If you’re reading this in a pair of sneakers, there’s a surprisingly good chance they began their life in a place you’ve never heard of. Globally, one in every five pairs of athletic shoes is manufactured in a single, unassuming county-level city on China’s southeastern coast: Jinjiang.1 Annually, this city churns out over a billion pairs of shoes. It is the birthplace and headquarters of national champions that have become global behemoths, brands like Anta, Xtep, 361°, and Peak.1 Yet, for all its colossal output, Jinjiang remains largely anonymous in the West, a ghost in the global machine. It’s a place that produces the very items on our feet but doesn’t exist on our mental map of China.
This paradox is the heart of Jinjiang’s story. Geographically, it’s a small patch of land, just 649 square kilometers, nestled on the coast of Fujian province, directly across the strait from Taiwan.3 For centuries, it was known as a poor agricultural county, a place of “dense population and barren valleys” (人稠山谷瘠, rén chóu shāngǔ jí), where the land was too infertile to support its people, forcing generations to seek their fortunes abroad.1 It had no significant natural resources, no history of industrial might, and no special government designation to kickstart its economy.
So, how did this overlooked corner of China, against all odds, transform itself into the undisputed “Shoe Capital” (中国鞋都, Zhōngguó Xié Dū)? The answer isn’t found in government master plans or foreign investment alone. It’s a uniquely Chinese saga of grit, audacious opportunism, and a local philosophy so powerful it has been studied and codified by the country’s top leadership. It’s the story of how a city fought its way to the top, one shoe at a time.
To understand Jinjiang, you must first understand a four-character phrase in the local Minnan dialect: “爱拼才会赢” (Ài pīn cái huì yíng). It translates literally to “You have to fight to win,” but its meaning runs much deeper than a simple motivational slogan. For Americans, think of it as a fusion of the Protestant work ethic and the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things,” all supercharged by a survivor’s instinct. This phrase is the cultural DNA of the region, the foundational ethos that fueled Jinjiang’s impossible rise.5
This spirit was forged in the crucible of hardship. For centuries, the people of Fujian faced unforgiving terrain—a local saying describes the province as “eight parts mountain, one part water, and one part farmland” (八山一水一分田, bā shān yī shuǐ yī fēn tián).6 With little land to cultivate, survival meant turning to the sea, either through trade or emigration. This history bred a culture of proactive struggle, relentless hustle, and an unshakeable belief that your destiny is not preordained. As the famous song that popularized the phrase goes, life is “three parts decided by heaven, seven parts dependent on hustle” (三分天注定，七分靠打拼,
sān fēn tiān zhùdìng, qī fēn kào dǎpīn).5 This wasn’t just a nice idea; it was a survival strategy.
This abstract ethos came to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the dawn of China’s Reform and Opening-Up era. The spark for the shoe industry came from overseas relatives, known as Huáqiáo (华侨). These relatives, who had emigrated from Jinjiang generations earlier, would send back gifts, including stylish “foreign shoes” (洋鞋, yáng xié), which were exotic and highly coveted items in a still-closed China.10 In a moment of entrepreneurial inspiration that would change the city forever, local villagers began to wonder if they could make these shoes themselves. In 1979, a man named Lin Tuqiu gathered 14 fellow villagers, and they painstakingly deconstructed a pair of these foreign sneakers to reverse-engineer the manufacturing process.11
This single act ignited a firestorm of grassroots capitalism. The “family workshop” (家庭作坊, jiātíng zuōfang) era had begun. All across Jinjiang, but especially in the town of Chendai, people turned their homes into miniature factories. The barriers to entry were low, but the risks were enormous. Entrepreneurs started with almost nothing. Ding Shuibo, who would later found the sportswear giant Xtep, began his journey in 1987 with two friends and a shared capital of just 500 yuan.1 Ding Jiantong, the founder of 361°, started making shoes in his own living room, initially managing to produce only five pairs a day before scaling up to ten.1 This period is vividly described by the Chinese phrase “家家点火，户户冒烟” (
jiājiā diǎnhuǒ, hùhù màoyān), meaning “every house lit a fire, every chimney smoked,” a testament to the raw, decentralized, and almost frantic wave of industrialization that swept the region.15
What drove this phenomenon was not just economic desperation, but a deeply ingrained cultural preference for being one’s own boss. A local Minnan proverb says, “卖三占钱土豆也要做头家” (mài sān zhàn qián tǔdòu yě yào zuò tóujiā), which means, “Even if you only sell three cents’ worth of peanuts, you want to be the boss”.5 This powerful desire for autonomy and ownership, over the security of a salaried job, created a massive and unique pool of individuals who were psychologically primed for high-risk, high-reward entrepreneurship. While people in other parts of China might have sought the stability of a government job, the people of Jinjiang were culturally programmed to gamble on themselves. This “founder’s mentality” was a non-replicable competitive advantage, a human resource that proved more valuable than any mineral deposit or fertile field. It explains not just that a miracle happened, but why it happened
here.
