A Times dispatch from Fall River, Mass., reports, "Like other former mill towns throughout the Northeast, Fall River necessarily refocused its economic base after the textile industry began departing in the 1990s." (The language is repeated in a photo cutline that goes with the article.)
I wrote a book about John F. Kennedy, and in researching it, I found that even back in the 1950s, when Kennedy was a senator from Massachusetts, the textile industry was already fleeing the state. Back then it wasn't so much China that was the competitor but lower cost and less-unionized states in the South. But it just isn't accurate to say that the textile industry "began departing in the 1990s." The exodus of manufacturing jobs began long before then. If the Times doubts this, it could check its own archives. A dispatch in the Times datelined Fall River that appeared on Sunday, August 14, 1955, for example, referred to Fall River and New Bedford as "once thriving areas" and said that the cities had "been striving for industrial diversification in the thirty years since the cotton textile industry began to shift from New England to the South."