This is the second time Zuo Ying has been called back to China to help with her father’s business, Zongshen Industrial Group based in Chongqing in southwest China.
　　With more than 13,000 employees and total assets exceeding 4 billion yuan ($635 million), Zongshen Industrial Group is China’s leading private enterprise manufacturing products related to motorcycles. Zuo Ying’s father Zuo Zongshen is the founder and chairman of the company. Starting from scratch as a motorcycle repairman in the 1980s, Zuo Zongshen worked extremely hard and eventually turned his motorcycle repair stand into a multi-million-dollar company.
　　Zuo Ying was born in 1982. From a young age, she was told she would take over her father’s position and that the livelihood of the company’s employees would depend on her.
　　“It is a lot of pressure for a 10-year-old girl and I felt more stress than excitement,”said Zuo Ying, who attended the University of Miami in the United States after she graduated from an exclusive high school in Chongqing.
　　Zuo Zongshen made this education plan after consulting experts’ opinion on how to educate his daughter so she could successfully take over his position in the future.
　　However, this well thought-out education plan didn’t quite achieve the desired results. Unlike her father, who prefers to stay in Chongqing and is generally serious and conservative, Zuo Ying travels around the world and posts sexy pictures of herself on China’s popular micro-blogging site Weibo.com.
　　In 2007, when the daughter graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business admin- istration in the United States, the father asked her to come back to China to help with the business. Zuo Ying was keen to stay in Miami but she finally agreed to come back under considerable pressure from her father. On her return, she was appointed his assistant.
　　In the following year, the duo found many differences between them. The father’s office was filled with reports, and he often shuffled back and forth between meetings. The daughter struggled to understand why her father had to deal with every little problem by himself while the father failed to understand why his daughter spent most of the day staring at the computer screen.
　　“For him, staring at the computer screen is a waste of time,” said Zuo Ying. “But how can a modern business run without the Internet and computers?”
　　Zuo Ying’s spontaneous and unguarded speech in front of political officials was also seen as inappropriate by her father. “These interpersonal relationships are so complicated and there is a lot of guesswork in communication,” complained Zuo Ying, who decided to go back to Miami after one year on the pretext that she couldn’t bear Chongqing’s cold winters.
　　In 2009, as the Zongshen Group suffered from the financial crisis and witnessed a sharp fall in the export volume of its motorcycles, the father called the daughter back and asked her to take over Zongshen Import & Export Corp., the subsidiary company that was suffering the most.
　　This time the father-daughter partnership worked out better. Zuo Ying expanded the scope of the business and Zuo Zongshen began investing in other industries such as real estate to cater to his daughter’s interests, and also encouraged her to invest in projects separate from the Zongshen Group. In 2011, Zuo Ying invested 350 million yuan ($55 million) in a BMW 4S store. She had succeeded in expanding the export volumes of the subsidiary by 50 percent by the end of 2011. Finally, the father felt the daughter had become more mature.
　　But Zuo Ying still flies back to Miami every few months to get away from Changing’s climate and pollution. “I have more friends in Miami,” she said. Her ideal life is said to be traveling around the world with her American husband and making money by trading stocks. However, she is obliged to help her father run his business.
　　Zuo Zongshen once tried to introduce professional managers to his company, but “since the system of professional managers has not developed to an ideal level in China, it is still not the best way to deal with it,” he said.
　　Zuo Ying prefers to discuss business with her father and uncles instead of the managers employed by her father. “People from the same family are more reliable,” she said.
　　 Between east and west
　　Zong Fuli, also born in 1982, has a lot in common with Zuo Ying. As the only child of Zong Qinghou, China’s richest man in 2010 and the chairman of beverage giant Wahaha Group, Zong Fuli spent several years in the United States receiving her high school and university education before joining her father’s company in 2005 as an assistant to a mid-level manager.
　　When she first joined the company, she had difficulties in communicating with some of the staff at Wahaha. “I tend to use the straight-forward business methods of the West, but it is more common in Chinese culture to be less direct,” she said.
