China Under The Background Of The Continuation Of The Family Business: The Intergenerational Inheritance And Wishes For Their Children

Since the reform and opening-up, Chinese modern family business growing rapidly both in number and scale. And now, family business has became an very important part of China’s economy. After thirty years’development, many family business founders leave the scene and pass their companies to the next generation of leaders. And the succession issue becomes one of the most important strategic questions for the Chinese family companies in present-day.Literatures in recent years mainly researched this issue from the angel of inter-generational succession and family companies’socialization, and have achieved considerable results. Through the theoretical review of the researches on the overall, we found that it’s very hard for the Chinese family companies to break the traditional heritage path and go public. On that basis, we further researched the influencing factors which impact the next generation’s succession will. The main contents of this paper are as follows:Firstly, we answer the question of " What kind of business is family business" which is in a long-running dispute. After carefully reviewing the existing literatures, we conclude that it’s more appropriate to define "family business" from the angel of ownership structure. Our research results indicate that the family occupy a certain proportion of ownership is the premise of the "family business" definition. The core content of the definition of family business is the family has effective control over the companies. Specifically, the family has the right of reputation and right of profit of this company, and own the effective power to perform management right, inheritance right, financial control right and personnel arrangements right in this company.Secondly, we discussed the probable succession path of Chinese family business. After reviewing Chinese and foreign literatures, we found that it’s more difficult for the Chinese family companies to break the traditional heritage path and go public with the strong "family culture", low-trust society background and imperfect professional manager system. Therefore, most of the Chinese family business will still be inherited by family members, especially by the children of the founders. As to the inter-generation succession problem, most of the elder generation would like to pass their company to their children. So whether the intergenerational inheritance of the family business can be realized is largely depended on the children’s inheritance will. If the elder generation can wisely nurture and guide their children’s inheritance will, the succession of family businesses will be more successful. Therefore, the research on the influencing factors of children’s inheritance will is very meaningful.Thirdly, we studied the influencing factors of children’s inheritance will with the "Four factor theory" which was widely used by the foreign literatures. According to "Four factor theory", children’s inheritance will was mainly influenced by the personal factors, family factors, enterprise factors and society factors. Based on the existing research, we structuralize the four levels of the factor and form a model of the causal path by which all of the factors influence the successors’inheritance will. At then, we propose the hypothesis of this research.Fourthly, we designed and sent out the formal questionnaires with the index system of the inheritance will result from Exploring Factor Analysis. Then, we analyzed the survey data with Factors correlation analysis, Forced regression and stepwise regression method in multiple regression model, etc. The results indicate that, capability, personality, interests, values and employment pressure are positively correlated with the younger generation’s inheritance will; and among the11factors are complicated correlation relationships. So we used SPSS software to implement the Path Analysis of the influencing factors, and finally formed a structure model of the inheritance will effect factors.Fifthly, we carried out independent sample t test and variance analysis. The result indicate that, the inheritance will is related to the gender while number of children in the family have no effect. Men are more willing to inherent family business than women. And the inheritance will is also correlated with the industry, the younger generation in the labor-intensive industry perform lower inheritance will.Finally, we summarized the our research, analyzed the shortcomings and put forward the improvement ways and research directions in future.