This summer, a grassroots amateur soccer tournament held in the coastal province of Jiangsu was stealing all the spotlight from China's top professional league matches.

Affectionately known as the Suchao, the Jiangsu Football City League features 13 teams representing the province's 13 cities. With each team fiercely competing to defend the honor of its hometown, the tournament has become not only one of the year's biggest sporting sensations but also a cultural phenomenon—one that taps into a deeply rooted sense of local pride.

The game has consolidated its host province's nickname, "loose-packed Jiangsu," a playful nod to how, unlike most other provinces dominated by a single metropolis, Jiangsu is composed of 13 roughly matched cities, each with its own robust economy and distinct cultural character.

While such "loose-packing" may suggest a certain lack of unified identity, it has proved a unique strength in one arena: foreign trade. For 22 consecutive years, the province has ranked second nationwide—trailing only Guangdong Province—in import and export volume, powered by a constellation of cities and towns that each has carved out its own niche in the global supply chain.

Like a well-drilled soccer team, each city and town in the province plays a different position; together, they are steering Jiangsu through the complexities of the global market, scoring consistently despite the many shifts in international trade.

Crystal rush

In Donghai, a small county in the province's northeastern corner, the best place to watch the Suchao is not a bar or a sports stadium, but Crystal City, a sprawling complex that houses the world's largest crystal trading market.

The choice of venue could not be more fitting. Crystal is Donghai's lifeblood: With verified reserves of some 300,000 tons of rock crystal, making up 70 percent of China's total, and nearly a quarter of its 1.24 million residents working in crystal-related industries, the county has long reigned supreme as the country's crystal capital.

In recent years, it has set its sights further afield. In 2019, the county saw the creation of the Donghai Crystal Cross-Border E-Commerce Base, a one-stop hub for small exporters that offers everything from livestreamer training and business incubation to customs clearance and international logistics.

Inside the base, a giant screen greets visitors with a real-time tally of overseas sales, tracking the takings of more than 5,000 shops trading on major e-commerce platforms, from Amazon and eBay to Shopee and Alibaba. Farther in, rows of long tables are loaded with giant crystal eggs, crystal figurines of Star Wars characters and healing gemstones. Live-commerce, a combination of livestreaming and e-commerce, is in full swing 24/7, with streamers chatting in English, Russian, Spanish and several other languages as they help customers half a world away choose their sparkle.

"Styles may vary by market, but crystal is a universal trend that transcends cultures and borders," a livestreamer and regular visitor to the base who goes by the name Jay Young told Beijing Review.

Young and his colleagues are part of a growing community of more than 2,000 cross-border livestreamers now based in the county—a new generation of entrepreneurs who are deeply reshaping local crystal trade. Their efforts have helped lift industry revenues from 24 billion yuan ($3.3 billion) in 2020 to 46 billion yuan ($6.4 billion) in 2024. Within that total, e-commerce sales accounted for 32 billion yuan ($4.4 billion), up by roughly a quarter year on year.

The county's global trade network, however, stretches far beyond livestreaming. Some 10,000 crystal buyers from the region now operate overseas, bringing rough stones from Brazil and Uruguay to the county, where they are carved, polished and sold worldwide via cross-border e-commerce. "Wherever there are crystals, Donghai goes," Young said. "And we cannot be easily replaced, as what we have built over the years is an entire ecosystem of processes that continues to grow and adapt."

Moving as one

Young's words could just as easily describe another corner of the province: Taicang, a county-level city just 20 minutes from Shanghai by high-speed rail. Like Donghai, it has built a highly integrated industrial chain of its own—though instead of crystals and livestreams, its strength lies in precision engineering.

Nicknamed "China's Little Germany," this small city is home to more than 560 German firms, including over 60 "hidden champions"—highly specialized companies that are world leaders in their niche but relatively unknown to the public. Together, these "hidden champions" power a cluster centered on automotive component manufacturing, where as much as 70 percent of a car's parts can be sourced locally.

The density of this industrial web is visible even from its bus routes. Starting at a stop named after Kern-Liebers, the first German company to settle here in 1993, a 4-km radius is strewn with more than 40 foreign firms. Hop on bus No.103, locals say, and you can practically assemble a whole electric drivetrain before reaching the terminus.

