The Economic Downturn, The Two Cities Of Fur Have Also Been Depressed.

In the fur market of Tong Er Bao, most of the brand names are in Hongkong or Europe and America.

2 at the end of the month, the Northeast did not go out of winter. I sat on the bus from Liaoyang to Tong Er Bao. Outside the window was a common Northeast Village scene - the dark red roof, brown fields, yellow withered grass and dry trees.

Tong Er Bao town is located in the central part of Liaoning Province, about 10 km away from the nearest prefecture level city of Liaoyang, and about 50 km from Shenyang to the northwest.

A 10 metre high billboard stands on the high speed roadside. Under the red script, "Kim Tai Lung" is "the Chinese leather dress king". A white beauty with a high nose is dressed in red.

Looking sideways at the traffic on the highway.

Half a minute later, another billboard appeared. This is the Yellow word "iPhone". A woman in white mink coat is looking at you.

There are "thousand Shun Zi", "Heng Di Shi" and "Jin Bao Lai"...

These billboards are very similar - yellow or red characters with white models, cold eyes and bright fur.

Gradually, several tall buildings appeared in plain corn fields, and the words "Haining leather city" were vaguely visible.

This is Tong Er Bao, the largest in Northeast China.

Sales center is also the largest fur production base in Northeast China.

Some people say that Tong Er Bao is the "Mecca" of the Northeast women's mind.

It is cold in winter in Northeast China, and cold resistance is a kind of rigid demand, and fur is a natural and luxurious thing for the northeast people to protect the cold.

In the big cities of Northeast China, such as Daqing and Harbin, there are fur cities.

But the town of Tong Er Bao was originally the holy land of fur. A large reason is that it is located in the traffic arteries of Shanhaiguan into northeast China, and it can radiate Liaoning and southern Jilin.

Fur city

At the height of the prosperity, the fur and grass of the surrounding cities and counties heading for Tong Er Bao go directly to the shuttle bus, and a car may buy hundreds of thousands of clothes.

In December 11, 2014, a bus was reported to have rolled over at the high speed of Tong Er Bao. Some of the passengers escaped from the skylight and were still shopping on foot.

This bus is a fur direct passenger train. It is registered by Huanren Daya river travel agency. It is 30 yuan per person per day.

Compared with the general northeast Township, there are more high-rise buildings, more convenient pportation and more private cars.

The bus stops at the passenger station on the west side of the town of Tong Er Bao. When you get off the bus, you can see the "royal city of fur" not far away. The golden dome is on the front, showing luxurious temperament, while the back is white.

From the royal city of fur city to the east of the main road fur street, it is now a pavement of "fur factory" and "fur factory" on the street.

The snow melts and some tiles rise, and the shopping malls and residential buildings are closely linked. The tricycle of the soliciting company keeps on returning to the road in the hundreds of meters.

I walked through the "St. Louis fur boutique city", "Wang Ding fur grass boutique city", which is the early fur market of Tong Er Bao.

The main road of Tong Er Bao was divided into two sections. After "Zuo Bai Ni" and "first gentleman", he came to the East Street of fur.

East Street is more "clothing factory", I quickly went to the leather city of Haining fur square, the shopping mall about two hundred meters in length, the parking lot in front of the car parked several cars sporadically.

Its east is the "Hongkong Times Square fur fashion MALL" which is the same size. It is opposite to the "Shanghai leather city". They are the new buildings developed in the past 10 years, forming the core shopping area of Tong Er Bao.

Fur is made from animal fur.

The most famous mink in Tong Er Bao is a more expensive kind of fur. It has good warmth retention properties, which is lighter and thinner than the down jacket and cotton padded jacket, and the price is more expensive.

The industry recognised that the best fur came from North America and Northern Europe.

There are also scattered farmers in China, whose quality is inferior to imports.

In order to buy the mink, it is necessary to turn the nitrite into a machinable "cooked leather" first and then cut it into the fur mill to make ready-made clothes.

