With the home textile industry its industrial pillar, Tongzhou district currently boasts more than 3,000 home textile enterprises and holds 20 percent of the national market share. Most of the companies are concentrated around Nantong home textile city.

The core competitive advantage of Nantong's home textile industry is pattern design, which is subject to copyright. At present, Nantong home textile city has over 300 companies engaged in research and development (R&D) and design of product patterns. These companies have developed more than 30,000 new patterns and registered 12,000 copyrights. Each year, trading of the copyrighted designs is valued at 200 million yuan ($29.3 million).

The first grassroots copyright management agency in China – the Zhihao comprehensive market copyright management office – was established in 1997. It is responsible for handling complaints and mediation of registration of home textile art works and piracy disputes.

A rapid rights protection center was founded in January 2013. In January 2014, the center and the State Intellectual Property Administration networked trial operations and became China's second rapid intellectual property rights protection agency set up for a single industry. A quick review and authorization channel focusing on home textile fabrics and style design patents has been established, greatly shortening the time for patent authorization.

Nantong home textile city now has a comparatively complete copyright protection mechanism integrating administrative penalty, civil mediation and judicial intervention, and has effectively solved the problem of difficult rights protection that has plagued the market for a long time.

As of the end of June this year, the copyright management office of the home textile city had accepted a total of 56,805 art works for registration. With the addition of the municipal, provincial and national copyright protection centers, the number of art works registered by the home textile city has exceeded 100,000.

The copyright management office has accepted 2,879 administrative complaints about infringement of art works, and 2,227 mediation cases. The successful rights holders received economic compensation of 24.4 million yuan and recovered more than three billion yuan in economic losses.