe the dominant force within it. Export is this industry's base; in 2023 Yunhe's wooden-toy exports were about USD 132 million, around 78.5% of the county's total exports.

Yunhe's distinctiveness lies in turning an inland mountain county into a base that both exports and goes online. Locally it does not just offline foreign trade — it has made e-commerce and cross-border e-commerce a priority, setting a goal of advancing toward a 10-billion-class output scale. Wooden toys are a business highly dependent on design, safety standards and overseas channels — products must pass European and American toy-safety certification and keep pace with shifting demand for educational, learning and trendy toys, which pushes Yunhe's factories beyond woodworking toward design and branding.

Wooden toys, like rackets and stationery, prove a shared trait of Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods: the win comes not from natural resources, but from taking an unremarkable category and, over decades in one particular place, making it deep, thorough and large-scale.

6. Yiwu: Another Way to Live in Cultural-and-Sporting Goods

The last block is Yiwu — and its way of making cultural-and-sporting goods differs from every cluster above.

Yiwu is not a manufacturing capital for any single cultural-and-sporting category; instead it uses a small-commodity network spanning more than 20 industrial clusters to fold these goods in. Its zipper industry has over 300 enterprises, about 20% of China's zipper firms; its cultural goods, sporting goods, toys and handicrafts, backed by the world's largest small-commodity market, form a distinctive "market-driven manufacturing" model — vast numbers of small and medium factories orbit the market, orders come from the market, products go to the world, reaching over 200 countries and regions.

Yiwu's logic is to treat cultural-and-sporting goods as a branch of its small-commodity ecosystem, not a standalone industrial landmark. Its strength is extreme category breadth and very fast market response; its weakness is that any single category lacks the depth of a specialized cluster like Tonglu's or Ningbo's. But for many fledgling cultural-and-sporting goods factories, Yiwu offers a low-barrier path of "manufacturing right next to the market" — itself a pole that cannot be ignored on Zhejiang's map.

7. The Upstream Chain: Five Clusters, Five Sets of Procurement

Zhejiang's scattered cultural-and-sporting goods structure means its upstream procurement needs also split into several non-overlapping systems:

  • Pen tips, ink and pen components: Fenshui's massive pen capacity is a steady buyer of ball seats, tip steel balls, gel ink, oil-based ink, pen-barrel plastic pellets and moulds; high-end tips and quality ink have long been the key links this chain is working to bring upstream
  • Paper, cultural-educational consumables and office components: Ningbo's paper and cultural-office cluster needs all kinds of paper, binding and office components, in large volume and with brand customers demanding on quality and lead time
  • Carbon fibre, aluminium and stringing materials: as Fuyang's rackets move from bamboo and wood toward carbon composites, demand keeps rising for carbon fibre, fibreglass, aluminium tubing, racket strings and grips — a niche ordinary sporting-goods suppliers tend to overlook
  • Timber, eco-friendly coatings and toy-safety materials: Yunhe's wooden toys consume large amounts of timber, water-based eco-coatings and accessories meeting European and American safety standards, with material-certification requirements far above ordinary wood products
  • Forming, injection-moulding and surface-treatment equipment: from pen injection moulds, to racket forming and stringing machines, to wooden-toy woodworking and coating lines, Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods equipment procurement spans plastics, metal and woodworking — a richly layered demand

These five demand types map to five distinct factory groups: pen-making, stationery, rackets, wooden toys and small commodities. An upstream salesperson who views Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods through a single-category lens will easily fixate on one block and miss the other four.

Sales teams supplying pen tips and ink, carbon materials, eco-coatings or forming equipment to these factories can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter, along the two dimensions of Zhejiang × cultural-educational-sporting goods manufacturing, prospective factory customers and decision-maker contacts across pen-making, stationery, rackets and wooden toys — turning a county-by-county hunt across five places into following a clear map.

8. The Institute's Assessment

Pulling Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting clusters together, what emerges is an industry that is "scattered yet each excellent in its own way": there is no single industrial capital, yet in several far-apart counties each has taken one niche to the front rank nationally or globally. Tonglu holds 30% of national output with a pen; Ningbo became a "stationery capital" with a whole cultural-office suite; Fuyang holds 80% of China's mid-low racket market with a racket; Yunhe takes 66% of the nation and 40% of the world with a wooden toy; and Yiwu folds cultural-and-sporting goods into a small-commodity network.

This structure's variables sit within each block's own challenge. Pens and rackets must hold cost and capacity while moving toward upstream materials and mid-high-end brands; stationery and wooden toys, already on the brand-and-global path, must keep investing in design, channels and overseas certification; Yiwu's small-commodity manufacturing must find single-category depth beyond the market dividend. These paths move at different speeds and bear no relation to one another — which is exactly the underestimated resilience of Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods: no single category or single market shock can shake all five at once.

The Institute's assessment is this: the value of Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods lies not in being number one in any single category, but in having, across five unrelated niches, each ground out over decades an industry hard for others to replicate as a whole. To understand it, one cannot treat it as one market, but as five markets with different logics, cycles and customers — and that, precisely, is the premise for efficiently developing factory customers in Zhejiang's cultural-and-sporting goods.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of Zhejiang cultural-educational-sporting goods manufacturers and industry data)
  • "Tonglu: a pen writes a big article" — Economic Daily, Xinhua (Tonglu's Fenshui town ~900 pen and supporting firms, ~8 billion pens/year over 30% of national output, output value over RMB 6 billion, 2024 output ~8.5 billion units and value ~RMB 8.06 billion, Fenshui pens ~40% national share, gift pens over 90% global share, 2023 high-end pen-tip firm settled and in production)
  • "Industrial upgrading at the pen tip" — People's Daily, People's Finance (Fenshui pen-making full-chain structure and high-end tip gap-filling)
  • "Ningbo's stationery industry climbs toward the high end of the global value chain" — China Trade Remedy Information Net (Ningbo stationery ~1/5 of national output, ~1/3 of exports; Deli sharpeners, Guangbo paper cultural-office, Beifa pens, Kangda art supplies each lead their peers; Beifa a leading Asian pen maker by scale; Deli, Guangbo, Beifa in Ningbo's 10-billion-class cultivation list)
  • "Shangguan township makes 100M+ rackets a year / your racket may come from here" — Sina Finance, Tide News, Zhejiang Online (Shangguan China's hometown of rackets, annual racket output over 100M pairs, badminton rackets recent annual value ~RMB 2 billion and output over 100M units, ~80% of China's mid-low racket market, sold to 70+ countries, shift from bamboo-wood to carbon composites)
  • "Yunhe wooden toys sail overseas" — Zhejiang Tax Bureau; "2023 panorama of China's wooden-toy industry" — Chyxx; "Yunhe wooden-toy industry three-year action plan (2023–2025)" — Yunhe County Government (Yunhe China's hometown of wooden toys, 1,300+ firms, ~66% of national same-category output and ~40% of global, Zhejiang wooden toys over 55% of national output, 2023 exports ~USD 132M, ~78.5% of county exports)
  • "Analysis of Yiwu's foreign-trade industrial-belt structure" — LianLian Global; "Yiwu ranks second nationally" — Yiwu Municipal Government (Yiwu 300+ zipper firms ~20% of China's zipper enterprises, cultural goods/sporting goods/toys/handicrafts clusters backed by world's largest small-commodity market, market-driven manufacturing, products to 200+ countries and regions)