I. A Forestry Province, So Why No Giant Paper Mill

When discussing Heilongjiang's paper industry, many people's first thought is that this is a major forestry province—plenty of forest, plenty of timber—so papermaking should follow naturally.

The truth is the opposite. Heilongjiang's papermaking never took the road of refining bulk wood pulp by felling timber. One plain reason is that the province's forests are less and less meant to be cut. Yichun, with more than sixty years of logging history, halted commercial logging of natural forests in 2013, and its forest coverage has since climbed back above eighty percent; Da Xing'anling and Mohe have been designated national ecological civilization demonstration zones. The forest's primary identity in Heilongjiang has shifted from "raw material" to "ecological barrier." With timber off limits for casual felling, the logic of building a large wood-pulp mill on local timber simply does not hold here.

So Heilongjiang's papermaking takes on a somewhat counterintuitive shape. It is not a bulk wood-pulp base that wins on forest resources, but several scattered forces each taking their own form: Mudanjiang has a specialty-paper mill that took cigarette paper to first in the world; Jiamusi and Qiqihar have several industrial-paper firms that started from timber by-products; Lindian and Dorbod make paper from wetland reeds; and there is a circular-economy experiment trying to replace timber with crop straw. The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute singles out Heilongjiang's papermaking precisely because its interest lies not in scale but in how a forestry province, under the constraint of not being able to cut more trees, has turned papermaking into a model of "stand on specialty paper, seek raw material elsewhere." This report endorses no investment judgment; it simply maps this landscape and honestly notes its weaknesses and open questions.

II. Hengfeng Paper: Taking a Single Sheet of Cigarette Paper to First in the World

To understand the real weight of Heilongjiang's papermaking, one must start with a single factory in Mudanjiang.

Hengfeng Paper was founded in 1952, originally no more than two old paper machines relocated from the Andong paper mill, and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2001. Across more than seventy years it has focused on one thing—taking thin specialty paper, above all tobacco-industry paper, to its limit. Today's Hengfeng is the world's largest producer of tobacco-industry paper and China's largest base for cigarette ancillary paper, with products spanning ten major series including cigarette paper, filter-rod forming paper, tipping base paper, new-type tobacco paper, plus tissue, food-packaging paper, and decorative paper.

Its lead is not vague. In 2024, Hengfeng's combined domestic and international cigarette-paper sales exceeded 49,000 tons, holding first place in the world; in finer segments, its filter-rod forming paper covered close to one hundred percent of the domestic market, and its cigarette ancillary paper held a combined domestic market share near one-third. That year the company's revenue was about 2.77 billion yuan, up roughly 4.74 percent year on year. Its trading partners span Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa, with products sold to more than sixty countries and regions, making it the world's largest supplier of direct cigarette-material paper.

Hengfeng's significance lies in the tone it sets for Heilongjiang's papermaking: this province does not win on bulk or output, but on making a thin sheet of specialty paper carry thick added value. Cigarette paper looks unremarkable, yet its technical bar is high—grammage must stay stable, porosity precise, burn behavior controllable, all while suiting high-speed cigarette machines. Hengfeng spent seventy years on this small thing others overlooked and made it first in the world. Without Hengfeng, Heilongjiang's papermaking would scarcely hold any presentable coordinate on the national map.

III. Jiamusi and Qiqihar: The Rise and Fall of Timber-Based Industrial Paper

Beyond Hengfeng, another force in Heilongjiang's papermaking is the timber-based industrial and packaging paper along the Songhua and Nen rivers.

This stretch once rested on firms such as Jiamusi's Longjiangfu Pulp and Paper and Qiqihar's Fuyue Chenming, using timber as the main raw material to build about 300,000 tons of capacity, chiefly producing industrial technical paper, industrial packaging paper, specialty kraft paper, and adhesive base paper—mid-to-high-end industrial paper. It follows a different logic from Hengfeng's thin specialty paper: Hengfeng competes on formula and precision, while industrial paper competes on capacity and cost, closer to downstream packaging, tape, and industrial manufacturing.

