An international guitar industrial park in Zheng’an county, Zunyi city, southwest China’s Guizhou province, produces 6 million guitars a year, which accounts for 20 percent of the country’s total annual guitar output and are sold to over 30 countries and regions.
The county’s success in developing the guitar indus-try is fundamentally attributed to the work of skill-ful and down-to-earth local guitar makers, said Chen Kunhua, an official in charge of vocational capacity building at the county’s employment bu-reau.
By building the labor service brand of “Zheng’an Guitar Craftsman”, the county has stimulated the growth of local guitar industry and made it a reliable source of income and road to prosperity for resi-dents, according to Chen.
Located on the border between Guizhou and Chongqing municipality, Zheng’an nestles among high mountains and deep valleys, and lacks arable land. It has long been plagued by poverty.
In 1987, a great number of Zheng’an residents be-gan to work as migrant workers in south China’s Guangdong province, which marked the beginning of Guizhou’s organized labor export to other re-gions.
Gradually, over 200,000 people out of the county’s total population of more than 600,000 worked out-side their hometown all year round. Among these migrant workers, over 60,000 engaged in Guang-dong’s guitar industry and many became technical professionals and were promoted to managerial roles.
In 2012, Zheng’an launched a project to encourage residents working elsewhere to come back home to start a business, since when the local guitar industry has been incubated.
“My hometown established a guitar industrial park. Companies only need to take care of their operation inside the park, for the government handles every-thing outside the park,” said Liu Jiangbo, one of the first batch of migrant workers who returned home to start their own businesses. They were motivated by a series of preferential policies concerning rent, tax and business environment construction rolled out by the local government.
In March 2016, Liu’s guitar company settled in the guitar industrial park and began with production. “Guitar-making is a labor-intensive industry that depends on manual work for nearly 70 percent of its procedures, even with machines,” he said.
In addition to technical professionals who came back to Zheng’an together with him, he also hired many people living near the industrial park. “We have built and expanded three production lines, and employed nearly 200 people. Most of them are local women,” Liu pointed out.
Within merely several years, a total of 104 compa-nies have joined the industrial park, generating an annual comprehensive output value of 6 billion yuan ($941 million). At the same time, a complete guitar industrial chain covering guitar making, sale, logis-tics and other related industries has gradually taken shape.“The local government has clear positioning for guitar industry. It has regarded the industry as a pillar industry and rolled out favorable policies, which are encouraging for practitioners in the indus-try,” Chen said, noting that Zheng’an has become a well-known guitar production base. After over 200 procedures, high-quality guitars made in Zheng’an are brought to other regions from the mountainous county. Gradually, a stable work-force has been formed.The local guitar industry has directly provided jobs for 9,242 residents and lifted 6,690 of them out of poverty. Nearly 100,000 people have secured em-ployment in related industries.
