The Company Restarted, the Market Moved, and the Chiang Family's Fourth-Generation Designer Wrote Another Book | 100 People With Ideas

His name still gives him an edge others don't have, but reality demands he be pragmatic.

Demos Chiang entered the mainland Chinese market for the second time in 2016, and to this day he still feels he has never caught a "good moment."

"Every time someone asks me what I'd do if the market were booming, I say I honestly don't know — I've never seen one. When I was in Taiwan, Taiwan was doing badly; when I came to the mainland, the mainland was..."

On September 23, 2016, Chiang opened Changcheng Culture and Creative Co., Ltd. in Fenghua, Zhejiang Province — the mainland headquarters of his Taiwanese firm, Chengguo Design. From then on he traveled between Taiwan and the mainland more and more often. The move came after he had remade his old company and started again almost from scratch.

When he founded Chengguo in 2003, Chiang wanted to build an international design firm, and he said the standard equipment for that was an "internationally famous master." So he called London once a day for six months and finally got the British designer his friends called the best around, Michael Young, to join. Young's work spans industrial design, interior design and art design; he has won a long list of awards, and some of his early pieces sit in the permanent collections of world-renowned art museums.

Chiang was sure a team like that would lift Chengguo into the first rank of design firms overnight. What he did not expect was that once the company had been running a while, reality would fall far short. "I was caught between the clients who paid and the great creative directors. At the time it was an ordeal that made every day feel like a year. I was always the one who had to face the clients' complaints. And back at the office, when I passed on what the clients expected and thought, the answer was always, 'The clients don't understand — that's exactly why they need our design services,'" Chiang wrote in his 2010 book A Path on the Cliff (《悬崖里的小道》).

Chiang admits he once had a romantic idea of the design profession, that it was an idealistic, almost sacred calling. Once he actually had to "manage" a roomful of designers, it all looked much less beautiful — even a little ugly.

Chengguo changed shape several more times after that. In 2014, Chiang found the team's routines had hardened and felt powerless to change them. Around the same time his shareholders handed him a blunt conclusion: he was suited to a small, flat organization that could move with a fast-changing market. So he flattened the company's whole structure. The change cost him a good number of employees, but it kept the business alive to this day.

In those years Chengguo lived through the global financial crisis and long troughs in demand. "When the economy is bad, a lot of satellite businesses spring up. Say a big architecture firm can't afford to keep so many people on staff — it will farm out some of the specialized work. That gave me a lot of openings. It meant I could buy your experience to get something done, and because I'm competitive, once I'd bought it I'd learn from it too. You keep paying tuition that way, and you become less and less afraid of integrated design."

To date, Chengguo Design has done work in more than 70 different fields, on a wide range of projects: industrial design, multimedia digital design, furniture design, visual communication design, product design, fashion design, jewelry design, interior design and more.

"[The past two years] have kept confirming two things for me. First, design is like any other industry — once you're in the top 5%, you basically never run short of work. Second, in design you often have to be strong enough to muscle in sideways. This is a martial arena, not a literary one. With ninety percent connections and ninety percent power, you can take ninety percent of the projects. With ninety percent ability but only ten percent connections and ten percent power, you will never get the work." By "connections," Chiang explained, he does not mean the kind that come from "corrupted power" — he means who you know and which circle you are in.

Chiang thinks the rule holds hardest in a downturn, because clients have no spare money to gamble on "inexperienced people."

On April 27, 2016, the Fenghua Municipal People's Government in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, issued the "Opinions of the Fenghua Municipal People's Government on Building the Yong-Tai Maker Town (Trial)," meant to develop a themed town and build a "Cross-Strait Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center."

One project in the plan was the Cross-Strait Chengxi Cultural and Creative Ecological Park, covering 122.8 mu (about 8.2 hectares). The Fenghua district government invited Chiang to take on the overall concept design and the running of the park, and planned to bring in Taiwanese companies from cultural and creative design, film and animation, and software and information technology.