These processes are best completed before winter, because the sales season is from October to December every year, and sales will decrease significantly after the Spring Festival.

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When I arrived at Tong Er Bao, there was only a few shadows in the mall in the 15th day of the first month of the Chinese lunar calendar, but most of the merchants were still open.

The salesmen of two leather stores in Haining leather city told me that sales were particularly poor this winter compared with previous years.

"The market is not good for two or three years," one of them told me. "This year the bus pulls up more middle-aged people than they buy, and they go shopping."

I wandered in the empty building. According to the sign, this is the D seat of fur city square in Haining Leather City, and it has about 140 brands.

Most of the brand names are in Hongkong or European and American style. I have counted 28 brands with "madam", such as "Royal wife", "Royal noble lady", "Mrs. Huang Zhaogui", and a "Qianlong Madame".

There are 4 brands beginning with "Paris".

At least 10 stores claim that their products come from Hongkong.

This is the most high-end retail fur shop in Tong Er Bao. Its brand is similar to that of fur West Street.

Along the way, numerous brands came with Hongkong, the United States, Paris and the British prefix.

In the Macao Street on the third floor of leather city in Haining, a middle-aged woman who was scalded with yellow curls recommended a sheepskin single fur coat to me.

She convinced me that this is a genuine American product.

"Look, Playboy, playboy," she said, turning down the sign on the bottom of her clothes, the blank white paper shell, and writing "Playboy" in bold letters.

Playboy is the legend of the big shopping malls in Northeast China. I have seen at least fifty kinds of Playboy clothes from small to large. This time, at least, the words were not misspelled.

After that, I tried on a "mink skin" coat on the two floor of a "mink shop". The waitress has always advised me that this is a mink imported from the United States, even though it is a male mink, and it is much better than the domestic female mink.

I asked her how much it was.

"Fourteen thousand."

She said.

I didn't speak.

"If you really want to get it, I'll give you the cost price, eleven thousand."

She said.

I turned over the sign of the mink, which reads "Tong Erbao Hongkong Industrial Park", which is one of the three industrial parks in Tong Er Bao.

The waiter is busy explaining that this is the American mink import processing here.

The economic downturn, the fur city Tong Er Fort also subsequently depressed.

From Hongkong

The whole Tong Er Bao, I did not see a brand, and the Northeast China's mink tradition related.

Many people believe that the northeast people like to wear mink clothes because of tradition.

For example, the widely distributed "three treasures of Northeast China" -- ginseng, mink, and sedge seem to indicate that there has been a custom of wearing marten in Northeast China.

In fact, the mink, product and production techniques were different from modern ones.

The businessmen of Tong Er Bao liked to flaunt their goods in Hongkong.

Because fur in Northeast China came mostly from Xinji and Zaoqiang in Hebei, the fur making technology of the latter was brought by Hongkong businessmen after 1980s.

The fur industry in Hongkong was formed by the development of raw materials processing in the 1960-1970 era when the fur industry in Europe and the United States shifted.

Sun Zuomin, a Hongkong fur merchant whose ancestral home is Zaoqiang, Hebei, plays an important role in it.

He was born in Daying Town, Zaoqiang County in 1929. During the war, he was pferred to Hongkong to inherit his uncle's carpet company, then gradually pferred to the fur industry, and sold fur products to Europe and the United States.

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After 1960s, he and his colleagues in Hongkong gradually opened up the factories of nitrite dyeing and leather making, competing with Turkey and South Korea for the processing orders of European and American fur, and gradually improving the technology.

After the reform and opening up, Sun Zuomin quickly purchased fur from the mainland and tried to run factories in Shenzhen and Hebei.

It's hard to deal with the factories in the mainland.

In his memoirs, Sun Zuomin devoted a chapter to recording his cooperation with the State animal husbandry companies in Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai and Hebei. Sometimes the factories in the mainland did not allow inspection, resulting in the poor quality of the garments received by the European partners and forced to pay the indemnity. Sometimes the local master did not trust the masters in Hongkong, and the result was that the quality of the products was difficult to reach the standard.

