The Textile Industry Began To Build Factories In The United States. The TPP Agreement Is Crucial.

25 years ago, Ni Meijuan, in Rand, Indian, South Carolina, worked as a spinners in a giant textile mill in Hangzhou, China, earning $19 a month.

Now, she is training at Keer Group in April at a new cotton mill in South Carolina, Cole.

How do workers do their previous jobs?

According to reports, "they learn things very fast," said Ni Meijuan. She has just shown two new workers how to straighten out a strew of disordered cotton thread from the gears of the spinning machine.

"But their textile speed has to be improved."

Textile manufacturers from former low-cost countries were once typical representatives of cheap mass production, and now they are building factories in the United States.

The boundary between the high cost production countries and the low cost producing countries began to blur. The change in the textile sector is part of this change process. Few people expected such a change 10 years ago.

Over the past years, China's workers' wages, energy prices and logistics costs have been increasing.

The new quota system has been introduced into the import sector, which has led to a lower profit in China's textile production.

At the same time, the cost of production in the United States is becoming more competitive.

In Lancaster County, Indian's Indian Land, Cole group found that local people are eager to work, even if their wages are low. There are also cheap and abundant land and energy resources, as well as subsidized cotton.

From county to state to federal government, politicians in the United States are competing with subsidies and tax incentives to attract Cole group to bring back jobs that they thought they had lost forever.

The United States led package of Pacific trade agreements did not include China. This prospect also prompted Chinese textile enterprises to take a place here so as not to be trapped outside the alluring American market.

The Cole group set up a cotton mill here for $218 million, spinning the raw cotton into yarn and selling it to all parts of Asia.

Product manufacturer.

Although Cole is still importing raw cotton from the United States and doing a lot of yarn production in China, this situation is slowly changing.

"Why did Cole come here? Concessions, land, environment and workers," said Zhu Shanqing, chairman of Cole, when he came to the United States recently.

"In China, the whole spinning industry is losing money," it added.

"But in the United States, things are quite different."

Since the early resumption of trade relations between Beijing and Washington in the early 1970s, the United States has been faced with a huge trade deficit with China for most of the time, because the Americans spent less than $one billion on cheap electronic products.

And other Chinese goods.

But China's rising labor and energy costs are reducing its manufacturing competitiveness.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, China's manufacturing wage has increased two times over the past 10 years, from 4.35 US dollars per hour in 2004 to about 12.47 US dollars per hour last year. Consulting

Similarly, data from Boston consulting firm show that in the US, productivity adjusted manufacturing wages have increased by less than 30% from 2004 to $22.32 per hour.

The wage cost of American workers is more than that of China, which is offset by lower natural gas prices, cheap cotton raw materials, and local tax incentives and subsidies.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, the average US $1 production in the US now costs 96 cents in China.

Data from the International Textile Manufacturers Federation show that the cost of spinning industry in China is 30% higher than that in the United States.

"Everyone feels that the cost of China will always be lower," said Harold L. Sirkin, senior partner of Boston Consulting Group, L Harold.

"But things are changing, faster than everyone else can imagine."

China's rising production costs are causing some types of producers to shift to low-cost countries such as Bangladesh, India and Vietnam.

In many cases, a large number of enterprises are left by the Chinese themselves, and these people have begun to build production bases in other regions.

In recent years, some manufacturers have turned to the United States.

A report released in May by New York research firm Rhodium Group showed that from 2000 to 2014, the value of new projects and acquisitions by Chinese enterprises in the US amounted to US $46 billion, many of which occurred in the past five years.

North Carolina and South Carolina now have at least 20 Chinese manufacturers, including the Cole group and Sun Fiber, which set up a polyester fiber plant last year at Richburg, South Carolina.

In Lancaster County, negotiations with two other textile enterprises from Taiwan and Mainland China are in progress.

"I never thought it would be a Chinese job to bring back the textile industry," said Keith Tenel, Keith Tunnell, President of Lancaster County Economic Development Corporation. He helped Cole group get a subsidy worth about $20 million, including infrastructure subsidies, income bonds and tax relief. "(County)

Cole's Adventures in America are not without risks.

For example, the strength of the US dollar has increased the cost of production here.

The shortage of water resources in Arizona and California may also threaten cotton production and threaten the less reliable Cotton Subsidy.

Negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been stagnant, and the agreement does not include China.

The outcome of the negotiations will also affect Cole's future in the US.

The US negotiators are pushing forward some rules that require garment manufacturers in member countries to enjoy tariff relief only if they use yarn from the trade area.

Through the production of yarn in the United States, Cole is increasing the odds and ensuring that he can continue to supply yarn to clothing manufacturers in Vietnam and other countries within the TPP trading area.