Putting down roots grows generational success

In 1992, 28-year-old Taiwan entrepreneur Chi Chin-shu took a passenger ship from Hong Kong to Humen in Guangdong province, before continuing by road to Dongguan — the beginning of a journey that would eventually bring three generations of his family to the Chinese mainland.

Over the next three decades, Chi would go from working as a junior engineer in the chemical industry to building a listed company in Leping, a county-level city administered by Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province.

Chi remembers the early 1990s as a period when exchanges across the Taiwan Strait were expanding and Taiwan businesses were already arriving in large numbers in the Pearl River Delta.

"After the 1992 Consensus was reached, relations between Taiwan and the mainland became much closer," he said. "I was still young then, and I had a lot of expectations. I thought I would come to the mainland and try to build something of my own."

There was another reason that made the decision less like a business calculation.

Chi's ancestors had migrated from Fujian province to Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). By the time he was born, his family had lived on the island for 11 generations.

Yet he said a tradition of leaving home while young to seek opportunities elsewhere remained strong in the coastal culture of Fujian and Taiwan.

"People from Chaozhou went to Southeast Asia, and people from Wenzhou went to Europe," he said. "When you were young, you went somewhere far away to make a living and start a business. That was quite common in our culture. It is something that runs in the blood."

The mainland Chi encountered in 1992 looked very different from the one he knows today.

He remembers farmland stretching along the route in Dongguan and a road so narrow that two vehicles could barely squeeze past each other.

"It was still the early stage of reform and opening-up in Guangdong," Chi said. "There was still so much waiting to be built."

Over the next decade, he watched roads widen and factories appear as Dongguan became a major manufacturing center in the Pearl River Delta.

He started as an engineer, working with applications at the downstream end of the chemical materials industry.

"We started from the very downstream," he said. "Then we kept moving upstream."

By 1996, four years after arriving on the mainland, Chi had started his own business in Dongguan.

As his business expanded, Chi began looking further upstream, toward the production of chemical materials themselves. In 2005, that search brought Chi to Leping.

His arrival came as Jiangxi was stepping up efforts to attract Taiwan investment and absorb industries moving inland from coastal regions.

Chi recalled that land and other investment incentives offered by local authorities were among the attractions when he decided to invest in Leping.

At the end of that year, the company that would later become Jiangxi Hungpai New Material Co was established there.

Hungpai grew into a silicon-based materials business producing chemical additives for industries ranging from automobiles to healthcare.

Rubber coupling agents remain at the core of its business. According to its 2025 annual report, the company has established long-term business relationships with major global tire manufacturers including Continental, Goodyear, Bridgestone and Michelin.

As Hungpai expanded, Jiangxi introduced measures supporting Taiwan-funded businesses in investment, taxation, financing, land use and employment.

On Aug 12, 2020, it was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's main board. According to the company, Hungpai was the first locally cultivated Taiwan-funded company in Jiangxi to go public and the first company in Jingdezhen to list on the Shanghai exchange's main board.

The company Chi had built was becoming his sons' business too.

His eldest son — born in Taiwan in 1992, the same year his father first came to the mainland — gradually joined the business and now serves as general manager, overseeing its day-to-day operations. His younger son, Chi Kuan-an, followed and now serves as a deputy general manager.

Chi Chin-shu said entrepreneurs of his generation relied heavily on experience, endurance and relationships between people. His sons, he said, are more comfortable with data, modern management methods and new technologies, including artificial intelligence.

"They are more innovative," he said. "They are better at using tools."

With more than 1,600 employees, Hungpai recorded 1.39 billion yuan ($195 million) in revenue in 2025 and had total assets of 4.25 billion yuan by year-end. More than half of its employees are from Leping.

Beyond the family business, Chi has also become involved in exchanges with younger people from Taiwan.

As president of the Jingdezhen Taiwan Business Association, he said he has watched the makeup of the Taiwan community in Jingdezhen change.

The people arriving today often look very different from the manufacturers who came to the Pearl River Delta in the early 1990s, he said.

Many are young ceramic artists and other creative workers.

The association has more than 100 members, Chi said, many of them involved in art or ceramics.

"When we have gatherings now, I see more and more young faces," he said. "A lot of them have come here to create."

The association helps newcomers with practical matters ranging from study and employment to settling into daily life, he said.

Yet when Chi is asked when Jiangxi stopped feeling simply like the place where he did business, he does not point to the factory, its growing workforce or the stock market listing.

He points, instead, to the birth of a child. His first grandson was born in Leping in October 2020.

The third generation of his family will grow up in Leping, making the city home to three generations of the Chi family. For Chi, his grandson's birth also changed the way he saw Jiangxi: it was no longer simply a place where he had built his business, but a place he could call home.

"I felt differently from then on," Chi said. "If a piece of land can nurture the next generation of your family, then that land becomes important to you."