If the “fight to win” spirit was the fuel, the arrival of Taiwanese manufacturers was the spark that ignited the engine of Jinjiang’s growth. In the 1980s, a pivotal geopolitical and economic shift occurred. Taiwan, then a global powerhouse that controlled over 80% of the world’s branded shoe production, began looking for ways to lower its manufacturing costs. The mainland, with its vast and inexpensive labor pool, was the obvious answer.10
Jinjiang was the perfect landing spot for this industrial migration. It was separated from Taiwan by a narrow strait, making logistics relatively simple. More importantly, the two regions shared a common language—the Minnan dialect—and deep ancestral ties, which smoothed the cultural and business friction that often plagues cross-border ventures.10 The Taiwanese factory owners were, in many ways, coming home.
This influx transformed Jinjiang into the world’s workshop. The dominant business model was known as “三来一补” (sān lái yī bǔ), or the “three-comes and one-compensation” model. This was a form of contract manufacturing where foreign companies would provide the raw materials, the product designs, and sometimes even the equipment. The Chinese factory, in turn, would provide the factory space and the labor, earning a fee for assembly.10 For years, the factories of Jinjiang operated in this mode, churning out millions of pairs of shoes for global giants like Nike and Adidas, who established production bases in the city during this period.18
On the surface, this was a story of low-wage labor and razor-thin profit margins. But beneath the surface, something far more significant was happening. This period was a crucial, city-wide apprenticeship. By manufacturing for the best brands in the world, Jinjiang’s entrepreneurs and workers were getting a world-class education in shoemaking, for free. They weren’t just stitching uppers to soles; they were absorbing everything. They learned advanced production techniques, sophisticated quality control standards, and the complex logistics of global supply chain management.18
This intense focus on a single industry created an industrial ecosystem of unparalleled depth and efficiency. The town of Chendai, in particular, became the epicenter. Within its 38 square kilometers, over 7,000 shoe-related enterprises sprang up.6 A local saying boasted that an entrepreneur could gather all the necessary components and materials to make a pair of shoes within half an hour, and find every element of the value chain—from new material R&D to brand marketing—within a 50-kilometer radius. This hyper-specialized cluster created a powerful gravitational pull, making Jinjiang the undisputed center of the shoemaking universe.6
This OEM phase was not merely an exploitation of cheap labor; it was a massive, unintentional technology and knowledge transfer program. The expertise wasn’t taught in classrooms; it was learned on the factory floor, day in and day out. This practical, embedded knowledge created a workforce and a managerial class with a deep, intuitive understanding of how to make high-quality shoes efficiently. So when the time came for Jinjiang to step out of the shadows and build its own brands, its entrepreneurs weren’t starting from scratch. They were starting from a position of manufacturing excellence that was already world-class. This “paid apprenticeship” was the hidden key that unlocked their future, allowing them to eventually compete on quality and innovation, not just on price.
