Research on Family Business Strategies for Sustainable Development in China
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kang Jae-Shik , Kim Hyung-Jae 
Published: June 2018

China is on the crossing point of two modernizations simultaneously, that are on its way to industrial civilization from agricultural civilization, and also the conversion to post-industrial civilization from industrial civilization.
Encountering this turning period, therefore, Chinese family business gets lots of challenges and opportunities, and taking its way to survive or to develop.
In China, family business is given a great deal of weight on Chinese national economy. Because continuous development and expand of family business takes the same way with economic development of China.
Generally, the core characteristics of family owned business are privacy and family management. It means that it has both ownership and management system. In China, except for the few large companies, most of them are owned privately. The portion of private owned family run business is too high to be neglected. This not only improved the total income figure for the China, but it also played a major role in terms of providing more job offers. For the last past 10 years, 90% of new jobs were from family owned firms. Their contribution to the society influenced the nation greatly, became the role model for other firms to benchmark. As for the upcoming challenge for family owned firms, they have to focus on gaining more insight in terms of how they are going to prepare for the future. Current founders of companies should consider more about the new global economic environments since China became a new member of World Trade Organization. It also relates to the matter when founders succeed their business to second generations. Overall, the progress of family owned firms and their succession became China and its people's great interest.
However, many experts point out that current management of family business faces some serious problems. Among them, the possibilities of sustainable development of family business are the main issue of research and interest of not only concerned people, but also the researcher about enterprise.
Therefore, this paper aims at some practical problems of Chinese family business from Chinese point of view, and also suggests countermeasures about them. And this paper focuses what kind of specific methods is needed to achieve sustainable development especially the development of system about management of family business, establishing conciliatory corporate culture, enhancing the human resources, and finance system, and also the right way to sound development of family business henceforth.
The common problems that many Chinese family businesses are facing are following. First, the obscure right of property which is an inevitable consequence of the way of development, second, the lag of the way of the enterprise management behind government enterprises in China and international firms, and the last, the inefficiency about the structure of human resource such as using non-professional personnel which is unique in family business.
Chinese family business pursues the sustainable development as a natural, but it cannot get out of the limitation of the closed way of management in fact. Therefore, following methods are needed. The first is the reestablishment of modern social consciousness of members of business, the second is the improvement of staffs’ capabilities, the third is establishing conciliatory corporate culture, the fourth is the close cooperation with an external capital, the fifth is the system reconstruction about efficiency-based management, and the last is the introduction of financial accounting system which is efficient and advanced. These methods seem to helpful means to develop the family business in China. Also these are the conclusions of this research.