One county in Hebei weaves most of China's metal mesh, everything from chicken wire and gabion baskets to the 3,200-mesh stainless filters used in aerospace. More than 13,000 wire-mesh firms cluster here, exporting to over 190 countries, and Anping even publishes the world's only wire-mesh price index.
Anping, in Hengshui, Hebei, is the capital of wire mesh. More than 13,000 wire-mesh enterprises crowd this single county; by local accounts the industry employs around 210,000 people and contributes over 70% of Anping's GDP, tax revenue and rural incomes, with operating income on the order of 76 billion yuan. Almost everything the county does, it does in woven and welded metal.
The range is enormous. Anping makes more than 400 varieties and 6,000 specifications: guardrails, gabion baskets, chain-link fence, razor wire, window screens, perforated and expanded metal, and filter meshes for mining, petrochemicals and air purification. At the fine end it weaves stainless mesh up to 3,200 wires to the inch, the grade used in aerospace and defence. The same skill makes a rabbit hutch and a jet-engine filter.
Anping wove long before it weaved steel; the county has a deep tradition of weaving screens and sieves that predates the modern industry, and that hand-weaving instinct is what the wire trade grew out of. The local slogan, "from Anping Weaving to Anping Smart Manufacturing," captures the arc from craft looms to automated mesh machines and sintered multi-layer filters.
Anping does not only make the mesh; it sets the benchmark. Its products travel to more than 190 countries along over 1,200 transport lines, helped by closeness to Tianjin's port, and in 2020 the China Wire Mesh Index, the only price index for the global wire-mesh industry, was launched here. When a town makes enough of one thing, it stops taking the world price and starts making it.
Like Yangzhong's switchgear, wire mesh is everywhere and noticed nowhere: it fences fields, filters fluids, screens windows and reinforces concrete across the built world. Anping is another of the atlas's invisible capitals, a place whose product you have touched a hundred times without once wondering where it was made.