1. Why Gansu's Paper Industry Needs a Different Lens

When reading the paper industry, people instinctively look at output first. But measuring Gansu with that yardstick yields almost nothing — Gansu has never been, and will never be, a major paper-producing province on China's map. Comparing it on scale against the Shandong–Guangdong–Zhejiang tier is using the wrong frame of reference.

A more fitting view is to treat Gansu's paper industry as a regional-supply sector. According to survey data from the China Paper Association, by volume of paper and paperboard, the eleven eastern provinces and municipalities account for about 67 percent of national output, the eight central provinces about 20 percent, and the twelve western provinces and municipalities combined only about 13 percent. Gansu is embedded in that western 13 percent, and is only a small piece within it. This scale dictates the logic of Gansu's paper industry: not to fight for a national share, but to meet local demand close to home — local packaging paper, local tissue, local paper-product processing.

This is an entirely different story from the southern provinces rich in forest-pulp-paper resources. The south can rely on forestland and self-supplied pulp to integrate upstream and keep the chain firmly in hand; Gansu has no such foundation. Annual rainfall is limited, mature timber forests are not abundant, and water in the northwest is itself a hard constraint — while pulping happens to be a water-intensive, high-emission stage. The dual constraints of raw material and water ruled out, from the very start, any path of large-scale pulping for Gansu; it can only work on the paper-use and processing ends.

This report endorses no investment judgment. It does one thing only: to lay out clearly, from public information, the real structure, transition attempts and weak points of Gansu's paper and paper products industry, and to honestly flag where the data is thin and should not be over-interpreted.

2. Product Mix: Centered on Paper Use and Paper Products, Not Pulping

The first step to understanding Gansu's paper industry is to set aside the heavy-asset imagination of "pulping–papermaking." The center of gravity of Gansu's paper sector clearly tilts toward the mid- and downstream of the chain.

At one end is tissue. Demand for consumer items like toilet paper and facial tissue exists steadily with population and living standards, and the northwest market likewise needs supply close to home. Tissue's base-paper consumption is relatively manageable and its dependence on local water and land is lower than that of bulk cultural paper or industrial pulp — making it a relatively feasible direction for a resource-constrained province. At the other end is paper-product processing, especially corrugated boxes and packaging printing. As long as the locality has food, dairy, liquor and agricultural-product industries that need boxing, steady demand for cartons and color-printed packaging follows. This segment often does not require pulping from scratch, but rather buys base paper and processes it into boxes.

The makeup of Gansu's papermaking players bears this structure out. In Lanzhou, for example, the area hosts a considerable number of machine-made-paper sales and paper-product processing firms — such as Lanzhou Hongan Paper, founded in 2015 and located in the Honggu Park of the Lanzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone, which was named to Gansu's first batch of green factories in 2020 and whose main business is machine-made paper and paper products. The common trait of such firms is that they are small in scale, close to the local market, and in the business of paper use and processing rather than building their own pulp lines.

It should be stated honestly that public disclosure of year-by-year output, industry value-added and other detailed statistics for Gansu's paper and paper products industry is limited. This report makes no estimates, and uses only verifiable regional shares and corporate facts to sketch the structure. That, in itself, is one profile of Gansu's small paper sector and the limited attention it receives.

3. The Chongxin Sample: A Coal City Breaks Through Via Paper

If Gansu's paper industry has one real story worth singling out in recent years, it is Chongxin in Pingliang. Its distinction lies not in how large the output is, but in how it answers a question no resource-dependent city can avoid: when the coal runs out, what do you live on.

Chongxin is a textbook resource-dependent small county — over 800 square kilometers, a permanent population of about 80,000, and proven coal reserves of about 1.88 billion tons. It has long lived on coal. But coal is non-renewable, and single dependence must eventually give way. Chongxin's answer is somewhat unexpected: papermaking.

