The regional split: Foshan, Anji, Bazhou

How we drew the map

Two source types, read against each other. First, our own marketplace sample: when we pulled roughly 540 first-page listings across eight seating categories in June 2026, we counted supplier-location mentions in the listing metadata. Mention counts are a proxy for cluster dominance, not a census — promoted listings skew toward larger sellers — but the proxy is consistent across categories, which is what makes it informative. Second, the published regional overviews from CIFF, the Guangzhou furniture-fair organiser, which name Guangdong (Foshan/Shunde), Zhejiang (Anji/Hangzhou) and Hebei (Bazhou/Langfang) among China’s key furniture manufacturing regions. The two sources were collected independently and they agree.

The stakes of the map are not small. China supplied $30.3 billion of the world’s $80-billion-plus trade in seats and parts (HS 9401) in 2023 — 37.5% of global exports, per UN Comtrade-derived data — and that output is not spread evenly across the country. It pools in the clusters below, each of which evolved around a different bill of materials.

Foshan: the all-around upholstery and metal hub

Foshan, in Guangdong province, dominated our sample almost everywhere upholstery matters. On the Made-in-China sofa page it accounted for 205 location mentions — an order of magnitude ahead of anywhere else. It led office chairs (140 mentions), bar stools (59) and, together with the wider Guangdong cluster, cinema and auditorium seating (Guangdong 64 plus Foshan 45 on the cinema page). If your category involves foam, leather, PU or project-scale public seating, the path of least resistance runs through Foshan and neighbouring Guangzhou.

The buyer-facing consequence: depth of supply chain. Foshan’s scale means component makers, finishing shops and inspection firms within a short drive, and it also means the widest quality spread — the same district houses export-grade factories and workshops assembling the cheapest possible version of the same silhouette. Region tells you where to look, never whom to trust; the verification checks are the same everywhere.

Anji and the Zhejiang swivel belt

Zhejiang’s cluster — Anji county plus Huzhou and Hangzhou around it — is the specialist: ergonomic, gaming and office swivel chairs. In our sample, Anji was notably stronger in ergonomic chairs than in any general category (second place on the Alibaba page with 13 mentions, plus Huzhou and Hangzhou from the same cluster), and it led the Alibaba gaming-chair page outright with 22 mentions. That matches the cluster’s own numbers: according to Xinhua, citing local government data, Anji’s factories make one in every three chairs produced in China — a claim we examine, with its caveats, in our Anji deep-dive.

What specialisation buys you in Anji is component density for one product family: gas lifts, tilt mechanisms, nylon and aluminium bases, mesh weaving — the full swivel-chair bill of materials within one county. What it costs you is breadth; an Anji shortlist for solid-wood dining chairs or sectional sofas is the wrong shortlist.

Bazhou, Langfang, Tianjin: the metal-frame belt

The third cluster gets the least attention and exports an enormous volume of furniture anyway: the Hebei belt around Bazhou and Langfang, spilling into Tianjin. In our sample it led metal-frame dining chairs (Langfang topped the Made-in-China dining page with 30 mentions), ran a strong second in bar stools, and dominated the Made-in-China gaming-chair page (Tianjin 35, Langfang 23, Hebei 23, Bazhou 9 mentions). This is tube-bending, welding and powder-coating country — the budget end of dining, bar and gaming seating, where the frame is the product.

Two smaller notes complete the map. Folding chairs were the most geographically scattered category we sampled, with Zhejiang/Ningbo leading and Foshan, Hebei, Tianjin, Shandong and Jiangsu all present — a low-margin product that follows cheap steel and cheap labour rather than a single cluster. And Guangzhou shows up consistently in sofa and cinema listings as Foshan’s overflow.

Using the map

One pattern across all three belts is worth naming: the clusters are component ecosystems first and chair brands a distant second. Foshan’s strength is foam, leather and metal finishing under one roof of suppliers; Anji’s is the complete swivel-chair bill of materials; Hebei’s is tube steel and powder-coating at scale. A factory’s real capability is mostly its neighbours’ capability, which is why a plant transplanted out of its cluster rarely quotes the same price twice.

Match the category to the cluster before you shortlist, and the shortlist builds itself: the factories that actually specialise in your product are concentrated in one or two prefectures, their component suppliers are neighbours, and a single factory-visit trip covers many of them. Freight does not care which cluster you buy from — Ningbo, Shanghai and Shenzhen serve the three belts respectively at broadly similar ocean rates — so the decision is about product fit, not logistics. Our directory currently concentrates on the Anji cluster because that is where our verifiable public-source data is deepest; the methodology page explains the rules, and the map above explains what the directory does not yet cover.