Dalang raises no sheep and spins no yarn, yet it makes one of every five sweaters in the world, about 900 million a year, in a Dongguan town smaller than 120 square kilometres. It holds the densest concentration of knitting machines on Earth, and it is where the machines quietly replaced a generation of knitters.
Dalang, a town in Dongguan, makes about one in five of all the sweaters in the world, roughly 900 million a year, inside fewer than 120 square kilometres. It was named “China's Woolen Sweater Town” in 2002 and is now working with the national textile council toward the title “World Wool Weaving Capital.” Some 28,000 to 30,000 knitting and spinning firms employ around 200,000 people, with an industrial-chain turnover near 75 billion yuan. The strange part: Dalang raises no sheep and spins no yarn. It is almost pure knitting and assembly, fed by a Guangdong yarn market set up here in 1995.
It began in 1979, when a Hong Kong company opened the first knitwear factory in Dalang, bringing the first knitting machine and a crew of skilled workers. Through the 1980s and 90s more Hong Kong firms moved their production across the border; after the 2008 financial crisis many of them closed or pulled back to trading, and local owners took over the factories and pushed hard into automation. A village of family hand-knitting workshops had become an industrial cluster.
Dalang's real distinction is mechanical. The town holds something over 100,000 computerised flat-knitting machines, part of roughly 200,000 across Dongguan, the densest concentration of such machines anywhere on Earth, with “knitting-machine streets” running through the town. They were once all imported STOLL and SHIMA units at over a million yuan each; today around 80% are domestic whole-garment machines that match the imports' speed at under a tenth of the price, and some are now exported to Southeast Asia. The government subsidised 2,000 yuan per machine from 2008. A “sweat economy” turned, machine by machine, into a “smart economy.”
Dalang is one corner of the Pearl River Delta garment triangle, with Xintang's denim and Humen's fashion markets within half an hour; the climb here is from contract knitting toward design and brands, with firms now turning out 300 to 500 designs a season and local schools training the designers. One last detail says everything: the town basketball team recently took second in China's national village tournament, and the prize was three goats, an omen received with delight in a wool town that owns no sheep.