Nelson Reinsch’s Cotton Leaves Lubbock - Cotton Comes to China

COTTON COMES TO CHINA

Nelson Reinsch’s cotton leaves Lubbock and arrives at Shanghai to spun into the yard, knitted into cloth, cut to pieces and attach a “Made in China” label then it will be returned back to America. Despite that Lamar (Nelson and Ruth’s son) never thou imagine one day the Reinsch cotton actually going to China now. China nowadays is not only the largest buyer of American cotton, it also produces more than 40 percent of the world’s cotton textiles soon. Besides, cotton was America’s eighth largest export to China in 2007, and U.S. cotton exports to China more than tripled between 2000 and 2007. The reason source from the demand of cheap clothing of American leads to the demand of American cotton in China. To produce a large volume of cotton, Nelson has to manage land, technology, and capital. But to make a T-Shirt, the factor that cannot be absent is people and enter to Shanghai which a new global industry, Nelson can deal with that problem. In the 1920s, beatings, wage cuts, murders, mobilizing workers and paralyzing industry appeared. As the workers stood up, the army squashed them, and many strike leaders in the textile industry were publicly beheaded as a lesson to others. Besides the textile industrial development, Shanghai became a decadence place where offered industrialists opium dens, “singsong houses,” and amusements for any appetite. The divide between labor and capital yawned wider, the Communists gradually and secretly infiltrated the cotton mills, where thousands of workers were locked in a steamy hell, ripening for revolution. In 1949, the Communists drove the mill owners from Shanghai, closed the pleasure palaces, and seized the factories for the people. In the 1960s, Mao Zedong and his Red Guards went mad in the Cultural Revolution, terrorizing the management of the spinning and weaving factories. And finally, in the late 1970s, China reopened its door to the world and after that, this country is promising change. It was hard to access when The Communist Party excels at the control of information. But China has a centuries-old tradition of hospitality so that approached both managers and workers were the easy way. But the fact is the authors are courted in Washington and in China they are still feared. Most of sensitivities seem to be raised only in traditional state-owned firms, and among older managers.

The Shanghai Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory is representative of state-owned firm which was built in 1944, five years before all factories were seized in the Communist Revolution. It places on the far-eastern outskirts of the city. Inside, it brought a lot of sensory. The noise is a metal blanket with no air but a dusty steam. And the worst sensory assault is the titled Communist Green, and it is everywhere.The process of the factory is a transformation rather than an assembly, and almost every stage of the process is circular rather than linear: winding, twisting, spinning, coiling. Whereas the cotton had to be compressed to a brick for shipping, now it must be blown apart into a cloud in preparation for spinning. After it is blown apart, it is smoothed into a soft flat blanket. The blanket is a sheet of fluff, with soft tufts pointing in every direction. Next, the cotton is carded, tiny wire teeth forcing the fluff to lie down flat and face its fibers in the same direction. The now-flat blanket is drawn into a snowy rope perhaps an inch in diameter, called a sliver. The slivers are coiled around and around into tall metal cans, until they mound over the top like ropes of cotton candy. The ropes are then fed into the spindles and are twisted into yarn. In the final circular process, the yarn is wound onto bobbins, leaving a spool of yarn the size and shape of a motel ice bucket. Supervising all of this circular motion was Tao Yong Fang, manager of the factory. The Number 36 factory remained in 2008 a classic Chinese state owned enterprise (SOE). It has recently entered into a joint venture with a Hong Kong firm..Tao, the workers, and the factory itself were cogs in the wheel of China’s central economic planning machine, with no room at all for initiative, no reason to be in a hurry. Well into the 1980s, the central planners delivered set quantities of cotton bales, machinery, and factory workers to the doorstep, and came back later to collect the production quota of cotton yarn. .A system that ignores market signals that provides no incentives, and that subsidizes losers cannot be efficient in producing goods and services. Even, central planners will produce the wrong goods, use the wrong inputs, set the wrong prices, hire the wrong people, and ultimately produce shoddy products, and not enough of them, anyway. Additionally, Meeting Tao also made us realize that central planning lies not in its inefficiency but