driving forces behind this dramatic rural growth. Little work has been previously made to examine
these questions. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap.
This paper provides an overview of the Wenzhou footwear cluster and of our survey design in
Section 2. It demonstrates how new entrants overcome the technological, capital and institutional
barriers in Section 3 to 5 respectively. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the major findings and draws
some lessons from this case.
2. An overview of the Wenzhou footwear cluster and survey design
The traditional shoemaking industry has a history of over 500 years in Wenzhou. In the Ming
Dynasty, Wenzhou footwear was produced exclusively for the courts due to its exquisiteness and
quality. At the end of the Qing Dynasty andthe beginning of the Republic of China, the Wenzhou
shoemaking industry began to flourish. The Fuqian Street in the city was then lined with dozens of
footwear stores and became a unique footwear street.
In the 1920s, Shanghai, Xiamen and other cities employed workers from Wenzhou to make
shoes. The shoemakers, through their work experience, mastered the advanced shoemaking
process. When these skilled workers came back to Wenzhou, they became the key technicians in
the local shoemaking industry. This batch of workers had a far-reaching influence on the
development of the contemporary shoemaking industry in Wenzhou, especially in improving
shoemaking technology.
In 1950, there were 43 family footwear workshops and 103 employees in urban Wenzhou.2
Since then, Wenzhou footwear industry went through two social movements; the socialist
transformation movement in which many private workshops and factories were nationalized or
closed, and the (write in the other social movement) movement. By 1978, there were only 19
footwear factories left, including two state-owned, eight collectively owned and nine privately
owned with a yearly combined output of 496,800 pairs.3 These factories are the “seed factories”
which trained and accumulated a good number of technical workers, marketing and management
talents and provided the basis for the emerging of the Wenzhou shoemaking industry in the
context of opening and reform. After 1978, the Wenzhou shoemaking industry recovered rapidly.
As state-owned and collective-owned businesses gradually went out of business, more and more
employees set up their own factories, and the local shoemaking business boomed. By the end of
1981, there were 99 shoemaking factories in the Lucheng district of Wenzhou alone. After over 20
years’ development, Wenzhou has now become the most important footwear production base, and
is called the “Footwear City of China”. As shown in figure 1, Wenzhou gradually formed a highly
specialized and coordinated industrial cluster consisting of over 4000 shoemaking factories (over
30 leading companies with yearly output value of more than 100 million yuan), over 200 leather
enterprises, over 380 footwear sole enterprises, over than 200 footwear machine manufacture
enterprises, 168 footwear last enterprises, over 100 footwear accessories and ornamental materials,
over 50 footwear-sample design and drawing offices and abundant household factories, in addition
to specialized footwear-related information service agents, training schools and research institutes.
These enterprises, institutions and households are linked together via numerous specialized
2 Wenzhou City Annals, Zhang Zhicheng, Wenzhou City Annals Compilation Committee, Beijing, Chunghua
Bookstore, 1998
3 Wenzhou City Annals, Zhang Zhicheng, Wenzhou City Annals Compilation Committee, Beijing, Chunghua
Bookstore, 1998