About China Entrepreneur

China Entrepreneur

China Entrepreneur, in Chinese Zhongguo Qiyejia, is a Chinese business magazine for company founders and executives, published in Beijing. Launched by the Economic Daily Group in 1985, it was — in the words of its long-serving president, He Zhenhong — the first magazine given the name “Entrepreneur”. For four decades it has chronicled the emergence of China's entrepreneurs as a distinct social stratum, and it is as much an institution as a magazine: it co-hosts the annual China Entrepreneur Summit, works alongside the China Entrepreneur Club, and runs the China Entrepreneur Mulan Club for women business leaders.

Founded in 1985 by the Economic Daily Group

China Entrepreneur Magazine was launched by the Economic Daily Group in 1985. The date matters. China's reform and opening had begun only in the late 1970s, private business was still a novelty, and the figure of the entrepreneur was only just re-entering public life. He Zhenhong, the magazine's president, has explained its founding idea directly: it was the first magazine given the name “Entrepreneur”, and its core idea is that “the competition of national strengths lies in enterprises, while enterprises' competition lies in entrepreneurs”. On that basis, she said, the magazine advocates the spirit of Chinese entrepreneurs and gives them a reputation as the most respectable people and the mainstay of society. In 1985, that was a statement of intent about a class of people who barely yet existed in the People's Republic; the magazine then spent the following decades documenting — and helping to legitimise — their arrival.

Editorial Mission: The Business and Life of a Stratum

The magazine's positioning is summed up in a phrase He Zhenhong used in interview: the business and life of a stratum. China Entrepreneur does not primarily cover companies as balance sheets or markets as data; it covers the people who found and lead companies, as members of an emerging social layer with its own experiences, values and responsibilities. Its directory description is consistent with that mission: a magazine for company founders and executives, focusing on Chinese entrepreneurs, company leadership and business trends. Read alongside the founding idea — that national competition ultimately rests on entrepreneurs — the editorial line is clear. The entrepreneur is treated as a historical actor: someone whose choices about strategy, ethics and social responsibility shape the wider economy, and whose story deserves the kind of sustained attention that Chinese media of an earlier era reserved for officials, workers and peasants.

He Zhenhong and the Magazine's Leadership

The public face of China Entrepreneur in its modern era is He Zhenhong. She is president of China Entrepreneur Magazine, president of the China Entrepreneur Mulan Club, a director of the organising committee of the China Entrepreneur Summit, and a director of the judges for CCTV's annual Top 10 Economic Persons selection. Active as a journalist and news editor, she is considered an expert in macroeconomics, the industrial economy and corporations. She was awarded the titles of Top 10 Best Journalists and Top 10 Best Editors by the Economic Daily Group, and held the honour of National Distinguished Media Professional. In summit materials from 2011 she is described as the magazine's director or chief, personally interviewing leading entrepreneurs about each year's theme; by 2013 she was giving interviews internationally as the magazine's president. Her dual role — running a magazine and convening the community it writes about — is characteristic of how China Entrepreneur operates.

The China Entrepreneur Summit

The magazine's best-known platform beyond its pages is the China Entrepreneur Summit. The event series has run since 2002 — in He Zhenhong's words at the tenth summit, the enterprise carried “the historical mission” begun in 2002. The 10th China Entrepreneur Summit opened on 9 December 2011 and was convened on 10–11 December 2011 at the China World Summit Wing in Beijing. It was co-hosted and jointly sponsored by China Entrepreneur magazine and the China Entrepreneur Club, and it was billed in advance as the most influential annual business conference in China. The theme for the 2012 outlook was “Institutional Evolution and Market Integrity”.

The way the theme was prepared shows the magazine's method. Ahead of the summit, He Zhenhong interviewed, separately, a roll-call of Chinese business leadership about the theme: Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Lenovo Holdings; Zhang Ruimin, chairman and chief executive of Haier Group; Li Dongsheng, chairman of TCL Corporation; Jin Zhiguo, president of Tsingtao Brewery; Zhang Yaqin, chairman of Microsoft's China research and development group; Wang Wenjing, chairman of UFIDA Software; and Zhang Ligang, chairman and chief executive of iKang Guobin Healthcare Group. Explaining the theme, He argued that improper behaviour by some enterprises — lack of credibility, trampling of business rules and the contract spirit — had to be condemned, but that the system behind violations of business ethics also had to be recognised, including anti-market behaviour such as excessive intervention by public power and “the state advances and the private sector retreats”. During the summit, on 11 December, an awards ceremony honoured the year's business leaders. A magazine that can frame a national business debate in those terms, and fill a Beijing summit with the founders it names, is exercising a convening power well beyond ordinary publishing.