"This concentration of automotive suppliers is precisely why we chose Taicang as our first foothold in China," Li Youmei, head of communications and branding at the Chinese branch of Schaeffler, a German "hidden champion" that has lent its name to a local bus stop, told Beijing Review.

As the world's second largest manufacturer of rolling bearings, key components that reduce friction between moving parts, Schaeffler established its first Chinese operation here in 1995. Thirty years on, what began as a modest workshop of just over 30 employees has grown into the company's largest manufacturing base in China, home to five of its 17 factories nationwide.

This journey, however, has been anything but smooth, with a shortage of skilled workers proving the biggest hurdle. When Schaeffler first settled in Taicang, China's automotive industry was still underdeveloped, and most vocational-school graduates back then had little practical experience with operating complex machinery. Recruiting local workers capable of handling the mass production of precision parts was therefore extremely difficult.

"In the first decade after entering China, Schaeffler introduced a master-apprentice program, which sent German engineers to Taicang to teach local workers hands-on," Li recalled.

Meanwhile, a broader reform was underway. In 2001, Taicang became the first city in China to successfully adopt Germany's dual system of vocational training, a model that combines workplace training with classroom-based learning. As of now, 15 vocational training centers adopting this model operate across the region, collectively producing more than 10,000 management and technical professionals.

Changes are also happening on another front, with the growth of homegrown manufacturers profoundly restructuring Schaeffler's supply chain.

"We are no longer simply importing German technology but also developing locally," said Lou Junfeng, head of Schaeffler's fifth Taicang plant, adding that the company's supply chain in China is now 95 percent localized. "This deep localization is not just a market strategy; it reflects our confidence in China's innovation capacities."

On a wider scale, some 600 Chinese businesses now feed into the local supply chains of German firms, while more than 800 local institutions have partnered with these companies on scientific research and investment initiatives.

"It used to be about bringing innovation in; now it's about innovating and evolving alongside China," Lou said.

The sky's the limit

If Donghai embodies how tradition adapts to changing times, and Taicang shows how foreign capital integrates itself into the local economy, then Guanyun—a county in the coastal city of Lianyungang—illustrates how liabilities can be turned into assets.

For years, Guanyun was dominated by small, heavily polluting chemical plants—many unlicensed, and most pushed out of the wealthier corners of the Yangtze River Delta.

In recent years, local authorities have worked to undo that toxic legacy by shutting down 126 such firms to make room for cleaner, higher-value businesses focused on green energy production.

Among the new settlers is Jiaao Enprotech, a company that specializes in transforming waste cooking oil into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), an alternative fuel made from non-petroleum feedstocks that reduces emissions from air transportation. In May, the company became the first in China to secure a state-granted export license for SAF.

Once despicably known in China as "gutter oil," recycled cooking oil was part of a series of food safety scandals first uncovered in 1998, when it was found to have been used in cheap restaurants and street stalls.

"You couldn't easily get gutter oil even if you wanted to," said He Jian, the company's general manager, noting that the oil has become a valuable commodity whose price has topped 8,000 yuan ($1,100) per ton. The biofuel extracted from it is mainly exported to the European Union, where prices have risen to $2,600 to $2,700 per ton.

Located at the juncture of three major urban clusters—the Yangtze River Delta, the Bohai Rim and the Central Plains—Lianyungang has long served as a hub for recycling waste oil nationwide and exporting it to Europe, where it is refined into SAF.

"With our own technology and the support of the local government, we are moving up the value chain, from selling raw materials to exporting finished products," He said. In August, some 13,400 tons of SAF produced by Jiaao arrived in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, marking China's first-ever SAF export.

The future looks extremely promising. In 2023, the European Union passed the ReFuelEU Aviation regulation, mandating that at least 2 percent of all aviation fuel at EU airports must be SAF by 2025, which should increase gradually to 70 percent by 2050. The company is also experimenting with alternative feedstocks, such as corn cobs, straw and blue-green algae, and has also started supplying SAF to domestic airports.

"The sky's the limit, and we have only just taken off," He concluded. 

(Reporting from Jiangsu Province)

(Print edition title: The Jiangsu Jigsaw) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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