At the end, he wrote: "to tell you the truth, at the beginning of reform and opening up, many domestic foreign trade enterprises only seek benefits, do not emphasize reputation, do not guarantee quality, and have no responsible professional management personnel.

Why do Hongkong enterprises make money and make money? "Because they are all individuals. They have a strong sense of responsibility and sense of crisis, quality, credibility and fear of losing customers."

In 1983, Sun Zuomin was recommended to be a member of the Hebei provincial CPPCC. The technology he introduced was spread among farmers in Zaoqiang. Private factories and companies took the place of state-run livestock companies and developed rapidly.

At this point, Tong began to wholesale leather jackets from Hebei to Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin, Manchuria and other places, and gradually learned to make homemade fur clothing.

In the middle of Liaoning, Tong is on the road in Shanhaiguan to Shenyang, Jilin and Heilongjiang.

As a result of the rise of business atmosphere, people quickly found making leather jackets and making money, so they went to Hebei, Tianjin and other places to get their goods. Some people went into the raw materials and made the leather industry slowly.

Until 2000, Tong Erbao was famous for leather jackets. The town government led the construction of fur trading market, wholesale leather jackets, and the border trade between China and Russia was hot around 1990. A large number of Russian orders stimulated the economy of Tong Er Bao, and almost every household was doing leather jackets business.

However, quality has become the weakness of Tong Er Bao.

Too many orders, too large export demand, many people began to cut corners, the worst is the paper shell spray glue, and then make leather appearance, many of the exports from Manchuria.

Some of them were returned and some of them flowed into Russia, which posed a hidden danger to the credibility of Tong Er Bao.

The financial crisis at the end of the twentieth Century hit the Tong Er Bao leather industry, which was dominated by small workshops. Soon, only one of the eight leather goods markets in the peak period remained hard to maintain.

At this time, the fur industry in Hongkong also suffered a great impact. Consumers in Europe and America suddenly refused to buy fur.

In 1990s, the European animal protection organization launched the Anti Fur. Animal protectors gathered in the street to stop people wearing fur and repeatedly persuaded them.

Extreme people even threw red paint on models on the fur fashion show.

In order to save costs and develop the gradually wealthy mainland market, fur enterprises in Hongkong began to open factories in the Pearl River Delta and Hebei to produce fur clothing.

Tong Er Bao also found this opportunity. After 2006, leather jackets have been completely eliminated by the market. Tong Erbao people went to Zaoqiang and Xinji after the industrial upgrading to buy mink clothes sales, and gradually learned to make technology.

The traditional wild marten of Northeast China is poor and small, and the surrounding villages begin to introduce new varieties.

It is the last 15 years that northeast people have been wearing marten clothes.

Before that, people wore thick cotton padded jacket and down garments were new things.

After 2005, mink skin became popular, and after 2010, people often saw mink fur on public pport.

The Internet is full of northeastern women who love to wear mink, and fur becomes a symbol of wealth.

The rich North America and Europe have reduced fur consumption because of the anti fur movement, and the Northeast has become an emerging market.

Tong Er Bao has become the main distribution point and processing point, and is also known as the sacred place of mink.

Decline in border trade

Tong Er Bao tried to restore the former foreign trade business, especially to Russia, so as to avoid relying solely on the Northeast market, but failed.

Chen Jun, who was doing business in Suifenhe, told me that their fur exports to Russia usually came from Hebei, Zaoqiang or Xinji.

"Tong Er Bao mainly sells domestically, and seldom heard of exporters getting there," he said. "Hebei imports more leather and has better quality."

Suifenhe is located in the eastern part of Heilongjiang. It is a major trade between Russia and Russia. It is not far from Vladivostok, Russia's largest city in the Far East.

In the early 1990s, Chen Jun served as a postal clerk here, and found that the frontier trade made money, so he went to sea to do business and specialized in clothing trade.

