(Yicai) March 17 — The time for the second generation of Chinese entrepreneurs to shine has come, and they have been tasked with taking over the family businesses while also expanding overseas.
The heirs of China’s most successful businesspeople have attended the 2026 Next-Generation Leaders Go Global Conference in Kunming, southern Yunnan province, on March 14 and 15, aiming to explore the challenges of succession and global expansion.
Trade friction, global supply chain restructuring, and intensifying competition in a saturated domestic market are pushing more and more manufacturing companies toward Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other overseas markets.
The first generation of entrepreneurs is not very familiar with foreign markets because they do not have overseas study backgrounds, said Jiang Feng, director of the Family Business Succession Research Center at Hejun Consulting. But their successors studied abroad for many years, so they have a natural advantage. Eight or nine out of 10 second-generation entrepreneurs she worked with studied abroad.
Overseas expansion is the continuous tempering of an entrepreneurial mindset, said Liu Jia, founder of ChuhaiGO Global, a Chinese company supporting businesses in global expansion. “A true entrepreneur is someone with rich emotional sensitivity and extreme capacity to control those emotions.”
There are considerable challenges when expanding abroad. For example, when South Korean and Japanese companies exported their local management style to Southeast Asia, it triggered massive labor strikes, said Jiang Zhiying, director of the Master of Digital Marketing program at Singapore University of Social Sciences.
The 11 Southeast Asian countries are highly fragmented, with vastly different ethnicities, religions, and legal systems. “Treating Southeast Asia as a block is the biggest trap in doing business there,” Jiang Zhiying noted.
For second-generation heirs who have already navigated generational conflict at home and are used to domestic playbooks, going global means rebuilding an entire set of assumptions, not simply replicating what their parents did, she explained.
Li Daiwei, the sales manager of Yunnan Zoey Import and Export Trading and the daughter of the founder of Zoey Auto Parts, returned to take over the Chinese auto parts business after three years working in finance in Shanghai.
Zoey Auto Parts was initially rooted in Yunnan, where demand for auto spare parts is high due to challenges brought by the mountainous terrains. But after Li took over, she opened export channels to Laos and Thailand, leveraging the Chinese province’s border crossing to directly ship goods to neighboring countries.
Vietnamese customers do not use WeChat and WhatsApp, they use TikTok to communicate with local buyers, Li explained, adding that many Yunnan exporters now also use TikTok to contact users directly.
Sherry Huang is a third-generation successor to a machinery manufacturing company in Guangdong province. She studied luxury goods management at HEC Paris Business School and returned to China in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic to learn everything about her family business.
After two years, she shared her frustration on Chinese social media site Xiaohongshu to find that many others shared the same burdens as her. Within months, thousands of people joined her community group named ‘Factory Heirs GOGOGO,’ which now counts around 6,000 verified manufacturing and business successors.
Members of the community group have an average of 26 years, with overseas returnees accounting for 68 percent of the total. What began as a space for mutual venting has evolved into a ‘succession support community’ where members share experience on overseas expansion, customer relations, and factory management.
Huang hopes the platform will help her family business get in touch with young talent in the manufacturing industry, building a network of resources through peer-to-peer channels.
Xuan Yan, son of the founder of Songming Blue Dragonfly Flowers, is now general manager of the Chinese firm specializing in dried and preserved flowers. In the first years after taking over, he attempted livestream sales three times and failed. “It’s a real shame,” he said at the event. “It came down to not having a professional operations team, and sometimes you really do just need a bit of luck.”
Songming Blue Dragonfly Flowers now provides business-to-business services to livestream studios, customizing products based on client requests and shipping out Christmas items and gifts. This strategy has kept the company on a low profile, but also given it a stable foothold in the market.
One of Xuan’s goals is to make processed Yunnan flowers available in more international markets.
Falling in Line or Exploring New Path
When expanding overseas, second-generation entrepreneurs are presented with a choice: continuing to build on their family legacy or shifting to a new development path.
Going global is not about “stepping out” but about “nailing it,” hammering brand, content, story, and values into the minds of overseas customers, Gao Yang, director of the International Communication Research Center for South and Southeast Asia at Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, said at the release event for its Brand Digital Intelligence Overseas Expansion White Paper.
The first phase of China’s supply chain globalization has largely completed its historical mission, with the next challenge being perception. “Without a brand, you’re just a supplier, replaceable at any moment,” Gao noted.
Other experts have a different opinion. For example, Gan Zhaoquan, chief executive officer of Liangji Artificial Intelligence, argues that the core competitiveness of Chinese companies going overseas remains extreme cost-effectiveness and supply chain efficiency.
“It’s not about prestige, it’s that we drove the price from a million down to a hundred thousand, building outstanding foundational supply chains and working incredibly hard,” Gan explained.
Whether the next generation can truly take the helm depends on the understanding that the legacy passed down from their parents is not an endpoint, but the starting line of another founding.
Succession in China has never been a smooth handover, Jiang Feng believes. It is a dynamic interplay of entrepreneurship and inheritance happening simultaneously.
“The business environment and external markets are constantly changing,” she said. “The first generation is at a loss, while the second generation has just stepped in, so it will take both of them pulling together to succeed.”
Editor: Futura Costaglione
