At present, China is faced with a situation of unbalanced regional economic development. The report of the 19th session of the national congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that we should accelerate the implementation of the strategy of coordinated regional development. However, this study finds that, in the process of “leaving the cage and changing birds”, the number of enterprises in the textile industry in the eastern region has risen again, which, in turn, has led to overcapacity and has seriously affected the sustainable development of the textile industry. The present study finds that the increasingly distorted price of industrial land is the root cause of the “surge phenomenon” of enterprises in the textile industry and overcapacity. Therefore, China’s central government should be fully aware of the negative impact of the distorted price of industrial land on the sustainable development of textile industry. Efforts must be made to solve the problems of the excessive influx of textile enterprises, overcapacity, and unsustainability in the eastern region in three aspects. Specifically, the land transfer procedure should be standardized, the motivation of local governments’ land attracting investment should be curbed, and the introduction of high-quality enterprises should be paid attention to.

An important prerequisite for promoting sustainable development and value chain climbing of textile enterprises is to achieve a win-win situation between environmental protection and export technical complexity. Thus, based on Chinese enterprises’ microdata, this paper investigates the impact of cleaner production standards implementation on the export technical complexity of Chinese textile enterprises using a double difference method. The results show that the implementation of cleaner production standards significantly increases the export technical complexity of Chinese textile enterprises. The results of the mechanism test indicate that cleaner production standards increase export technical complexity by enhancing capital and labor inputs of textile enterprises, as well as by promoting enterprise innovation and increasing productivity. Heterogeneity analysis shows that cleaner production standards have a significant role in increasing the export technical complexity of textile enterprises in the eastern region and larger scale; it is not significant in increasing the export technical complexity of textile enterprises in the central and western regions and smaller scale; in terms of enterprise ownership attributes, it has the greatest role in increasing the export technical complexity of state-owned textile enterprises, followed by foreign and private textile enterprises. The results of this paper show that cleaner production standards, as an environmental regulation policy, can achieve a win-win situation for environmental protection and export technical complexity increase.