In February 2023, Chongxin brought in Baoding Yusen Hygiene Products Co., Ltd., a top-ten enterprise in China's tissue industry, to set up a plant. Behind this choice is a pragmatic chain of logic: the drying stage of tissue production is a heavy energy consumer, and Chongxin, thanks to its coal-fired power and industrial base, has over 3 million tons of usable industrial steam available per year. By turning steam — which elsewhere requires extra fuel to generate — into a locally surplus resource supplied directly to papermaking, Chongxin upgrades the value of its coal from "selling raw material" to "converting it on the spot into steam that supports the paper industry." This is exactly the rarest kind of linkage in a resource city's transition: not discarding the old resource, but finding a new outlet for it.

The project's scale is already rare for Gansu's paper industry. According to Gansu official information, the Gansu Yusen project carries a total investment of about 4.5 billion yuan, plans for an annual output of 360,000 tons of tissue and paper products, and aims to become the largest papermaking base in Northwest China; in May 2025, the first phase put four paper machines into production simultaneously. Once at full capacity, the project is expected to generate annual revenue of about 2.8 billion yuan and annual tax of about 150 million yuan, absorb over 1,000 jobs, and draw clustering of upstream and downstream sectors such as carton packaging and plastic color printing locally.

Placing Chongxin into the research, the value lies not in the 2.8 billion of expected output itself, but in how it demonstrates one of the few workable models for Gansu's paper industry: rather than competing with the south on forest-pulp-paper integration, it uses local energy endowment to offset papermaking's energy shortfall, grafting an outside leader's capacity onto a coal city's transition needs. Whether this path can be replicated across Gansu still depends on whether other counties also possess comparable steam, coal-power and industrial-park support — but Chongxin at least proves it can work.

4. Lanzhou and Packaging Printing: Nearly a Thousand Firms, Scattered and Weak

In contrast to Chongxin's concentrated investment, the other face of Gansu's paper industry is highly fragmented packaging printing.

The demand on the packaging end is real. Gansu Jinsaitai Packaging, with a total investment of about 2.1 billion yuan and occupying over 70,000 square meters, is a strategic partner of Inner Mongolia's Yili, producing milk cartons and liquor boxes, with an annual output value of about 140 million yuan and over 300 employees — a representative of local carton supply to downstream consumer goods. Such firms show that as long as the locality has boxing demand from dairy and liquor, there is steady work for cartons and color printing.

But zoom out to the whole province and the problem emerges. According to public information, there are close to a thousand printing and packaging enterprises of all sizes within Gansu, yet they are dominated by small-to-medium scale and traditional products, with no unified industrial platform formed over the long term, resources hard to integrate and chain coordination weak. It is precisely for this reason that there are conceptions such as the Northwest Printing Cultural Industrial Park — planned by the Yufeng Group with an investment of about 3 billion yuan over roughly 300 mu — attempting to gather the scattered near-thousand firms onto one platform and provide them with stable plant space and support. This park is for now more plan and vision; this report makes no judgment on its rollout pace, and treats it only as a footnote to Gansu packaging printing's aspiration to "gather what is scattered."

The Lanzhou and packaging-printing segment presents exactly the typical shape of a regional-supply paper industry: ample in number and close to market, but small per unit and weak in coordination, lacking a chain to string them together. This forms, with Chongxin's leader-driven concentrated model, two paths within Gansu's paper industry — one bright, one dim.

5. Weak Points: Resource Constraints, Single-Point Dependence, and Thin Data

Laying Gansu's foundations and weaknesses side by side, several structural problems are quite clear, and most cannot be solved by any single firm alone.

The hard constraint of water and raw material. This is the most fundamental ceiling of Gansu's paper industry. Water in the northwest is tight, while pulping and bleaching are water-intensive, high-emission stages. Gansu lacks both abundant mature forest and surplus water, and is thus destined to be unable to follow the south's path of large-scale self-pulping integration. What Gansu can do is more about paper use, processing and differentiated capacity built on energy endowment — not competing head-on with resource-rich provinces at the pulping end. Acknowledging this boundary matters more than blindly talking expansion.

