By Ren Yibin, Huang Yanming and Zhu Yan

iebei Village is a special village in Tongzhou. It has more than 170 overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, distributed across 20 countries and areas including South Africa, Angola and Ethiopia. In the past few years, Jiebei Village has used the power of overseas Chinese merchants to connect with home textile industry at hometown, and build marketing networks overseas.

Huang Guopei retired in China in last August. ‘In the month that I retired, I flew to Angola, to work on relevant matters about the mattress production company. At present the company has already gone into operation officially.’ During the online interview, Huang Guopei was busy in the workshop.

Huang Guopei was among the first batch of villagers of Jiebei Village who went abroad. In November 1997, he brought a few containers of cargo, got on an international flight to Eastern Europe, and settled in Romania. After years of development, Huang Guopei’s enterprises have been expanded to many countries including Namibia, Angola, and Serbia. In 2004, Huang Guopei went back to his hometown for work. While balancing domestic work and overseas business, he guided and helped many villagers go abroad.

After continuous development, overseas Chinese merchants in Jiebei Village have invested over 50 enterprises abroad, involving several fields such as home textile, construction, real estate and mining.

Huang Yuezhong, the boss of Nantong Thunderbird Textile Co., Ltd., started his overseas business career in Namibia in 2000. Currently he has a few shops at Angola Wholesale Market, which mainly sell bedding textiles. ‘In the first few years, my goods were purchased from neighbouring companies. Later I opened a small workshop for self-production and sales.’ Huang Yuezhong said that he thought that home textile products also need branding, so he founded a self-owned brand ‘Thunderbird’ in 2015. ‘At present, my brand is very popular in Angola markets. This year the value of goods sent from our state to Angola are estimated to increase 40% compared with that of previous few years.’

At present, there are more than 1500 households and more than 2500 people in Jiebei Village who work in textile product production and processing. 80% of the labor force of the village works in home textile industry, and more than 2000 migrant workers have been attracted here to do business or work.