For nearly two decades, Jinjiang was content to be the anonymous factory behind the world’s biggest brands. That all changed in 1997. The Asian Financial Crisis ripped through the global economy, and the river of foreign OEM orders that had nourished Jinjiang for so long suddenly dried up. Factories that had relied entirely on contract manufacturing saw their business evaporate overnight. Many smaller workshops went bankrupt.2 For the “sleep-deprived Jinjiang people” (睡不着的晋江人), it was an existential threat that forced a painful but necessary pivot. They had to stop making shoes for others and start making them for themselves. They had to build their own brands for the massive, untapped domestic market.8
What followed was one ofthe most audacious and aggressive marketing campaigns in modern business history, a strategy so distinctive it’s known in China as the “Three-Pronged Axe” (三板斧, sānbǎnfǔ) of Jinjiang branding.
The first axe was the celebrity gamble. The legendary case study is Anta. In 1999, the company’s founder, Ding Shizhong, was running a business with annual revenues of less than 50 million RMB. In a move that his own family thought was insane, he bet a huge portion of his capital—800,000 RMB—to sign the table tennis world champion Kong Linghui as Anta’s first celebrity spokesperson.20 The gamble paid off spectacularly. The following year, Kong won a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. As he stood on the podium, his face was beamed into hundreds of millions of Chinese homes, and so was the Anta brand. Sales exploded, and Anta’s market share rocketed to over 13%.20 This high-risk, high-reward play became the bible for every other aspiring brand in Jinjiang. Soon, a veritable army of stars was enlisted. Xtep signed rebellious pop icon Nicholas Tse to cultivate a “cool” image.22 Delhui snagged Jay Chou, the biggest pop star in the Chinese-speaking world.12 The message was clear: if you wanted to be a national brand, you needed a famous face.
The second axe was a brute-force television onslaught. Having secured their celebrity endorsers, the Jinjiang brands proceeded to blanket the airwaves, particularly on the national sports channel, CCTV-5. The spending was staggering. During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, it was said that one in every four commercials on CCTV-5 was for a Jinjiang shoe brand, leading viewers to jokingly dub it the “Jinjiang Channel”.12 Between 2004 and the early 2010s, Jinjiang companies collectively poured over 6.5 billion RMB into television advertising.12 This relentless “ad bombing” was not subtle, but it was incredibly effective. It seared the names Anta, Xtep, 361°, and a dozen others into the collective consciousness of a generation of Chinese consumers, creating brand recognition from thin air.
The third axe was the rush to go public. The transformation from scrappy family workshops into modern, publicly traded corporations was actively encouraged and accelerated by the local government. In a remarkable display of pro-business governance, Jinjiang established a dedicated “上市办” (Shàngshì Bàn), or “IPO Office,” to guide companies through the complex process of listing on the stock exchange. The government even offered substantial cash rewards—over 3 million RMB per company—for successful listings, effectively subsidizing their entry into the capital markets.13 Anta’s hugely successful IPO in Hong Kong in 2007, which valued the company at nearly 20 billion HKD on its first day, triggered a stampede.13 Xtep and Peak followed in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and 361° listed in 2009, cementing the city’s dominance.1 This flood of capital provided the funds for even more marketing, more stores, and more expansion.
| Brand | Founding Family/Entrepreneur | First Major Endorser | Year of Endorsement | IPO Year (Hong Kong) |
| Anta | Ding Shizhong | Kong Linghui (Table Tennis) | 1999 | 2007 |
| Xtep | Ding Shuibo | Nicholas Tse (Pop Star) | 2001 | 2008 |
| 361° | Ding Jiantong | Focus on event sponsorship | – | 2009 |
| Peak | Xu Jingnan | Focus on NBA player sponsorships | – | 2009 |
| Delhui | (Ding family) | Jay Chou (Pop Star) | 2003 | (Failed IPO attempt) |
This three-pronged strategy—celebrity power, media saturation, and capital infusion—was the engine that propelled Jinjiang from a manufacturing hub into a true “Brand City” (品牌之都).