But this stretch's fate was not smooth. Jiamusi's Longjiangfu Pulp and Paper fell into operating distress, and in 2018 a local court publicly auctioned its assets, which Longde Paper acquired for about 337 million yuan, then pivoted toward a project for 500,000 tons of corrugated board using recycled materials. The rise and fall of timber-based papermaking in Heilongjiang confirms the earlier judgment: in a province where forests are designated ecological barriers and log felling is restricted, a paper mill that lives purely on timber struggles to stand firm. Once feedstock is squeezed at both ends, even a former backbone enterprise can be forced to change hands and turn to recycled materials. What this stretch leaves Heilongjiang's papermaking is less a body of mature capacity than a real-world question: can timber still serve as the main feedstock for papermaking.

IV. Reeds and Straw: Finding Fiber Beyond Timber Without Felling Trees

Since timber cannot be cut freely, Heilongjiang's papermaking must seek fiber sources beyond timber. This is the most locally distinctive stretch of the province's industry.

The first route is reeds. In western Heilongjiang, the Lindian and Dorbod area has continuous wetlands rich in reed resources, where firms such as Haida Paper use reeds as the main feedstock to build about 80,000 tons of capacity, producing mid-to-high-grade cultural paper and tissue. Reed is an annual wetland plant that can be cut every year without touching forest timber—one of the few papermaking feedstocks in this province that can be sourced locally without crossing the ecological red line.

The second route is more experimental—replacing timber with crop straw. Heilongjiang is a major grain province with enormous straw output whose disposal has long been a problem. Heilongjiang Quanlin Eco-Agriculture built a straw circular-utilization chain along the "Quanlin model": its phase-one project, with total investment of about 2.5 billion yuan, handles around 600,000 tons of straw a year, producing about 200,000 tons of unbleached straw pulp and about 200,000 tons of unbleached tissue, while co-producing about 300,000 tons of fulvic-acid organic fertilizer plus supporting power generation. By its estimate, three tons of straw yield one ton of unbleached pulp, and one ton of straw pulp can replace about four cubic meters of timber. The value of this route lies not only in papermaking itself but in linking the straw-burning ban, organic fertilizer returned to the field, and paper production into one circle: turning field waste that cannot be burned into mill feedstock.

Seen together, these two routes make Heilongjiang's approach to the feedstock problem clear: since it cannot ask the forest for fiber, it asks the wetland reeds and the farmland straw instead. This is a choice forced by resource constraints, yet it unexpectedly dovetails with Heilongjiang's character as a major agricultural and ecological province.

V. Several Forces Pieced Together: The Real Shape of Heilongjiang's Papermaking

Putting Hengfeng, Jiamusi and Qiqihar, Lindian and Dorbod, and Quanlin together, the shape of Heilongjiang's papermaking becomes clear.

It is not a bulk wood-pulp base that wins on forest resources, but several segments of differing logic pieced together: Mudanjiang's Hengfeng takes a sheet of thin specialty paper to first in the world in added value, the hardest pole of this province's papermaking; the timber-based industrial paper of Jiamusi and Qiqihar once carried capacity but rose and fell under feedstock constraints; Lindian and Dorbod make cultural paper and tissue from wetland reeds, and Quanlin explores a circular route with farmland straw—two ways the province seeks fiber beyond timber. Overall, by the end of 2013 Heilongjiang had more than forty large-scale paper enterprises with main business revenue of about 9.2 billion yuan—on the national papermaking map, not a heavyweight province by volume, but a distinctive one "strong in specialty paper and clever in feedstock innovation."

This is also where Heilongjiang differs from the southern papermaking giants. The papermaking strongholds of Shandong, Guangdong, and Zhejiang mostly build large wood-pulp and recovered-paper bases along the coast, competing on tonnage and cost. Heilongjiang has neither a coastal location for importing wood pulp nor freedom to cut its protected forests, so it did not chase bulk; it concentrated its limited strength on perfecting one sheet of cigarette paper, then filled the feedstock gap with reeds and straw. The value of this structure lies not in entering the national output rankings, but in holding, under heavy constraints, a niche coordinate that is first in the world.

VI. The Questions of Transition: Feedstock, Single-Pole Dependence, and Going Green

Clear in shape, Heilongjiang's papermaking still has very concrete questions to answer.

The first is feedstock. This is the knot the province's papermaking cannot avoid: forests are ecological barriers that cannot be cut freely, and timber-based firms have already suffered for it; reeds are limited by wetland area and cutting season, with a ceiling on scale; the straw-pulp route, sound as it is, is capital-heavy and process-demanding, and whether it can truly work on cost still awaits the test of time. Where the feedstock comes from and whether it is sustainable will set the ceiling for Heilongjiang's papermaking.

