![]() ![]() He wanted to study landscape design in France.īut he felt he had to step in, at least for a few years, and convince his now 55-year-old parents that tech upgrades, and setting up new distribution channels on e-commerce platforms, were worth investing in. Like five of the other chang er dai who spoke to Reuters, Zhang never planned to take over the factory. "Young people like to be lazier, but laziness is actually a manifestation of progress," he said. in a gym he set up inside the factory, and allows workers to use, before driving home. While his mother spent long hours micromanaging production, Du ends most days around 4 p.m. A worker now walks 300 metres to complete the more complex tasks, down from one kilometre, and needs less than a third of the time to do it. He remodelled the factory floor to allow forklifts to drive around easily, grouping storage and production units differently to minimise physical effort for a workforce whose average age is around 50. He introduced specialised industrial software that cuts across accounting, orders, procurements, deliveries, and other processes previously handled by humans, Du said. ![]() It also sells components used in temperature-control systems for shopping malls, computer rooms, battery cooling, and medical equipment.īut production processes remained largely unchanged until Du took over in 2019. His father's business acumen and his mother's hard work helped turn the factory into a supplier to large Chinese appliance firms. The large-scale generational transition, which comes as China's growth prospects dim, is the first in the country's private sector since the chang er dai's parents emerged as industrialists in the decades after Mao Zedong's death in 1976. "If I'm chang er dai, I'm trying to save my family business from bankruptcy," said Zhang Zhipeng, a research assistant at the Shenzhen Research Institute of High-Quality Development and New Structure, who estimates roughly 45,000 to 100,000 of this cohort are at various stages of taking over up to one-third of private Chinese manufacturing firms. This do-or-die mission of tech upgrades and practical changes largely falls on a group of people in their 20s and 30s known as "chang er dai", or "the second factory generation", a play on the derogative term for spoilt, rich children, "fu er dai". Du, like tens of thousands of other young Chinese factory bosses, is inheriting a basic manufacturing business that can no longer rely on the labour-intensive model that made China the world's largest exporter of goods.Ī shrinking and ageing workforce and competition from Southeast Asia, India and elsewhere are making at least a third of China's industrial base - the low-end manufacturers - obsolete, Chinese academics say. ![]()
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