中国制鞋业和温州模式：世界主要生产和出口鞋商的观点外文翻译

中国制鞋业和温州模式：世界主要生产和出口鞋商的观

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外文翻译

原文

China’s Shoe Manufacturing and the Wenzhou Model: Perspectives on the World’s Leading Producer and Exporter of Footwear

Material Source: Journal Eurasian Geography and Economics

Author:Y. H. Dennis Wei

INTRODUCTION

The global map of industrial production is in a state of nearly unprecedented flux, reflecting China’s spectacular rise and success in becoming a dominant player in the world economic arena. Although still identified with communist ideology, the country’s most dramatic growth in output has occurred in exportable consumer goods such as clothing and footwear.

Exports from China have flooded global markets, so that the country has by now

earned the well-deserved reput ation as the “world’s factory.” In 2008, its GDP became the world’s third-largest, surpassing that of word文档可自由复制编辑

Germany and challenging the leading position of the United States.

How has China achieved its remarkable rise in production, and what roles have its industries and regions played in the process? The country’s footwear industry represents a clearexample of China’s rise in manufacturing, and thus provides some revealing answers to that question. The limited Western literature posits that China’s footwear factories are concentrated in the export-oriented Pearl River Delta PRD, where growth is driven by foreign investment and external production under a blueprint for development popularly known as the PRD model e.g., see Scott, 2006. But while this picture reflects the situation in the early 1990s, it needs to be updated, if for no other reason that several major centers of footwear production including Quanzhou Fujian Province, Chengdu Sichuan, and Chongqing and Wenzhou Zhejiang also have by now been established in China.

This paper attempts to expand our knowledge of industrial and regional development by presenting a study of footwear industry in the Wenzhou Municipality, which could be called China’s “capital of local capitalism.” The municipality is kno wn for the Wenzhou model of industrial districts and regional development, based on bottom-up development of family-owned small business enterprises embedded in dense local institutions.

Wenzhou’s districts resemble those of the Marshallian industrial word文档可自由复制编辑

districts MIDs more frequently studied and cited in the literature see A. P. L. Liu, 1992; Y. L. Liu, 1992; Parris, 1993; Ma and Cui, 2002; Sonobe et al., 2004; Ye and Wei, 2005; Walcott, 2007; Wei et al., 2007; Huang et al., 2008. The resemblance, however, tends to fade since the late 1980s, after Wenzhou’s family enterprises have undergone two major rounds of institutional change and faced several strategic choices, in conjunction with the emergence of multiregional enterprises MREs.

In this paper, I will attempt to interpret the development and restructuring of Wenzhou’s footwear industry in an effort to provide a clearer picture in the context of China’s regional development models e.g., PRD, Sunan, and Wenzhou. In so doing, I challenge both the New Regionalism literature that focuses on small firms and local assets, as well as perspectives that place undue emphasis on integration with global networks and exogenous factors of development. I will argue that neither approach provides adequate explanations of regional development in China.

THE RESEARCH SETTING

My research activities focused on the Municipality of Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang Province; Fig. 1, which covers an area of 11,784 km2. Inhabited by an estimated 7.9 million people in 2008, it had a concentration of 1.42 million in its urban district WSB, 2008. The district Wenzhou City formed the traditional economic core of the municipality, which in aggregate accounted for 81.5 percent of its gross word文档可自由复制编辑

regional product ibid..

My research on Wenzhou was initiated in the late 1990s, and from 2003 to 2005

involved surveys and personal interviews with local companies and government officials. With renewed funding, we began another round of extensive field research in August 2008 in Wenzhou in collaboration with local researchers affiliated with the Wenzhou Institute of Economic Construction and Planning and a group of faculty and students from the Department ofUrban and Regional Economics at East China Normal University. Our team included more than 40 researchers and students from Wenzhou as well as from other cities. Together we interviewed almost all business associations in Wenzhou N 20 as well as more than 100 firms recommended by these associations and representing different sectors and enterprise sizes; many are among the most influential enterprises in the region. With regard to its footwear industry, we interviewed the two relevant business associations and 15 typical companies, providing a representative sample of the entire shoe manufacturing cluster and production process. Interviews, averaging 1.5 hours, were conducted with business owners, general managers, and other high-level functionaries in charge of production, investment, and public relations of the shoe-making firms. Because our study of Wenzhou is deeply intertwined with the remaking of the Wenzhou model, I will now briefly outline how that model has changed word文档可自由复制编辑

as a consequence of institutional

restructuring.

