While his mother spent long hours micromanaging production, Du ends most days around 4 pm in a gym he set up inside the factory, and allows workers to use, before driving home. A worker now walks 300 meters to complete the more complex tasks, down from 1 kilometer, and needs less than a third of the time to do it. He remodeled the factory floor to allow forklifts to drive around easily, grouping storage and production units differently to minimize physical effort for a workforce whose average age is around 50. ![]() He introduced specialized 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. Those skills would come in handy in a factory the Chinese state set up in 1951 and privatized in 2002. He studied Taiwanese and Japanese production methods, focused on reducing inefficiencies. He moved to the United States, working at Apple supplier Foxconn’s Wisconsin facilities. He went to high school and university in New Zealand, specializing in electrical engineering. Like his peers, Du grew up with a level of comfort and opportunities his parents never dreamed of. Reuters interviewed eight chang er dai for this report, who described their attempts to bring family businesses into the modern era with efficiency upgrades while facing challenges such as labor costs, shortages of workers, and, in some cases, disagreements with relatives on the best way forward.ĭu spoke on the condition that his business not be named to protect the privacy of his semi-retired parents, whom he said were in their 50s and largely leave factory affairs to him. 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 spoiled, rich children, “fu er dai.”
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