The China Entrepreneur Club Connection

The summit's co-host, the China Entrepreneur Club, grew out of the magazine's own circle. The club was founded in 2006 by 31 Chinese business leaders, economists and diplomats, as a non-profit organisation devoted to enhancing the role of Chinese businesses in sustainable development and strengthening the sense of social responsibility among China's entrepreneurs. Contemporary reporting credits Liu Donghua, then chief editor of China Entrepreneur magazine, with refining the idea in 2006: why not pool the talent of the pioneering entrepreneurs who had built the first very successful businesses in China's market economy? Liu Chuanzhi, the founder of Lenovo, chaired the club for its first decade; at a Chinese entrepreneurs forum on 8 May 2016, the 72-year-old Liu handed the chairmanship to 52-year-old Ma Yun (Jack Ma). The club's membership — some of China's wealthiest and most prominent founders — overlaps naturally with the magazine's interview subjects and summit speakers, and delegations of the club, led by its chairman, have toured institutions such as Wharton, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, Google and Facebook. The magazine, the summit and the club form a single ecosystem, with China Entrepreneur as its publishing core.

The Mulan Club and Women Entrepreneurs

He Zhenhong also serves as president of the China Entrepreneur Mulan Club, the magazine's platform associated with women business leaders, known through its annual Business Mulan selections of leading female entrepreneurs. The Mulan name invokes Hua Mulan, the legendary woman who took her father's place in the army — a deliberate emblem for women who have built companies in a business culture whose founding generation was overwhelmingly male. The magazine's coverage of figures such as Xia Hua, president of the Eve Group, who took Chinese costume design to the opening of the London Olympic Games, illustrates its interest in women founders as part of the entrepreneurial stratum's story. Through the Mulan Club, China Entrepreneur does for women executives what the summit and the China Entrepreneur Club do for founders generally: it names them, convenes them and presents them as a recognised group within Chinese business.

Coverage: Founders, Leadership and Business Trends

On the page, China Entrepreneur focuses on Chinese entrepreneurs, company leadership and business trends. Its characteristic material is the long interview and the company-builder's case history: how a founder started, what decisions defined the firm, and what the experience reveals about the direction of Chinese business. Its pages have carried, for example, detailed examinations of foreign private equity's dealings with Chinese companies, and its interviewees range from the Lenovo and Haier founders of the first reform generation to the internet-era builders who followed. He Zhenhong's framing — entrepreneurs as the most respectable people and the mainstay of society — gives that coverage an openly advocative tone unusual in business journalism: the magazine does not pretend to stand outside the stratum it covers, but to speak from within and for it.

Place in Chinese Business Media

China's business magazine market includes news-driven titles such as Caijing and Caixin Weekly, wealth-focused licensed editions such as Forbes China and Fortune China, and management titles such as Harvard Business Review China. China Entrepreneur predates most of them — launched in 1985, it is older than China's stock exchanges, older than the internet industry, and older than almost every company it now covers. Its longevity and its institutional spin-offs are its distinction. Where other titles built audiences, China Entrepreneur also built organisations: a summit running since 2002, a club founded in 2006 by 31 of the country's top economic leaders, and a women's network under the Mulan banner. Its publisher, the Economic Daily Group, is an established state economic-media group, which gave the magazine both standing and continuity through decades in which many Chinese magazines rose and fell.

Why China Entrepreneur Matters

The emergence of entrepreneurs as a recognised stratum is one of the largest social changes of China's reform era, and China Entrepreneur is the magazine that named that change as it happened — literally, by being the first magazine to put the word “Entrepreneur” in its title, in 1985, when doing so was itself a claim about the future. Its founding doctrine, that national strength competes through enterprises and enterprises through entrepreneurs, has been its editorial compass ever since. With He Zhenhong's presidency linking the magazine to the summit podium, the CCTV economic-person judging panel and the Mulan Club, the title operates as chronicler, advocate and convener of Chinese business leadership at once. For readers of a directory of China's magazines, it is the essential homegrown counterpart to the imported business brands: a Beijing-published magazine, from a Chinese media group, that has spent forty years arguing that the entrepreneur is the central figure of China's economic story.