"The prospective inheritance tax is driving a growing number of business owners to pay more attention to the succession planning issue," said Lee.

"In this sense, it's quite a good thing. It's always the sooner the better when it comes to taking succession planning into consideration."

Even with his painful memories of family infighting and seeing a big family fall apart, Li has yet to put his own succession planning on the agenda. He insists it is too early to let his 20-year-old only son join the business.

The young man, however, may gradually feel the pressures of being born under the one-child policy.

The one-child policy has simplified succession planning for family-held businesses. Instead of involving the sometimes prickly nuances of family relationships, it is a question of whether or not to hand over the reins to the sole son or daughter, said Choi.

"But the hard fact is many grown children do not like the idea of taking over the family business," he pointed out.

Many business founders began their lives in humble circumstances, if not outright poverty, while their children, with years spent in upscale Western boarding schools and universities, have always known affluence, Choi noted.

Working as a superman to helm every aspect of their company, many founders view the story of their firm as the start of a family saga.

However, for their grown children, who are looking for personal fulfillment or have had their heads turned by lucrative opportunities offered to bilingual Chinese professionals, it is just something mom and dad do for a living, observed Choi.

The point is that standing on the shoulders of parents does not necessarily mean living in their shadow, which partly explains why the revamping or shifting of companies' traditional business is quite common among ambitious successors as an active response to turns in the market as well as a pursuit of self-worth, he explained.

Passing the baton

"In fact, family business succession isn't simply equivalent to taking charge of the company. The succession of family capital, including financial, intellectual, social and emotional capital, should be viewed from various angles," observed Lee.

"Such soft elements, which embody the family DNA, provide a set of possibilities for self-realization for grown children."

If grown children indeed have no stomach for running the company, the key is to find a balance between ownership and management, which helps ensure that the founding family maintains its grip on the company, with grown children leading a decent life, while the business survives and prospers even when the current leaders are no longer in charge, added Lee.

However, Choi pointed out, the challenges may not end even if the child does return to the fold.

It could be tempting yet a grave mistake to bring the children into business straight out of school, said Choi, who has seen many inexperienced 'young emperors' fooled into plowing money into high-risk projects.

Moreover, many mainland business founders who became rich overnight, and had not expected at the outset that their companies would grow to be so successful, figured they did not have time to groom their children in the early days.

Those children, when they grow up, may find themselves ill-equipped to take over the torch from their self-made parents, Choi said.

"However, this isn't always the end of the story," said Chung at PwC, recalling a businessman who refused to step into the family business when fresh out of grad school but came back to take the reins a few years later, after he had made his mark as an engineer.

"Complexities facing the parents are ever-changing, so are the thoughts of their grown children," added Lee.

"Not to mention that awareness of succession education is really improving, especially in many first-tier mainland cities."

Still, challenges should be viewed within a still-developing bigger picture.

"So far on the mainland, succession planning has largely involved the founders' personal decisions rather than the well-thought-out approach generated by a sophisticated mechanism," said Chung.

A lack of professional succession planners also stands as an obstacle, she added.

"Compared with Western countries where corporates have had a long history of development, the ecosystem of succession planning on the mainland is still taking time to be built up," Chung said.

"Time-consuming and complicated as it can be, it is a must-do rather than a nice-to-have."

Contact the writer at sophia@chinadailyhk.com