Fenghua, known as the Chiang family's ancestral home, obviously carries no small symbolic weight on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. And having a member of the family's fourth generation as lead designer was bound to draw attention.

Besides the park, Chiang took on the design of the Jinxi Academy attached to Fenghua High School — the alma mater of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo — because the old campus was facing demolition.

Just as he says: once you are inside the "circle," connections and ability bring in more and more work.

Chiang picked up a good many projects after that: the plan for the Weimeike cultural and creative cluster in Fuzhou; a multimedia interactive art installation for the lobby of Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank's headquarters; multimedia design for Guangdong Mingzhu Zhenzhuhong Winery in Meizhou, Guangdong; the UI for China UnionPay's MiniPay app; and cultural tourism merchandise for Fenghua.

Zheng Wending, one of Chiang's elementary school classmates, is both a childhood friend and one of Chengguo's founding employees, from the days when the whole company had seven people. Zheng left Chengguo in 2008 and later opened a design studio in Hong Kong. He came back only at the end of last year, this time as Chiang's special assistant.

Back inside, he looks at Chengguo's mainland projects as both a new hire and a veteran: "The projects Chengguo can take on now really are large — working with developers on residential district planning, or old-street redevelopment, that kind of thing. Projects that size basically don't exist in Taiwan anymore."

Zheng has watched Taiwan's design industry get harder to work in over the past decade. Even with "cultural and creative industry" policies and budgets that give some designers a chance, the weak economy means few companies will set aside money for this kind of work, product design above all.

Today Chengguo's mainland-to-Taiwan project split is 8 to 2; three years ago it was 5 to 5. The gap comes mainly from mainland projects growing far faster than the Taiwan market, which pulled the two sides apart quickly.

Beyond building working experience in the mainland market, Chiang has also begun building his own name.

In October 2018, Chiang's solo painting exhibition Watch Me Paint (《看我蒋画》) opened at the Jincai Gallery in Hangzhou. Soon after, he published a new book, Hello, This Is Our Business Card (《你好，这是我们的名片》). It exists only in simplified Chinese and is aimed mainly at mainland readers. He says it took him two weeks to write, though the stories, theories and cases inside cover more than a decade.

The design theory that fills most of its pages, the "Six-Pointed Star," divides the market into thirteen segments through resources, behavior and values, an angle different from traditional consumer analysis. It works more like a method: it tells a team how to "parse" the brief it has been handed, and how to judge where its own design sits in the market. Rather than sorting topics by industry, it lays every kind of demand on one plane and offers a single way to analyze them all.

Chiang's own second thoughts about management and teams run through the book, because the theory itself grew out of his repeated failures. He now uses it to train his own people.

Fifteen years and several business crises at Chengguo have changed how Chiang thinks about running a company — in degree and in direction.

"I don't have much in the way of ideals now. I think you have to be pragmatic." Chiang says he pays little attention to how the team grows, because Chengguo isn't about the team. "My company is me. The team is my hands. So I don't really care. I used to care a lot, and I let them lead me around — it wore me out."

He can talk about his team lightly now, but before he decided to be a "pragmatic" operator he took repeated beatings from inside the company: twice near bankruptcy, unable to pay year-end bonuses, a wholesale turnover of staff, a near-sale to a buyer. Each crisis sent Chiang looking for the link that had failed, and it was the problems with "people" that hit him hardest.

Zheng remembers that in Chengguo's early days the company wanted to run more like an ordinary design firm, with a business development department on the team, so Chiang would not have to bring in every project himself.

By its fifth year Chengguo had nearly 50 employees, and internal operations still had plenty of problems. "The business side was fairly chaotic then. A lot of client bosses simply wanted to meet Chiang in person; if he didn't show up, the deal would never close. That was roughly the situation," Zheng says.