The years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics were a golden age for Jinjiang’s brands. National pride was at an all-time high, and the domestic sportswear market was booming. Flush with cash from their recent IPOs, the companies embarked on a period of frenzied, almost manic expansion. They raced to open thousands of new stores across the country, pushing massive quantities of products into their wholesale distribution channels in a bid to capture market share.26 The strategy was simple: build it, and they will come. For a while, it worked.
But this rapid, unchecked growth was built on a fragile foundation. The dominant business model was still wholesale-centric, meaning the brands sold their products to regional distributors, not directly to consumers. This created a dangerous blind spot. The companies had a clear view of their orders from distributors but little to no real-time data on what was actually selling in the stores. They were flying blind, guided only by the optimistic forecasts of their distributors.
In 2012, the industry slammed into a wall. The post-Olympic hangover set in, consumer demand softened, and the brands suddenly realized their distribution channels were clogged with mountains of unsold shoes and apparel. The Great Inventory Crisis had arrived.14 The situation was so dire that it gave rise to a grim industry joke: “The shoes already produced by Jinjiang companies would be enough for the entire world to wear for several years without making a single new pair”.14 Warehouses across the city were filled to the brim with products that couldn’t be sold, and for many small business owners, their entire net worth was tied up in this dead stock.29
This crisis acted as a brutal but necessary market filter. It triggered a great culling that separated the resilient from the reckless. Brands like Delhui and Xidelong (XDL), which had poured all their resources into the “celebrity + TV ads” playbook but lacked deep operational strength, were wiped out. They collapsed under mountains of debt and unsold inventory, becoming cautionary tales of the industry’s excess.14
For the survivors, the crisis was a near-death experience that forced a fundamental and painful transformation. Anta’s founder, Ding Shizhong, later called it “the biggest crisis since starting the business”.13 The leaders of Anta, Xtep, and 361° realized their entire business model was broken. In response, Anta led the charge in a radical strategic shift: it would transform itself from a “brand wholesale company” into a “brand retail company”.13 This wasn’t just a change in terminology; it was a complete overhaul of their operations. They began the arduous process of taking back control of their retail network, buying out distributors, and implementing sophisticated IT systems to track inventory and sales data from every single store in real-time. It was a painful, expensive, and multi-year effort, but it was essential for survival.13
The 2012 inventory crisis was not a random market downturn. It was the inevitable, structural failure of the very “Branding Blitz” model that had brought Jinjiang so much success. The strategy of using mass media to create demand and then pushing products through a disconnected wholesale channel was inherently unstable. The euphoria of the Olympics created a massive bubble in channel inventory, and when consumer demand inevitably cooled, that bubble burst with devastating consequences.14 The crisis, therefore, was the system correcting itself. It forced the leading companies to abandon their old playbook and adopt a modern, data-driven, consumer-focused retail model—the kind used by their global competitors. The crisis wasn’t just a failure; it was the catalyst for Jinjiang’s second great evolution, transforming its leading companies from aggressive marketers into sophisticated, modern retailers.
Having survived the crucible of the inventory crisis, the leading Jinjiang brands emerged leaner, smarter, and more resilient. The 2010s marked the beginning of a new era, Jinjiang 2.0, defined by a strategic pivot from “competing on price” (拼价格, pīn jiàgé) to “competing on technology” (拼科技, pīn kējì).31 The goal was no longer just to make affordable shoes, but to make world-class performance footwear that could rival the best in the world.
This shift is visible across the industry. Companies that once relied on copying foreign designs now pour massive resources into research and development. Anta, for example, has built state-of-the-art sports science laboratories equipped with 3D foot scanners and force plates to analyze athletic performance with scientific rigor.33 The city has become a hotbed for material science innovation. Local firms are developing advanced materials like graphene-infused soles that offer superior shock absorption and durability, once the exclusive domain of high-tech aerospace applications.31 In the factories, the hum of sewing machines is increasingly being replaced by the whir of robots and the glow of 5G-connected smart manufacturing systems that can track every step of the production process, boosting efficiency by double-digit percentages.34
With a renewed focus on product and technology, Jinjiang’s giants have set their sights on the global stage, pursuing two primary strategies for expansion.