　　She also had different ideas on how the com- pany should be run. “If I ask employees what is the spirit of Wahaha, many people would reply my father’s name Zong Qinghou,” she said. “It is not the style of a modern company, which should focus more on the name of the brand, not the founder.”
　　Zong Fuli focuses on expanding the overseas market as she feels her generation and her father’s generations have “different missions.”
　　“I want to do something to improve the image of China’s food as recent scandals have affected the country’s reputation internationally,”she said. She is now in charge of about one third of the company’s production capacity as well as the import and export arm. “Basically, my father takes care of operations for the domestic market and I run the international part,” said the daughter. She developed an iced tea drink specifically for export.
　　The father and daughter also have different management styles. Zong Qinghou tends to give orders for people to execute, while Zong Fuli prefers employees to have their own ideas and their own sense of commitment.
　　In 2011, Wahaha had a total revenue of 67.8 billion yuan ($10.8 billion), making it one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. Zong Fuli, as the apparent successor, usually keeps a low profile and seldom appears in the media.
　　“I think anyone who wants to pass a business on to the next generation or implement a change should first look at what is the desired direction of the business and then decide who should be the one to take over,” she said. “I definitely don’t want to take over the work just because I am his daughter.”
　　Given a strong sense of family ties in China in almost every private company, the founder’s children are the first in line to take over from their parents. The children of these business people, however, generally don’t regard taking over the company as their first choice.
　　Shanghai Jiaotong University Professor Yu Mingyang conducted a survey in 2011 on 182 large private companies in China. The founders of all the companies were in their 50s or 60s. In the next decade all these businesses will have to transfer leadership. The results of the survey showed that 82 percent of the founders’ children didn’t want to take over.
　　“Most of the children got degrees in foreign countries and have wider views. Compared with their parents, they don’t have the experience of starting a company from scratch. Even when they decided to take over the business, they start from being the vice chairman or somebody in charge and not suffering a lot like their parents did,” said Yu.
　　“Just because we didn’t suffer that much doesn’t mean we are worse at business,” said Zuo Ying, who has proved to be a talented investor, she pocketed enough money from real estate investments to pay her own tuition while she was in college. She began purchasing stocks in the United States in 2007, and dumped all of them just before the financial crisis. In 2009, she snapped up shares of large firms, including Apple Inc., at bargain prices.
　　“I think the overseas experience has offered us some advantages that the first generation did not have,” said Zong Fuli. “We have more international views and rely more on information technology.”
　　


　　


　　 Well-prepared handover
　　Compared to Zuo Zongshen and Zong Qinghou, Mao Lixiang spent a lot more time preparing to hand over his company to his children. Instead of sending his kids overseas for further study, he dragged his son Mao Zhongqun, who wanted to go to the United States for further study, back to the family company.
　　“In the middle of 1990s, my company, which was named Flying Group, was suffering from a dilemma. Although we were the biggest producer of lighters in the world, we had no special technologies or patents and we were facing fierce competition,” said the father.
　　The son, who had just graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1995, was called back to help with the business. The father devised a nine-year handover plan—in the first three years, the son assisted the father, during the next three years the father ceded some control to the son and assisted the son in the business, and in the last three years, the son got all the power and worked independently while the father played the role of a supervisor.
　　“Actually, it didn’t take nine years, we finish the process quicker,” said the father. Mao Zhongqun changed the name of the company to Fotile Kitchen Ware Co. Ltd., and switched the business from lighters to kitchen facilities. Now, it has developed into the leading kitchen facility production company in China.
　　The handover was one of the most successful in Chinese corporate history and Mao Lixiang, after retiring from the company now often gets invited to give lectures on his successful experience. In 2007, he set up a training school on handing over to the second generation in his hometown Cixi in eastern Zhejiang Province.
　　Having witnessed some private companies’ disappearance during the handover process, Mao Lixiang feels the training of the second generation is crucial. “The following decade will see many more handovers and I would say more than 50 percent of them will fail unless they are well prepared,” he said.
　　The courses in the school are not limited to the second generation. It is also for the first one as communication between the two generations is vital.