In 2008, Zheng says, he hit a ceiling in his career and wanted to study in Britain. Coming back ten years later, he could plainly see the company's atmosphere had changed: "Now everyone has a better sense of how to work with him. People understand the position they've come in for, and why."

Zheng's job is no longer business development; he is Chiang's special assistant. The change has made things simpler, he says: "I came in this time as the special assistant, and my job is to help him. On most projects now he starts things off and hands the work down. We stay in close touch with him and report back, keeping track of where the project stands and where it's going. He sets a direction and we carry it out."

What Chiang cares about now is not the size of the team but how efficiently it works, and whether its members agree on what they are doing. He says he can no longer stand designers who produce work that goes against a client's needs.

Calling the book Hello, This Is Our Business Card was not only a way to show past work; to some degree it was also a way to reintroduce himself to an unfamiliar market.

And in truth, the public still knows Chiang less as the founder of Chengguo Design than as the fourth generation of the Chiang family.

Chiang is 42 this year. His great-grandfather Chiang Kai-shek and his grandfather Chiang Ching-kuo built the Chiang regime after arriving in Taiwan in 1949, and his father, Chiang Hsiao-yung, was chairman of Chung-Hsing Electric. The family's descendants withdrew from politics after Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, but the Chiangs still cast a long shadow over the history and politics of both sides of the strait.

Chiang has recalled that while Chiang Ching-kuo was alive, he was at Kuei Shan Elementary School in Tianmu, and two bodyguards followed him wherever he went. "Back then I really did think having the surname Chiang was pretty badass," he says.

That upbringing made him aware early of how "nobility" and "power" bend the people and things around them. But he did not grow up entirely inside that halo: after Chiang Ching-kuo died, Chiang Hsiao-yung moved the whole family to Montreal, Canada, and later to New York. Among foreigners, "Chiang" was just one surname among many.

"Before I turned 12 I really did enjoy the treatment of a political aristocrat. Growing up was like a passing dream — call it a mirage. Afterward my biggest problem was that everyone assumed I still held a magic lamp that could summon wind and rain, when in fact I didn't," Chiang wrote in A Path on the Cliff.

Chiang is direct and hard-edged. Zheng says he makes every decision fast: once he judges the moment has come, whether or not everything around him is ready, he throws himself in and starts. "I don't think everyone can decide the way he does. It takes his particular temperament."

He has changed the direction he sets for Chengguo more than once, and sharply. "Chengguo has been through several states," he says. "At first it maybe wanted to be a brand; later it wanted to be the brain behind the brand. Now it's turned into something much more natural, which I call a 'jacket' — I'll make you a jacket that fits and put it on you. I'm not as stubborn as I was."

More than a decade after starting the business, Chiang describes himself as taking on a project now the way a pilot switches on autopilot: not much happiness comes with it.

If it doesn't make him happy, why keep going? He answers simply: "Because I'm good at it. I don't think I need to think about it much — I know where my value is."

More of our conversation with Demos Chiang:

Q: QDaily C: Demos Chiang

Q: You had actually been to the mainland before this (note: in 2009, Chengguo did brand design and strategy consulting for Shanghai Jahwa's Two Girls), but the new book says you didn't formally start doing business on the mainland until 2016 — essentially starting over. What do you make of that timing?

C: Bad time.

Q: So client budgets are shrinking, because a lot of design firms in Beijing and Shanghai are moving into second- and third-tier cities now — they were already hunting for new openings back in 2015 and 2016.

C: Back then real estate was still growing. Not anymore.

Q: If Chengguo comes in at this point, what's your strategy?

C: I've been doing design too long — I've seen a lot of this industry's unwritten rules. Some design studios, as long as they can squeeze into the top five percent, won't be affected much, because the demand for them never goes away. And to squeeze in there, besides real ability you need a good record, and above all some other kind of value.

