China’s succession crisis: a generation of entrepreneurs is retiring, but are their children ready to take over?

Family run private businesses helped power China’s economic miracle, but the next generation is finding it difficult to carry on the work of their parents

Growing up, Ayu would watch his parents put together hand made leather shoes on the ground floor of their three storey home in the Chinese city of Wenzhou. Their relatives in Europe would send photographs of designer products from Italy for the workers to base their designs on, and in the decades that followed, the tiny family-run workshop transformed into a 700 person factory.

“The factory and the home were the same place. I watched them make shoes by hand, piece by piece, using small machines,” Ayu recalls of watching his parents work in the 1980’s.

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