Increasing The Competitiveness Of China's Textile Industry After WTO Entry

Textile industry is a traditional industry of our country, which plays a decisive role in the development of national economy by its important role in exportation, foreign exchange and profit gaining. The textile corporations once had glorious history. Facing the ever-growing demand in the low end of the international market, China became a large producer and exporter of textile and apparel due to its easy access to abundant natural resources and cheap labor. However, although the quality and technology of textiles and apparels made in China kept improving, China's textile industry is still perceived as a cheap processor on the whole. With the advent of WTO entry, China's textile industry is bound to increase its competitiveness to meet the severe competition after WTO entry.According to the current situations of textiles industry and the law of the textiles industry development, the author puts forward the main argument of the thesis: the fundamental measure for developing textiles industry is to update its comparative advantage to competitive advantage. Several proposals are raised correspondingly toward the end of the thesis.The thesis covers five chapters. In chapter one the author puts forward the key argument that the decisive factor in today's global competition is competitive advantage rather than comparative advantage, based on which the author introduces several theoretical frameworks that would be used in the rest of the thesis. Chapter two deals with the world textile industry development by analyzing the competition situation in the global textile market. Chapter three focuses on the competitiveness of China's textile industry, using the diamond framework of Poter's competitive advantage of nations, which has been discussed in the second chapter. At the end of the chapter three, several strengths and weaknesses of China's textile industry are generalized. Chapter four discusses the impact of WTO entry on China's textileindustry. Based on the analysis in the previous four chapters, the thesis concludes in the fifth chapter with several proposals at both industry level and enterprise level to improve the competitiveness of China's textile industry in the new century.