Pity the tailors of Hangzhou, but not their children.
In shops throughout this lakefront city celebrated for its embroidered silk, middle-age men and women with nimble fingers mourn the decline of their once-glorious trade in handmade clothes.
They count many reasons, including the drifting tastes of China’s vast new middle class, whose members would rather don Louis Vuitton’s initials or Ralph Lauren’s polo pony than a sturdy nameless creation from the neighborhood.
More surprising, however, these weary craftspeople tell a tale of economic evolution that all but echoes the trials of faraway American workers. Hangzhou’s tailors know little about the debates over offshoring and free trade that have complicated relations between the U.S. and China. What they know is that they are bedeviled by China’s surging manufacturing power, the acres of textile and garment factories that have cropped up on the city’s edge to disgorge mountains of low-cost blouses, suits and pants.
Guan Qinming once owned a thriving clothier with three employees who could stitch custom business suits for the relatively rich sum of $24 each. But by 2003, business had soured so much that the 49-year-old tailor laid off his last apprentice and turned his store into a laundry. He now makes 10 cents for pressing a shirt and 40 cents for a wash, just enough to cover the monthly rent of $100.
“There used to be three or four tailors every 100 meters, but the profits disappeared,” Guan said, shirtless on a stifling afternoon, arms draped in a new delivery of dirty clothes.
“I should have been a driver,” he added.
Just down the street, Yao Rucan, 55, laughs bitterly at the notion of trying something else. He joined the trade right out of high school nearly 40 years ago, when the political disorder of the Cultural Revolution scuttled his hopes for more education.
“Most tailors don’t want to be in this business anymore,” Yao said, his battered, black-enameled sewing machine sitting idle beside him. “There isn’t enough work for us. Most my age want to join a clothing factory.”
With his long shears and electric sewing machine, Yao can fashion a man’s shirt from bolt to hanger for a little more than $3. But he concedes that a factory can do it faster and cheaper: the same shirt for $1.25.
“They have assembly lines. I can’t beat them,” he said.
In a nation churning with innovation, the tailors are addled by the change around them. For centuries, Chinese poets hailed this eastern city, beside the placid shores of West Lake, as a symbol of culture and beauty. For a millennium, it scarcely changed.
But today the city of 6.4 million people, two hours’ drive from Shanghai, is increasingly regarded as China’s Silicon Valley, an emerging incubator of Internet companies such as Alibaba, the country’s multibillion-dollar e-commerce giant. The willow-lined lakefront has sprouted a Porsche dealership and an Armani boutique.
The tailors’ problems sprouted on the city’s northern edge, with rows of modest factories like the Hangzhou Guqi Fashion Co. plant, where 100 workers turn out brightly colored women’s wear.
“There are 1,000 factories like this,” said plant manager Xie Linchang. “This is the trend. I think the factories will get bigger, and the small tailors will probably disappear.”
Do the tailors imagine government or anyone else can save them? Not likely, they say. But they are not ready to fade into oblivion. They have a plan.
Guan, the laundry owner, crows that his 19-year-old daughter entered college this year to major in communications. With luck, in a few years she will be like Yao’s 24-year-old son Yeyong, whose years of night school have paid off with a job as a programmer at the Web site Hangzhou Life. His monthly salary of $400 is three times what his father earns.
Slightly built, with a floppy haircut, the younger Yao is the portrait of the Chinese yuppie, that immense class of rising professionals born since the late 1970s, when then-leader Deng Xiaoping declared China open for business. He is urbane, apolitical and ambitious.
“My generation is experiencing the biggest change in China’s history,” he said. “And people who were born in the 1990s? Their material position will be even better.”
He still goes to night school, studying database management and other subjects he has trouble explaining to his father.
“I need to study the technical subjects, but my real interest is management,” he said.
His heroes are not political leaders, poets or sports stars; they are entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, the Hangzhou-raised English teacher who parlayed himself into an Internet rainmaker and chief executive of Alibaba. “To me, they are more exciting than movie stars. The [companies] they bring to life are not just about products–they can change your life.”
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eosnos@tribune.com
