As seen on TV: Chinese hi-vis vests and Europe’s yellow jacket protests
- One Chinese manufacturer reportedly receives big urgent order as demonstrations take off in France
As Chinese businessman Yao Weining watched coverage of the “yellow jacket” protests erupt in France and spread across Europe late last year, he thought he saw something he recognised.
Yao, founder of Zhongding Protective Products in Yongkang, a small city in the Chinese manufacturing hub of Zhejiang province, said he believed that some of the emblematic high-visibility vests used in the protests were made by his company, Shanghai-based news outlet Thepaper.cn reported on Sunday.
“These vests [in the protest videos] are quite similar to the products we usually make,” Yao was quoted as saying.
Around the same time in November, the factory received an unusually “urgent European order” for more than 50,000 of the vests to be delivered before Christmas, he said, suggesting the protests had led to the order.
For a plant capable of producing up to 7,000 of the vests a day, such an order would not take long to fulfil, the report said.
“Basically, most of the fluorescent jackets in the European market are produced in China,” Yao was quoted as saying.