Historical classic industries have a long historical heritage and profound cultural heritage, but cultural advantages do not equal industrial advantages. Six departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently issued the "Opinions on Promoting the High-Quality Development of Historical Classic Industries", proposing to create 100 famous Chinese consumer goods by 2028 and cultivate a group of world-class enterprises and well-known brands by 2030. This is a response to the common difficulties faced by historical classic industries such as lagging brand building and low product added value.
Only by activating the contemporary value of traditional skills can profound cultural heritage be transformed into market competitiveness. Take the silk industry as an example. 90% of my country's silk products are exported, but most of them remain in the primary processing and OEM stages of raw material processing. Independent brands have a weak voice, and the competitive advantages hidden in skills have not been fully unleashed. If you want to promote old craftsmanship to be both popular and popular, you must deeply integrate into the modern industrial system and open up a complete chain of skill inheritance, technological innovation, brand building, and scene consumption.
Promoting the standardization of traditional skills is a prerequisite for expanding the market. Many historical classic techniques rely on the experience of craftsmen and are taught by word of mouth and heart. There is a lack of unified and implementable quality standards. The quality of products is uneven, which restricts large-scale development and brand building. To establish a modern standard system that adapts to traditional craftsmanship, it is necessary to strike a balance between integrity and innovation. It is necessary to introduce protective technical specifications, maintain the core process bottom line of intangible cultural heritage skills, and avoid sacrificing quality and dissolving the cultural core in pursuit of output; it is also necessary to meet the quality, safety, and environmental protection requirements of modern consumer goods, and transform the production experience inherited by craftsmen into detectable and traceable quantitative indicators.
Another major shortcoming of the historical classic industry is the lack of R&D capabilities. Many innovations only focus on appearance improvements. Breakthroughs in materials, processes, and functions are relatively limited. The product form is solidified and difficult to adapt to contemporary life scenes. To solve this problem, we need to open up the collaborative transformation channel of industry, academia and research, promote collaborative research among universities, scientific research institutes, leading enterprises, and intangible cultural heritage workshops, improve production processes, increase yield rates, develop diversified products suitable for modern life, and truly return traditional skills to the daily lives of the public.
In the long run, the sustainable development of historical classic industries cannot be separated from the support of a complete and sound industrial chain and supply chain. For example, a large amount of production capacity in the silk industry is concentrated in the raw material OEM link, which is behind the fragmentation of the industrial chain. Only by building an independent and controllable closed-loop local industrial chain and gradually getting rid of dependence on overseas brand channels can we break the old pattern of "raw material exports, overseas OEM, and domestic low prices" and provide solid industrial soil for industrial upgrading.
When thousand-year-old skills are connected with modern standards, modern R&D, modern brands and modern markets, only historical classic industries can enhance their market competitiveness and allow Chinese ingenuity to open up a larger market around the world. (Author: Jin Guanping)
