The chair you are sitting on may have come from Anji, a bamboo-covered county in northern Zhejiang that makes one of every three chairs in China and half of all the chairs China exports. It is the largest office-chair production base on Earth, and it began with a single swivel chair in 1981.
Anji, a county in Huzhou in the far north of Zhejiang, is the largest office-chair research and production base in the world. It makes about a third of all the chairs sold in China and roughly half of every chair China exports, and has led the country in office-chair exports for ten years running, shipping to more than 80 countries. Some 1,200 chair firms turn out more than 35 million chairs a year, fast enough that locals say seventy chairs are born in Anji every minute. As the appliance magnate Dong Mingzhu once told an audience: don't bother buying foreign-brand chairs, because they nearly all come from Anji anyway.
The origin is almost accidental. In 1980 the Dipu farm-tool factory built 45 iron “computer desks” for the computer room at Zhejiang University; word spread that Anji could make the furniture a modern office needed, orders poured in, and the factory reinvented itself. In 1981, working with Tongji and Peking universities, it produced China's first five-wheel swivel chair, and the name “China's Chair Capital” stuck. After a brutal 1990s price war and slump, a 2002 ten-year plan and a dedicated industrial park rebuilt the cluster, and leaders like Yongyi and the listed Henglin grew out of the wreckage.
Anji is famous for three things, and locals list them together: a leaf, a stalk and a chair. It is China's bamboo capital, producing nearly a tenth of the country's bamboo output from under 2% of its bamboo forest, and the home of Anji white tea; seven-tenths of the county is mountains. It is also where the slogan “lucid waters and lush mountains are gold and silver mountains” was coined in 2005, the founding line of China's green-development story, and the bamboo now feeds the eco-materials that go into the chairs.
The chair business runs on thin contract-manufacturing margins and fierce internal competition, and Anji's firms are trying to climb out the now-familiar way: cross-border e-commerce, mining Amazon's best-seller lists for openings, and building their own brands in gaming chairs, ergonomic chairs and massage chairs. The county's thirty-minute parts circle and shared production capacity let a single new brand go from zero to 25 million dollars in annual sales in five years. The move, as everywhere in this atlas, is from price competition to value competition.