INSTITUTIONAL RESTRUCTURING AND REMAKING OF

THE WENZHOU MODEL

The essence of the Wenzhou model is a system of production centered on family enterprises and embedded in thick, historically rooted local institutions. Families typically form the main production units, relying on social networks and sales agents integrated within local markets for production factors and flexible marketing. Broadly speaking, Wenzhou has tended to be ahead of the reform curve Y. L. Liu, 1992; in the mid-1980s, when China was still dominated by state-owned enterprises SOEs, family business units, many with “red hats” fake collective ownership, had become the backbone of Wenzhou’s economy. 17 Shoes from Wenzhou began to penetrate the markets of Chinese cities, which were then still dominated by SOEs and struggling to cope with the deprivations of a shortage economy. Nonetheless, the unfettered capitalism and protection afforded local firms by the Wenzhou government made the “made in Wenzhou” label synonymous with inferior quality. Wenzhou shoes had the reputation of lasting only for one week “week shoes” or even one day “dawn?evening shoes”. In 1987, the municipal government in Hangzhou, capital of

Zhejiang Province and one of the major markets for the shoes word文档可自由复制编辑

confiscated and burned thousands of pairs. By that time, the inherent problems of the original Wenzhou model had become serious, and local business leaders and governments pushed for change.

The Wenzhou model underwent two rounds of institutional restructuring. The first, launched in the mid-1980s, was a bottom-up process initiated by local business people and supported by the local government. It centered on establishing shareholding cooperatives as a response to the needs to clarify property rights and improve scale economies, and transformed many family enterprises into cooperative ventures. By 1997, 36,000 cooperative enterprises existed in Wenzhou, with a gross output of 90 billion yuan comprising 70 percent of the municipality’s total Editorial Committee, 2008, p. 206. These firms possessed clearer property rights and became better organized. But in tandem with with the broadening of reforms in China as a whole, Wenzhou firms began to face intense competition from foreigninvested enterprises with better equipment and higher quality products, as well as from private enterprises that had improved their competitiveness. And despite the shift of some firms to cooperative forms of ownership, most enterprises in Wenzhou still were locked in the orthodox Wenzhou model, being small in size and producing low-quality merchandise. The second round of restructuring, initiated in the mid-1990s, was devoted to quality and focused on the transformation from shareholding cooperatives to word文档可自由复制编辑

shareholding enterprises and limited-liability corporations. It resulted in the emergence of multi-regional enterprises,or de-localized “region-less” groups/conglomerates. This round of restructuring was in essence a “high-road” strategy based on efficiency, competitiveness, and innovation, with more local state involvement and integration with the global economy. Both businesses and

the local state launched campaigns to enhance the quality of products. Specific local government policies included financial support and bank loans to stimulate firm growth, allocation of land to large firms with large size and recognized potential, human resource development especially worker training, import and export subsidies, and improvements in urban infrastructure. As a result of these two rounds of restructuring, Wenzhou’s industry has been upgraded, diversified, and expanded in spatial term s; some observers now refer to a “new” Wenzhou model. Wenzhou has continued to rise in the Chinese economy, with its footwear industry being one of the most representative sectors. Thus, while traces of the orthodox Wenzhou model can still be observed, a fundamentally new type of industrial district has began to emerge.

THE NEW INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT MODEL

Similarities with the Traditional Model

In the past, when the industrial district functioned under the orthodox Wenzhou model, it in many ways resembled a classical MID?a word文档可自由复制编辑

territorial agglomeration of small firms embedded in thick local institutions.19 First, Wenzhou has produced footwear for over 500 years, including shoes explicitly for the royal family during the Ming Dynasty. In 1978, when China had just commenced economic reforms, Wenzhou already had 19 footwear factories producing 500,000 pairs of shoes annually Huang et al., 2008. By August 2008, the number of such factories had climbed to about 2,700 over 4,000 if informal, individual factories are included, supported by 2,500 related firms specializing in leather, soles, machines, ornamental

accessories, design, and other services.20 In aggregate, the industry employed ca. one

million workers producing 1.2 billion pairs of shoes, and accounting for one-fourth of

China’s total output. In 2008, the value of industrial output derived from shoe production in Wenzhou was 65.2 billion yuan Fig. 2. Wenzhou is one of the largest footwear-industry centers in China, commanding 17 percent of the Chinese market in 2007 and gradually evolving into a highly specialized andcoordinated industrial cluster. The Wenzhou Municipality can obtain most of its needs for components, semi-finished products, and services internally, including pig leather supplied from Shuitou, man-made leather from Longwan, buffalo leather Yangyi, footwear manufacturing machinery Wuniu, shoe bottoms Baishi, accessories and word文档可自由复制编辑

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