　　Training schools for heirs of Chinese fortunes and businesses have been gaining popularity from 2006. Some schools offer courses such as horse riding, swordsmanship, golf and wine tasting in addition to running a business. Some of the training programs even include pilgrimages to revolutionary sites and visits to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The tuition fees at these schools are typically very high. In 2009, such a training class at Wuxi in eastern Jiangsu Province, offered 12 weeks of tuition for 668,000 yuan ($105,530).
　　In Beijing, there are at least three wellknown training classes for future business leaders, including programs at Peking University, Tsinghua University and Beijing Huashang Institute of Management, a training body mainly for private enterprises.
　　


　　 No easy way
　　In March, a netizen who claimed to be one of the second-generation entrepreneurs posted pictures of a class online. In the picture, more than 50 percent of the students are asleep in the class and the few who are awake are either playing games on their iPhones or chatting with other students.
　　“For the students, to set up a social network with their classmates is more important than the content of the courses,” said Qu Jun, a director of the second-generation entrepreneur training program at Peking University. “Many of them don’t care what the teachers say in class.”
　　“Almost all the private companies would like to hand the business over to the children even if they know the children might not be qualified to run the business,” said Yang Guoan, a professor from China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). “So they rely on such training schools or overseas education to give their children more qualifications.”
　　In Yang’s opinion, courses such as horse riding or wine tasting are not that important for business. “Of course you need to know something about these things on certain occasions, but this kind of knowledge is easy to get access to as long as you have the money,”said Yang. “It is quite superficial.”
　　Li Xiujuan, another professor from the CEIBS echoed Yang. “Some parents are just too busy to take care of the children until they realize it is the time for the handover,” said Yang. “But it is not an easy task as the two generations can sometimes barely talk to each other due to a longstanding lack of communication.”
　　“Rome was not built in a day,” said Li.“Family education is more important than training classes. To talk more with the chil- dren and let them experience and know more about the business from the time they are young would be more useful for a handover.”
　　Wu Chaoji, born in 1984, is the son of the owner of Dawangye Electric Co. in Zhongshan, southern Guangdong Province. While he studied in a college in Zhejiang Province, Wu had a parttime job as a salesman of office facilities.
　　“I had to knock the doors of every office in the office buildings and promote our products. Usually they didn’t even open their doors for me, not mention to talk to me,” said Wu, who believed he benefited a lot from the experience. “It was a precious experience and I learnt how difficult it is to do marketing.”
　　After graduation, Wu worked in Nanjing and Guangzhou as a salesman for several years until he was called back by his father to help with the company. At first, Wu helped deliver the goods from the company to customers. “I got up before 6 a.m. every day and no customers knew I was the son of the company owner,” said Wu.
　　In 2009, Wu made major changes to the sales model of the company. He expanded the market significantly in 2010, and the company’s sales volume increased 75 percent compared to 2009.
　　Wu’s experience isn’t the only example of a second-generation heir successfully expanding a business. Li Zhaohui, who was born in 1981, took over his father’s position as the chairman of Shanxi Haixin Iron & Steel Group in 2003.
　　In January 2003, Li Zhaohui’s father was shot and he had to quit his school in Australia to come back to take over the company.
　　“I was in deep sorrow at my dad’s sudden death and couldn’t recover for a while,” said Li Zhaohui. “As a 22-year-old man who had no experience at all, I didn’t think I could ever fulfill this position.”
　　But the board decided to give the young man the position and it proved to be the right decision. Within three years, Haixin Iron & Steel Group developed to be one of China’s biggest private steel manufacturers and its total assets surpassed $1.2 billion in 2010.
　　“My father has long been my idol. He always taught me to be a responsible man and worked very hard,” said Li Zhaohui. “He had a huge influence on me and I tell myself all the time to work extremely hard to fulfill his expectations.”
　　“This is the result of the family education and influence on the children during the handover,” said Professor Li Xiujuan. “Parents should show them more about the pain and efforts of running a business and let them know it is not an easy job.”