Take our company: for at least the past three or four years the economy hasn't affected us much. My prices are what they are, my opportunities are what they are. The company isn't big either — seven or eight projects a year is enough. Put all that together and I'm fine. My opportunities come from the fact that a lot of people are going to die off and I, apparently, am not. Bluntly, that's how it works.

Q: After 2014, Chengguo brought in a new batch of people, and a lot of people also left. From then until now, do you think the team has grown fast, or what?

C: The growth rate is the same, actually. Bluntly, some people got pushed out along the way and new people came in to replace them; whether they'll survive here, I don't know either. I've never watched the team's growth, because my company isn't about the team. My company is me. The team is my hands. So I don't really care. I used to care a lot, and I let them lead me around — it wore me out.

Q: How far back is "used to"?

C: From when I started the business until 2012, I put a lot of weight on designers' ideas. The problem was that not one designer was willing to understand business, which I think is a huge gap. And none of them were willing to cross specialties: product designers wouldn't touch graphics, graphic designers wouldn't touch architecture. But over time graphic design couldn't avoid digital — the two have already merged. And once you touch digital you can't avoid architecture. Once you see that, you stop being led around.

Q: Does that mean your idea of Chengguo changed — before and after you worked this out? If the company is just you, then it's essentially a studio, because everything is an extension of "me."

C: Yes.

Q: Are your employees your biggest asset?

C: No. I'm my own biggest asset.

Q: What I mean is, a lot of people spend a lot of energy keeping employees.

C: I used to as well. Then I gave up.

Q: Why?

C: Most good designers — the ones with real taste — are, for the most part, the arty type. Once an arty type reaches a certain level, he'll always say he wants to chase his ideals. Fine, I say, I support you, go get them. Then he'll say: I don't want the pain, I don't want the hardship, but I do want the ideals.

I don't have much in the way of ideals now; I think you have to be pragmatic. You can tell me today that your dream is to design a great building, and I can tell you that at Chengguo your chances are no worse than anyone else's — better, in fact, because we do get to work on interesting things. The problem is that "your great building" has to meet the client's needs, and then you get folded into it. If you think "your great building" means that, because you're here, you get to take a pile of money, mess around, stick the client with the bill and have me go negotiate it for you — right, that's not happening. That's the first type of person.

The second type thinks he's learned six or seven-tenths of what I know and can go out and take his own projects. At least fifteen companies have spun off from Chengguo. But they hit a problem: they aren't me. Even if you've learned ninety percent, you aren't me. Out on your own you can't reach the people at the top; you only meet the people below them, and telling them about the Six-Pointed Star is useless. I've given up trying to keep either of these two types.

The third type loses their bearings. I'm dealing with one right now. Before he came to us he was probably doing bags, or ceramics. In three years here he's touched cars, touched architecture, touched digital, touched all sorts of things, and suddenly he's lost — what am I supposed to be doing?

Q: Is the confusion about "where does my expertise lie"?

C: Right, what exactly my specialty is. My own logic is that this isn't a question of expertise. We have to do our work well, of course, but there are too many specialties we can't carry properly ourselves. Ask me to calculate a structure and I'll get it wrong however hard I try — so we go find a structural specialist. Some designers don't think that way.

Q: They'd think, I need a skill I can live on.

C: Right, and I've given up on that type too.

Q: A skill you can live on is itself a methodology.

C: I think design is a methodology — it solves other people's problems. It isn't solved in a straight line. The world has changed: growth used to be linear, now it's multiple worlds overlapping. You might jump from World A to World B. Design is the logic that gets you from A to B.

The other thing is that I've been fairly lucky, because as time and technology move on, too many things really aren't a single skill anymore; software can replace them. And on top of that the economy is bad. From 2008 until now it has never once been good — it's genuinely wearing, you know? People ask me what to do when the economy is good and I say I honestly don't know, I've never seen it. When I was in Taiwan, Taiwan was doing badly; when I came to the mainland, the mainland was...

Q: In the two years since you came to the mainland in 2016, what have you learned?

