This Economic Model Organized Asia for Decades. Now It’s Broken

Thirty minutes by car into the scrubby desert outside Korla, in China’s remote Xinjiang region, a textile manufacturer owned by Jinsheng Group is building its latest factory complex. Inside the 16 billion-yuan ($2.4 billion) facility—a collection of stark white warehouses surrounded by an enormous expanse of pristine artificial grass—are rows of huge cotton spools, more than a million bright red and blue spindles, and almost no people. A few German engineers wander around, making sure the equipment runs at peak efficiency. This is the depopulated future of an industry that’s lifted millions of Asians out of poverty.

Jinsheng’s factory covers almost 15 million square feet, more than five times the floor area of the Empire State Building, but it needs only a few hundred production workers for each shift. “Textiles used to be a labor-intensive industry,” said Pan Xueping, the chairman and chief executive officer, in a September speech in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. “We are at a turning point.” Instead of moving production to whatever nearby country has the lowest wages, he added in an interview a day after the speech, “the industry can achieve a human-free factory.”