The red star shines on China｜The starting point of the Long March, a yarn strings together hundreds of billions of industries

In Yudu, Jiangxi Province, at the Memorial Hall of the Central Red Army’s Long March Departure, the black paint on the body of a hand-operated sewing machine has long been mottled.

More than 90 years ago, Ge Jiediao, a Red Army soldier from Yudu, carried a sewing machine similar to this and completed the 25,000-mile Long March.

Today, more than 90 years later, on the same red land, people are still dealing with needlework: more than 3,850 textile and garment companies are operating at full capacity, manufacturing for more than 300 domestic and foreign brands, and a complete textile and garment industry chain is taking shape here.

In 2025, the revenue of Yudu's textile and apparel industry will exceed 100 billion yuan, accelerating this "needle and thread relay".

The industrial transformation originated from the struggle of a generation of Yudu tailors to "go out" and "come back".

In the early 1990s, as domestic clothing consumption gradually shifted to purchasing ready-made clothes, 300,000 "Yudu tailors" moved south and poured into the coastal clothing industry to work hard. They worked abroad, developed their craftsmanship, and accumulated experience, which also laid the foundation for the rise of Yudu's textile and clothing industry.

In 2017, Yudu positioned textile and clothing as the "primary industry" to grasp, introduced various preferential policies such as land and taxation, and took the initiative to undertake the transfer of high-quality textile and clothing industries along the coast.

A large number of entrepreneurs from Yudu who have worked abroad have returned to their hometown to start businesses, driving the transformation and upgrading of local textile and garment manufacturing.

"Going up and down the stairs is the upstream and downstream, and the industrial park is the industrial chain." This sentence is not an exaggeration at all.

The local government has invested a total of more than 10 billion yuan to build 13 public service platforms and 3.625 million square meters of standard factory buildings. A yarn comes in and a garment goes out without leaving the park.

Today, in the workshop, traditional tailoring skills are iteratively upgrading to smart manufacturing.

In the production workshop of Zhifang Cloud Chain, there are almost no workers. Nearly 60 spinning machines are running at high speed, and the spindles of 25,000 revolutions per minute are operating in an orderly manner. Each spindle is equipped with an independent sensor, and data on thread breakage and abnormal tension are transmitted back to the large central control screen in real time, and fault warnings are pushed directly to the bracelets of inspection personnel.

In the 3D measuring room of Winner Fashion, you can stand in the 3D measuring room for 3 seconds, and the body data of 28 parts will be directly uploaded to the cloud. A tailor-made suit can be put on you in 7 days. The production line no longer only runs one model, but also undertakes customization, quick return of small orders and large-scale production.

Data shows that currently, Yudu County’s textile and garment enterprises have 135 private trademarks and 21 Jiangxi famous brand products, and the industrial digital transformation coverage rate is as high as 85%.

The "5G+AI" digital twin workshop and intelligent hanging system have become standard production equipment here. Digitalization has been deeply integrated with Yudu's textile and garment industry, resulting in an improvement of more than 30% in production efficiency.

People from Yudu who once went south to make a living started a new business in the fashion factory at their doorstep.

The 100-billion-level industrial cluster has driven about 300,000 people to be employed, of which 80,000 are stably employed locally. For locals, making money and taking care of their families are no longer a single-choice question.

With the accelerated rise of Yudu's textile and apparel industry, the door to opening up is opening wider and wider.

At the Jiangxi (Ganzhou) Textile and Apparel International Direct Procurement Matchmaking Conference, more than 150 international buyers from 41 countries and regions gathered in the capital, and reached a total international intended order of US$420 million on site.

Yudu's solid industrial foundation and mature intelligent manufacturing capabilities have attracted buyers from the United Kingdom, Turkey, India and other countries to cooperate with local suppliers. The British Debenhams Group even moved its China office headquarters to Yudu to lay out a normalized procurement and supply chain system.

This small town in southern Gansu is using the "one stitch and one thread" of the new era to create a new business card for the industry.

Back then, the people in Yudu sewed military uniforms and knitted straw sandals in the hope that the Red Army would win the war and look forward to good days.

Today, the hundreds of billions of industries here are weaving a new picture of the revitalization of the old district.

In the future, the story of this “needle and thread relay” will continue.

｜Chief Planner: Yu Lan

｜Planner: Zhou Rui

｜Coordinator: Wang Qingkai Cheng Chunyu

｜Written by: Zhang Ni

｜Editor: Li Jinlei

｜Proofreading: Huang Lei

｜Produced by "Sanlihe" Studio