A cluster of villages on the Hangzhou Bay plain makes about a third of the world's umbrellas. Unlike Zheng'an, nobody had to engineer this: it grew on its own, next to the fabric and the port.
Songxia sits on the flat, watery land of Hangzhou Bay, in Shangyu district of Shaoxing, roughly midway between Hangzhou and Ningbo and a short hop from the Hangzhou-Ningbo expressway. It is officially "China Umbrella City", and the title is not marketing: by most counts the cluster turns out something like a third of every umbrella made on Earth. Where Zheng'an is remote, mountainous and hard to reach, Songxia is the opposite — coastal, flat, and wired into the densest manufacturing region in the country.
There is no single founder and no government masterstroke here. Songxia is a textbook Zhejiang "block economy" (块状经济): one product, repeated across a cluster of villages until the whole district does little else. It started in the mid-1980s with small township-and-village workshops making umbrella parts — ribs, runners, handles — and grew family firm by family firm through the 1990s. A handful of today's leaders trace back to that period: a Shangyu parts factory founded in 1986, Tianwaitian in 1989, then a wave of firms in the early 1990s.
By 2002 there were enough of them to justify a dedicated Songxia Umbrella Industrial Park, which formalised what the villages had already built. The pattern is the ordinary one for coastal China: industry accreted where the inputs and the market already were, rather than being summoned home by policy.
The reason Songxia is hard to dislodge is proximity. The frames, springs, runners, handles and tips are all made within the cluster, and the single most important input — fabric — comes from Keqiao, also in Shaoxing, home to the largest textile market in the region. A maker can buy polyester, pongee or UV-coated cloth in the morning and have it on a frame the same day. Much of the hand-assembly is piecework done by tens of thousands of workers, including work-at-home women across some thirty umbrella villages. Add the Ningbo-Zhoushan port an hour away, and a buyer can have an order cut, sewn, assembled and on a ship without leaving the prefecture.
The result is roughly 500 million umbrellas a year from over 1,200 firms, an output value in the order of ten billion yuan, and exports to something like a hundred countries — Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and especially Japan. Every kind is here: folding, straight, golf, beach and patio, advertising, children's, windproof and reverse umbrellas. The big names supply the global supermarket chains, and a few are climbing upmarket: one Songxia firm now holds hundreds of patents and sends most of its output to Japan, where buyers pay for design rather than just price.
An umbrella is a cheap thing, and that is the whole problem. Margins are thin, the work is intensely price-competitive, and Songxia's reputation is built on cost and completeness rather than brand — its rival cluster, Dongshi in Fujian, is the one better known for fashionable design. The response is the familiar one: automate the lines, chase patents and ODM work, build own labels, and push into e-commerce. Most of the output is still other people's brands.
Set against Zheng'an, Songxia is the control case. Zheng'an had to import its skills and be coaxed home by the state because it had no port, no material and no market. Songxia had all three on its doorstep, so the cluster simply grew. Put the two deep dives side by side and you can see the two ways a Chinese industrial town comes into being: one engineered against geography, the other handed to it.