The risk of single-point leader dependence. The Chongxin Yusen project is certainly a highlight, but it also means that the largest increment in Gansu's paper industry hinges heavily on a single project from an outside leader. The first phase has just gone into production, the full-capacity output value is still an expected figure, and the project's actual capacity ramp, market absorption and profit realization all still need time to test. Pinning a province's paper-industry imagination on one project is both an opportunity and a risk of over-concentration — different from the structure of large output provinces that smooth volatility across many firms.

Thin data is itself a reality. The greatest difficulty in writing this report was that authoritative public data on Gansu's detailed paper output, industry value-added and enterprise counts is extremely limited. This is not an oversight but an objective reflection of the small scale of Gansu's paper industry and its position outside the statistical spotlight. The institute states clearly here: for anything that cannot be verified, this report would rather write less and flag the doubt than fabricate figures. Readers should understand Gansu's paper industry on the premise that this is an under-watched, information-incomplete small-province sector.

Among these three problems, the resource constraint is fixed by nature, the single-point dependence is a stage of development, and the thin data will ease as the sector draws more attention. Together they form the real and plain situation of Gansu's paper industry: not large, but with its own way of living.

For upstream sales supplying paper enterprises, to reach paper and paper-product factory customers in the Gansu region in batches, you can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter factory directories and decision-maker contacts by the two conditions of Gansu Province and the paper and paper products industry simultaneously, turning customer development for wood pulp, recovered paper, papermaking chemicals and paper-machine equipment from house-to-house inquiry into following a map.

6. The Institute's Judgment

Pulling the threads together, Gansu's paper industry presents the shape of a regional-supply, resource-constrained small-province sector: it does not win on output, nor does it intend to fight for national share, but rather meets the northwest's local paper-use and packaging needs close to home; it has no foundation of forest-pulp-paper integration, yet in Chongxin it has found a differentiated path of feeding papermaking's energy needs with coal and industrial steam.

The story of Gansu's paper industry is, in essence, not the output of any single year, but how a resource-constrained province does paper just right within the boundary of its own endowment. Chongxin traded a coal city's steam for Northwest China's largest tissue base, proving that energy endowment can offset papermaking's shortfall; the scattered pattern of Lanzhou's near-thousand packaging-printing firms reminds us that Gansu's paper industry still lacks a chain to string scattered capacity together. One pursues concentration, the other awaits integration — whether these two paths can each deepen will determine whether Gansu's paper industry can stand a bit more firmly within the west's 13-percent share.

What Gansu's paper industry should think through most clearly is perhaps not how to scale up, but how, under the hard constraints of water and forest, to put limited resources to the most fitting use — making energy-intensive tissue where energy is surplus, doing packaging processing where the market is near, rather than copying other provinces' heavy-asset models. The dignity of a regional-supply industry has never lain in the ranking of output, but in whether it honestly recognizes its own boundary and does, within that boundary, what it ought to do solidly.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Gansu paper and paper products factory directory and industry data)
  • China Paper Association: China Paper Industry Annual Report (regional shares of paper and paperboard output across east, central and west)
  • ChinaNews Gansu: How Chongxin's "paper breakthrough" became the "Northwest sample" of resource-city transition
  • Gansu Economic Information Net: Chongxin's dual-wheel drive gathers momentum
  • China Gansu Net: Chongxin's resource transition draws a new high-quality development blueprint
  • Lanzhou Hongan Paper Co., Ltd. corporate profile (Baidu Baike)
  • Cnzhixiang: Gansu builds its first printing and packaging industrial park — the Northwest Printing Cultural Industrial Park
  • Pack168: Yufeng Group plans a 3-billion-yuan Northwest Printing Cultural Digital Industrial Park