Calling it a rainy day was an understatement. A downpour lashed the lion dancers at the July 2005 ceremony to break ground on a new factory on flat muddy plains in Jiaxing, just west of Shanghai. KC Chou, the lead investor, tried to put a bright face on things by offering a proverb about rain symbolising money. By his side his American partner, investor Wilbur Ross, peered out from under an umbrella.
The denim mill in Jiaxing was designed to replace work done in Greensboro, North Carolina, historically a centre for US textile manufacturing, where Mr Ross had recently bought Burlington Mills and Cone Denim to create his International Textile Group (ITG). But there was a hitch. Chinese textile shipments to the US had surged so much when a global quota system expired that the US was about to impose special safeguard quotas, to gain US textile manufacturers more time to adjust to the influx.
Mr Ross was unperturbed. “The thing about safeguards that’s silly is that imposing the safeguards as our government did will not bring one textile job back to the US,” he said in an interview after the groundbreaking. “All that will happen is that whatever country is next-lowest cost producer will get that business.”