The first, and most audacious, has been to simply buy the world. The blueprint for this strategy was laid in 2009, when Anta acquired the China operations of the classic Italian brand FILA. Anta’s management brilliantly repositioned FILA as a premium, fashion-forward sportswear brand, turning it into a multi-billion-dollar business and proving they could manage and grow a foreign brand successfully.36 This success gave them the confidence for a much bigger gamble. In 2019, in a deal that was widely described as a “snake swallowing an elephant” (蛇吞象,
shé tūn xiàng), an Anta-led consortium acquired the Finnish sporting goods giant Amer Sports for a staggering €4.6 billion.37 This single transaction gave Anta control over a portfolio of prestigious, high-end international brands, including Arc’teryx, the cult-favorite and now mainstream “gorpcore” brand; Salomon, a leader in trail running and hiking gear; and Wilson, the iconic American brand famous for its tennis rackets and basketballs.38 This was a strategic masterstroke, a shortcut that allowed Anta to bypass decades of brand-building and instantly become a major player in the lucrative high-end global market.
The second strategy has been to conquer the digital frontier. Jinjiang has fully embraced the e-commerce revolution, with the local government actively promoting digital transformation as a way for its traditional industries to reach new customers and stay relevant.40 This has opened the door for a new generation of entrepreneurs and breathed life into older brands. On platforms like Pinduoduo, legacy brands like “Gong Niu Shi Jia” (公牛世家), which had faded from the offline world, are finding a second wind. By leveraging consumer data from the platform, they can rapidly design and market products that cater to the niche tastes of younger demographics, creating trendy items with labels like “wasteland-core” (废土风,
fèitǔ fēng) that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.42
This entire journey, from grassroots workshops to global acquisitions, has been underpinned by a unique philosophy of governance known as the “Jinjiang Experience” (晋江经验, Jìnjiāng jīngyàn). This concept, first systemically summarized by Xi Jinping during his time as governor of Fujian in 2002, is built on a few core tenets: an unwavering focus on the real, physical economy (实体经济, shítǐ jīngjì); a deep trust in market-oriented development; and a pro-business government that sees its role as providing services and support, not issuing commands.43 The government’s relationship with private enterprise is famously described as “亲” (
qīn, close) and “清” (qīng, clean), implying a supportive partnership free from corruption.47 This “Experience” is not a static document; it has evolved with the city. The government’s role has shifted from providing small grants to family workshops, to facilitating IPOs, and now to building high-tech research platforms and fostering a world-class innovation ecosystem.43
The four-decade story of Jinjiang is a microcosm of China’s own economic miracle, compressed into a single industry in a single city. It is a journey of staggering transformation: from impoverished farmers painstakingly copying shoes in their living rooms, to becoming the anonymous workshop for the entire world; from there, to forging national brands through an audacious media blitz, to surviving a near-fatal industry-wide crisis, and finally, to re-emerging as technologically advanced, globally-minded powerhouses.
Jinjiang’s success cannot be attributed to a single factor. It is the result of a powerful, self-reinforcing combination of forces: a unique cultural drive to struggle and win; a pragmatic opportunism that seized the wave of Taiwanese manufacturing; a tolerance for audacious risk-taking in marketing and branding; a hard-won resilience to learn from catastrophic failure; and a consistently supportive, business-friendly government that knew when to help and when to get out of the way.
Today, with Anta firmly established as the world’s third-largest sportswear company by market capitalization, and its portfolio of brands—from the homegrown Anta to the globally coveted Arc’teryx—visible on every continent, the questions have changed. The story is no longer about survival or domestic success. The final question is whether the Shoe Capital of China can take the last, most difficult step and truly challenge the global duopoly of Nike and Adidas for supremacy. The stride of Jinjiang, once confined to the dusty roads of a small coastal county, is now global, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
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