Daily Times

The Xufang International Media of CICG, the CICG Center for Asia and Pacific and the Information Office of the Qingdao Municipal People’s Government jointly organized an interview on the theme of “Perceiving the Charm of Qingdao”. Focusing on the theme of rural revitalization, correspondents from China, the United States, Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and other countries paid a visit to the “town of hat-making” in Jiaozhou, Qingdao of Shandong. This is the Ligezhuang Town of Jiaozhou City, the famous “Chinese town of hat-making”. The town has a population of 120,000, from which 30% are engaged in the industries relate to the hat-making. It has an annual yield of 500 million hats of all kinds and an annual output value of 4 billion yuan. One-third of the world’s baseball caps are manufactured here.

After gaining an in-depth understanding of the development history of the town’s hat-making industry at Qingdao Yaoqing Hat Making Co., Ltd., Chinese and foreign reporters also went down to the workshop to experience part of the hat-making process. “A baseball cap looks simple, but it is not easy to make. There are more than 30 processes in a hat from fabric slicing to packaging. There are strict operating specifications, whether about the early fabric selection, the hat shape design, or the tailoring, the sewing, and the shaping in the production process. The deviations of many processes are to be controlled within millimeters,” said the guide of the company. In the sample exhibition hall, American reporter John Klump was very excited to see many familiar hat styles from his childhood memory. He took turns to try on a baseball cap and tried some street dance steps involuntarily.

It is said that since the birth of the first hat-making enterprise in 1985, Ligezhuang Town has more than 600 full-chain enterprises, forming an industrial matrix integrating raw material procurement, product design, processing and manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and realizing the industry patterns of “hat companies in every village” and “balancing all the industrial supply and demand without leaving the town”. Their products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions in Europe, America, Latin America, Asia and Africa. They have also formulated the first “national norm” for the production of six-piece sports caps for the national hat-making industry. The locality is planning and has completed the construction of an industrial park of 2 square kilometers for hat accessories, and has created the Qingdao SCO Cross-border E-commerce Industrial Park of 15,000 square meters at the moment. The “town of hat-making” is making strides towards a “hat-making metropole” on the 10 billion-level.