The Empire’s New Clothes

It’s all about volume. Thousands of factories. Countless SKUs. Endless hours for workers. It takes a village. One known as Schein Village. It’s a world away in China, but the shirt on your back could be cut from the same cloth featured in this story. Welcome to human-powered machine behind those cheap threads. “The buildings have been hollowed out to make way for sewing machines, rolls of fabric and bags brimming with cloth scraps. The doors to their basements are always open for the seemingly endless cycle of deliveries and collections. As the day passes, the shelves fill up with warehouse-bound, clear plastic bags labelled with a now-distinctive five-letter noun. But even past 10:00pm, the sewing machines – and the people hunched over them – don’t stop as more fabric arrives, in trucks so full that bolts of colour sometimes tumble onto the factory floor.” A special report from BBC has the who, what, why, and wear: The truth behind your $12 dress: Inside the Chinese factories fuelling Shein’s success.

+ As you’ll learn in the piece above, there are reasons beyond lax labor rules that give China a competitive advantage when it comes to clothing. But fast fashion isn’t the only Chinese industry that’s bursting at the seams. NYT (Gift Article): China’s Trade Surplus Reaches a Record of Nearly $1 Trillion. “When adjusted for inflation, China’s trade surplus last year far exceeded any in the world in the past century, even those of export powerhouses like Germany, Japan or the United States. Chinese factories are dominating global manufacturing on a scale not experienced by any country since the United States after World War II.” (As you might imagine, this is going to be a very loud topic in DC in about a week…)