C: These two years have kept confirming two things. First, design is like any other industry — once you're in the top 5% circle, you basically never run short of work. The mainland is split into many circles: interior design has one, architecture has one, and so on. Second, in design you often have to be strong enough to muscle in sideways. This is a martial arena, not a literary one. Over these two years I've grown more and more certain of both.

Q: How much of this comes down to "connections," or to "power"? There's the power that comes from skill and the power that comes from who you are.

C: With ninety percent connections and ninety percent power, you can take ninety percent of the projects. With ninety percent ability but only ten percent connections and ten percent power, you'll never get the work.

Q: Doesn't that sound rather cynical?

C: But it's the truth, especially when the economy is bad. Thinking about it since, I've come to feel it's reasonable, because nobody is going to give you a chance to experiment — that's the point. Design is a form of investment; it's an experiment.

Q: So the "connections" here don't necessarily mean corruption?

C: No, that's not what I mean. I don't play that game, and never have, from the day I started the business until now. By connections I mean who you know, which circle you're in. Every circle has its top players, and if you're not in the circle you get no shot. And the people at the top won't die even in the worst case — they'll skip a few meals at most, because they have stores put away. Our company has stores too. How many design firms can say that?

Q: Cash flow?

C: Right. Most companies have three months, six at most. Our reserves are stacked well past the top of the gauge. Besides raw ability, that takes business knowledge, and not being greedy — a lot of details go into it. Which is why people say design is becoming more and more like a real industry: too many people break the logic of capitalism just because they're designers, yet they still need capitalism's support, so they never get to the top.

Q: There's a saying that designers have a somewhat fascist side, because absolute power decides the final result — power meaning politics in the broad sense: relationships, resources.

C: I think that can't be avoided. I used to imagine a kind of utopia: no socializing, none of that, just do good work and that's it.

Q: When did you think that?

C: When I started the business. When you're young you still have ideals — you think being a designer is a sacred profession, you walk with a swagger, you sit down and talk art, sip a cup of tea, you know. Only in the last few years did I realize it's impossible: if I don't socialize, where do the projects come from? Later I did socialize, and a lot of my clients became genuinely good friends — that happened often — and they kept sending me new work. But designers coming up now don't see that earlier part. All they see is that it can work: do a good job for one client and other projects follow naturally. When I hear that I think, what nonsense.

Q: You don't really enjoy that part? Or is that not quite right?

C: I think it's part of my life. A lot of my close friends have become clients and a lot of clients have become close friends, and I enjoy that a great deal. If we end up close friends it means our tastes and our logic, whatever it is, line up pretty closely, so talking with them about design and about ideas is fun. So I enjoy that. I don't enjoy the socializing itself.

Q: When you interview people, what do you ask?

C: Why did you come here? When are you going to leave? I always ask those. Don't sit there and tell me you'll never leave — that's impossible. And: under what circumstances would you take half your salary?

Q: What's the most memorable answer you've had?

C: Usually people freeze. But I watch their eyes, their body language, whether they're being honest.

Q: So even if the answers to those three questions aren't satisfying, you might still hire someone? Nobody is born ready to answer them.

C: For me it isn't whether the answer is good or bad. What I care about is the body language while they answer, the eyes, the look — that's how I read a person, at least whether we'll agree at a basic level.

Q: So what kind of person, at bottom, do you look for?

C: Honesty first. Selfish or not, honesty comes first — you know yourself. The other thing is someone genuinely willing to fight for it. Our company used to be chaotic — you'd be doing graphic design and suddenly you're doing something else.

Q: So you like bolder people.

C: I think what matters is being able to take pressure. Being bold isn't necessarily good — I'm too bold myself, so I need to find people who are more careful. But they have to be able to take the pressure. That's hard for me to describe, because I rely a lot on intuition. Running a business or anything else, it's the same.

The cover image and all images in this article are courtesy of Changcheng Culture and Creative Co., Ltd.