The second is single-pole dependence. Heilongjiang's global coordinate rests almost entirely on Hengfeng alone, and Hengfeng is in turn highly concentrated on the single line of tobacco paper. Under the tobacco-control trend, the long-term demand for cigarette paper and the increasingly fierce competition in the specialty-paper arena make this "one province leaning on one firm, one firm leaning on one line" structure look fragile. Hengfeng itself is extending into non-tobacco specialty papers such as food packaging and decorative paper—how steadily this diversification goes bears on the second half of Heilongjiang's papermaking story.

The third is going green. Papermaking is a water-intensive industry under discharge pressure, and Heilongjiang happens to be one of the most ecologically sensitive provinces. Unbleached pulp replacing bleached pulp, straw replacing timber, by-product organic fertilizer returned to the field—a circular route like Quanlin's has in fact pointed a direction: in this province, for papermaking to endure, green is not a bonus but a ticket of entry. Whether environmental pressure can be turned into a process advantage will decide whether Heilongjiang's papermaking is trapped by constraints or breaks out through them.

Upstream suppliers serving Heilongjiang's paper and paper-products enterprises—whether sales teams in pulping equipment, specialty-paper chemicals, reed and straw feedstock collection and storage, or downstream packaging-paper processing—can use Tianxia Gongchang to screen Heilongjiang's paper-mill directory and decision-maker contacts along the dual dimensions of region and industry, turning customer development from door-to-door inquiry into reading the map.

VII. The Institute's View

The real weight of Heilongjiang's papermaking lies not in how much forest it has or how many tons of paper it makes, but in how, under the hard constraint of "no felling more trees," it made a single sheet of cigarette paper first in the world. Hengfeng spent seventy years perfecting one thin sheet, its cigarette-paper sales steadily first on earth; the timber-based industrial paper of Jiamusi and Qiqihar rose and fell as feedstock tightened; Lindian and Dorbod with reeds, and Quanlin with straw, opened new fiber paths beyond timber—pieced together, they tell one story: a major forestry province that, of all things, did not stake its papermaking on cutting trees, but forced itself to find a way out through precision and feedstock innovation.

This is precisely what makes Heilongjiang's papermaking worth recording. What it offers is not an answer of scale but a solution under constraint: when resources cannot be freely drawn upon, an industry can only move in two directions—refine, and switch feedstock. Hengfeng's world first proves that "refine" can work; Quanlin's straw circle tests how far "switch feedstock" can go. The next stage for Heilongjiang's papermaking turns not on producing a few more tons of paper, but on whether it can keep the Hengfeng pole from standing alone and let the two new feedstock paths of reed and straw truly carry scale. Holding a niche coordinate that is first in the world is a confidence few other places possess; but growing that confidence into a resilient industry is something no external condition can do on its behalf.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of Heilongjiang paper and paper-products factories and industry data)
  • China Industrial Economy Information Network: number and main business revenue of Heilongjiang's large-scale paper enterprises, machine-paper and pulp-paper output, distribution of timber-based and reed-based backbone firms and their capacity
  • Annual reports of Mudanjiang Hengfeng Paper Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Stock Exchange disclosures: Hengfeng's founding year and listing date, 2024 cigarette-paper sales and global standing, revenue, filter-rod forming paper domestic coverage and cigarette ancillary paper market share
  • State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Heilongjiang Province: Hengfeng's seventy-year development, status as the world's largest tobacco-industry paper producer, products sold to more than sixty countries and regions
  • Northeast Net Heilongjiang: investment scale, annual straw processing volume, unbleached pulp, tissue and organic fertilizer capacity, and the straw-for-timber estimate of Heilongjiang Quanlin Eco-Agriculture's straw circular-utilization project
  • Heilongjiang Provincial People's Government portal and Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the PRC: Yichun's halt of commercial logging of natural forests and forest coverage, Da Xing'anling and Mohe as national ecological civilization demonstration zones
  • Public judicial auction and industry media reports: the asset auction of Jiamusi Longjiangfu Pulp and Paper, Longde Paper's acquisition, and the corrugated-board project