Most Chinese feel bad when the National Meteorological Center would issue orange or red alerts for smog. But not residents of Jiazhou, Shandong Province where the principal industry is the manufacture of face mask.
The capacity of the 300 factories in the village is about 20,000 a day, but when there are orders for more masks whenever an orange or red alert is out, they double the capacity, Gao Jian, the boss of a mask factory in Dadian said, China Daily reported. Jiazhou used to be a poor village, but the production of more than 1 billion face masks annually generates income of 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million) for the village.
Exported to U.S. & Japan
Because of its production, Jiazhou produces 80 percent of the standard face masks in China which are also exported to Japan and the U.S. In the 1990s, the situation was different when pollution was not that bad in the country.
Demand for face masks was not that high, so traders from Jiazhou must travel 36 hours by train to Lanzhou, Gansu Province to promote their masks. When Beijing was hit by a sandstorm in 2000, there was a large increase in demand for face masks made in the Shandong village.
SARS Too
After the sandstorm, China was hit by SARS in 2003, again boosting demand for face masks. Dadian’s 23 factories had to run 24 hours to meet orders earning for the village 20 million yuan that year. From only production, the entire industry chain from raw materials to textile processing to distribution is now present in the village, according to Jiang Xiubin, head of the Dadian Face Mask Manufacturers Association.
As a result of the village’s progress, Jiang said that his family yearly income grew to 90,000 yuan in 2013 from 40,000 when he opened the factory from producing 300,000 masks, Asiaone reported.