Zhili, whose name means “weaving village,” clothes China's children. A town of 14,000 little garment firms in the old silk country near Taihu Lake, it turns out around two billion children's garments a year and roughly two-thirds of China's children's clothing, some ¥85 billion in sales.
Zhili, a town in Huzhou's Wuxing district, is the largest children's-garment manufacturing centre in China, and so in the world. It was named the country's sole “China Children's Wear Famous Town” in 2002, and the scale has only grown since: around 14,000 children's-clothing firms plus more than 8,000 e-commerce businesses, an annual output near two billion garments, and 2024 sales above 85 billion yuan with online transactions over 30 billion. By the town's own accounting it makes roughly two of every three children's garments sold in China.
The name tells the history: Zhili means “weaving village.” Huzhou is the “city of silk,” one of China's four great silk capitals, supplier to Tang-dynasty emperors, and Zhili did embroidery and weaving for centuries before, in the 1980s, its people switched from embroidery to sewing children's clothes. A wholesale children's-wear market opened in 1997, a Children's Wear City in 2008, a government design centre in 2013 that drew hundreds of designers. With Alibaba headquartered an hour away in Hangzhou, Zhili rode Taobao into e-commerce and livestreaming and became one of China's archetypal “Taobao towns.”
As wages rose, Zhili did something the cheaper towns can't: it kept the brains and exported the hands. Much of the actual sewing has migrated some 400 kilometres inland to Wangjiang county in Anhui, settled by returnee workers who once tailored in Zhili, until the rule of thumb became “Zhili handles sales, Wangjiang handles production.” Fabric is trucked out overnight and finished garments come back the next morning. The cluster grew itself a satellite, and Zhili kept the design, branding and the market.
Zhili is the northern corner of the northern-Zhejiang garment triangle, with Puyuan's sweater market and Haining's leather city both within about forty kilometres, all in the Hang-Jia-Hu silk plain beside Taihu Lake. Between the three of them, sweaters, leather and fur, and the clothes for every child, the old imperial silk country has been rebuilt as a modern wardrobe. Cross-links below.