After 2000, he went to Beijing, like many other people in Suifenhe, to do business in the town of Ya Po Road, which is near the embassies in Eastern Europe and other countries, and is the largest market for Russian clothing trade.

In the past few years, Chen Jun had shops in Ya Po Road and Suifenhe. Since 2013, trade has become more and more difficult. Now he has withdrawn from Ya Po Road.

The most direct blow came from the depreciation of rouble in 2015, and the purchasing power of Russian merchants immediately weakened.

In about half a year, the population of Suifenhe has decreased from about 200000 to more than 80 thousand, and the rental of street shops has fallen by more than half.

Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has also reduced the price advantage of Chinese products.

In the early days of 1990s, the trade between shirts and planes was reversed. During the ruble depreciation, many Chinese went to the opposite side of the border to buy daily necessities and luxuries.

Russians do not need to go shopping in the northeast.

Many Chinese went to supermarkets and markets in the big cities of Russia, and Russians even learned to use the Russian version of Taobao's "Hai Tao" to take photos, and then concentrated on customs in Suifenhe and other places, and then mailed them to all parts of Russia.

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In recent years, however, the number of ports in Heilongjiang has increased, and cities and counties have attached more importance to port construction.

This is due to the economic downturn in Northeast China, and the local government regards foreign trade as one of the key points to boost the economy.

I have been to the Luobei port of Hegang City, which is a coal mine city, and the grain processing industry is also quite large.

But at the Luobei port, a row of villas was built, and in 2013, a famous mountain international fur city with a planned area of 150 thousand square meters was built.

According to "Heilongjiang daily" reported that this is the county's first modern business experience center, "can promote Sino Russian bilateral trade, promote the development of local tourism economy, meet the fur market demand in the eastern part of our province".

In 2013, Luobei's famous mountain international fur city opened up for a while. The tourists did not come from Russia on the other side, but from the free buses in all counties of Hegang.

In the spring of 2015, when I arrived at the Luobei port, the gate of the fur city was shut, and the villa was empty.

At the port, only one shop selling Russian chocolate is still open.

Across Russia, except for sporadic watchtowers, only dry birch trees do not see anyone.

The local people told me that the fur city had not been opened for a long time.

Everyone is not good.

Compared with these new shopping malls, the early market of Tong Er Bao has become obsolete.

Moreover, the old shopping mall mostly adopts the means of "selling on commission", that is, producers put fur on the counters of sellers, if sold, the counters will be deduct according to the proportion, otherwise they will be returned to producers.

This mode reduces the selling cost of small factories such as family workshops, but it is difficult to control the quality and can not form a brand.

In 2009, after many internal discussions, Tong Er Bao decided to introduce the leather city of Haining, Zhejiang, to build a new "leather leisure shopping center".

Soon, the Shanghai Han Tang Group was introduced to build the Shanghai International Leather City, and gradually formed a fur market group with fur grass street and high speed road.

These large shopping malls are stationed in the form of brand names, looking more formal and rentable.

However, after 2014, the sales of fur in Tong Er Bao decreased, and the merchants who settled in it felt that they could not afford the rent.

Every year when winter comes, people in Haining fur city have banners asking for rent reduction.

However, other northeast cities have begun to introduce this large fur shopping center.

In 2014, the fur city of Harbin opened in Haining, attracting consumers in Heilongjiang province.

In the case of weakness in the overall market and duplication of sales patterns by competitors, the sales of fur in Tong Er Bao continued to decline.

The decline of the fur capital is behind the economic downturn in Northeast China in recent years.

Before leaving Tong Er Bao, I took a three wheeled electric vehicle to Hongkong fur Industrial Park.

There are basically no people in the park, and the factory hasn't started yet.

I saw only a few companies sign up for recruitment. A local told me that people were recruiting less this winter than before.

He also told me that because of poor sales, many people who sell fur around the fox, the mink and the sheep can only keep them.