1. Why Henan's Paper Industry Deserves a Second Look

When people talk about China's paper industry, the names that come first are coastal provinces — Guangdong, Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu — close to ports, easy to import wood pulp and recovered paper, crowded with million-tonne giants like Nine Dragons, Lee & Man, Chenming and Bohui. Henan rarely appears on that first-tier list. It sits in the Central Plains: no coastline, no port, raw materials must be bought in from elsewhere, and by sheer tonnage it does not rank near the very top. By that yardstick, Henan looks like a supporting player.

But measuring Henan only by "where does it rank in output" misses what is most interesting about it. Henan's paper industry is really two layers stacked together. The visible layer is roughly three hundred pulp, paper and paper-products firms spread across Xinxiang, Jiaozuo, Puyang, Zhoukou, Zhumadian and Zhengzhou, making containerboard, corrugating medium, cultural paper, specialty paper and tissue. The layer underneath is Qinyang in Jiaozuo — a county-level city that has grown into the country's only papermaking-equipment manufacturing base, supplying over 30% of national output of paper machines and parts. A province that is at once a place that makes paper and a place that makes the machines that make paper is an unusual structure in China.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute singles out Henan's paper and paper products industry precisely because this two-layer structure is easily hidden behind output rankings. This report does not vouch for any single firm's business performance; it simply sets out the real landscape of paper in this inland province — its leaders, its cluster geography, and the turn it is now making.

2. A Province's Paper Base: Nearly Three Hundred Firms, Scattered Across Several Cities

Start with the visible layer. According to surveys by the Henan Paper Society and the provincial statistics bureau, in 2023 the province had roughly 260 pulp, paper and paper-products enterprises, of which more than 80 made machine-made paper and paperboard. Total machine-made paper and paperboard output was about 3.895 million tonnes, revenue about 50.7 billion yuan, and total profit about 2.2 billion yuan. By national standards this is a mid-range scale — no cluster of giants, but plenty of firms and a full range of products.

Geographically, Henan's paper firms concentrate in Xinxiang, Jiaozuo, Puyang, Zhoukou, Zhumadian and Zhengzhou — a multi-point pattern, each with its own emphasis, rather than one dominant city. In product mix, packaging papers such as corrugating medium and containerboard make up the bulk, tied directly to Henan's vast demand for packaging from food, farm produce and manufacturing; cultural paper, specialty paper and tissue are each carried by a few distinctive firms.

The raw-material structure explains Henan's situation best. In 2023 the province's pulp consumption totaled about 3.31 million tonnes — roughly 1.7 million tonnes of wood pulp, about 170,000 tonnes of non-wood pulp, and about 1.44 million tonnes of recovered-paper pulp. Two details matter here. First, non-wood pulp has fallen to barely over a hundred thousand tonnes, meaning Henan's old straw-pulp road — using wheat and rice straw as feedstock — is essentially finished. Second, around 900,000 tonnes of purchased wood pulp plus around 800,000 tonnes of purchased recovered paper (pulp) together account for more than half of the province's total raw-material consumption. An inland province with no coastline and little commercial timber, buying in more than half its papermaking raw material — this innate constraint is the starting point for understanding every choice Henan's paper industry makes.

3. The Leaders: No Super-Giant, but Several Firms With a Distinct Edge

Henan has no super-giant on the scale of Nine Dragons or Lee & Man with their multi-million-tonne capacity. Its leaders are a set of firms that have each carved out a distinctive niche.

In specialty paper, the most representative is Henan Jianghe Paper. Rooted in Jiaozuo, with three production bases across Henan and Shandong, it focuses on ecological products such as thermal paper, glassine, food packaging paper, carbonless copy paper, release base paper, heat-transfer paper and woodfree paper. By its own disclosures, its thermal-paper output and sales rank second nationally among comparable products, while its carbonless copy paper and release base paper rank first; it operates more than a dozen paper machines and over thirty coaters, with annual capacity above 600,000 tonnes. Jianghe does not chase scale or bulk containerboard; it drills into the higher-value, narrow lanes of specialty and functional paper — a notably clear-headed route within Henan's paper industry.

In packaging paper, Henan Longyuan Paper has expanded most aggressively in recent years. It is building a green packaging new-material project with planned annual capacity of 2 million tonnes — an 800,000-tonne first phase and a 1.2-million-tonne second phase — aimed squarely at expanding capacity for bulk packaging grades like containerboard and corrugating medium. In a province with strong packaging demand but long reliant on bulk paper shipped in from other provinces, Longyuan's large local packaging capacity fills exactly what was most lacking.

No account of Henan paper can skip Luohe Yinge. Tracing its roots to the Luohe No. 1 Paper Mill founded in 1967 and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 1997, it was once called the "first straw-pulp stock" and was among Henan's largest paper enterprises, making woodfree paper, carbonless paper, thermal base paper, tissue, containerboard and more. Its fortunes were also the most turbulent: trapped in debt and operating crisis, it was delisted in August 2020; it then entered bankruptcy restructuring, and in August 2022 the Luohe Intermediate Court confirmed that the restructuring plan for Yinge and six affiliated companies had been carried out and the proceedings concluded, with strategic investors brought in and assets and operations reorganized. Yinge's delisting and restructuring is about the bluntest footnote to Henan paper's turn away from the straw-pulp road and the era of extensive expansion — the old name did not vanish, but it had to find a new way to live.

4. The Layer Underneath: Qinyang, China's Only County-Level Papermaking-Equipment Base

The most distinctive — and most easily overlooked — part of Henan paper is the Qinyang layer in Jiaozuo.

Qinyang is a county-level city under Jiaozuo. Its papermaking-equipment industry began in the late 1960s and, over half a century, has grown into something singular nationally: it is the only county-level papermaking-equipment manufacturing base in China, and the country's largest and most complete trading hub for paper machinery and parts. By public accounts, Qinyang has more than 180 papermaking-equipment enterprises with over 30,000 workers; along a stretch of the Qinfu highway barely ten-some kilometers long, more than a hundred firms making paper machinery and parts are densely packed. Total output of paper machines and parts accounts for over 30% of the national market, and the city leads the national industry in enterprise count, production scale, sales volume and supporting capacity, with products exported to more than twenty countries and regions including India, South Korea, Russia and Southeast Asia.

This matters far more than it first appears. An inland county-level city did not tie itself down to "making a few more tonnes of paper"; instead it moved one step upstream along the chain — you make paper, I make the machines and parts that make it. The advantage of this path is that it is less dependent on imported wood pulp and less dragged down by swings in bulk paper prices; it is a business of equipment and technology. Henan Dazhi Papermaking Equipment Integration Engineering, based in Wuzhi County and part of the Jianghe system, was named a Henan provincial innovation leading enterprise — a representative of this "domestic substitution for equipment" route. The equipment belt linking Qinyang and Wuzhi gives Henan a foothold in paper that depends on neither raw materials nor scale.

5. From Straw Pulp to Packaging Paper and Equipment: An Inland Province's Turn

Reading the two layers together, Henan paper is going through a clear shift of gears.

Henan paper once carried the label "straw pulp" — using the wheat and rice straw abundant in the Central Plains as feedstock, low-cost and locally sourced; Yinge's "first straw-pulp stock" title was a product of that era. But straw-pulp processes pollute heavily and limit paper quality. As environmental thresholds rose and the market demanded better paper, this road narrowed; non-wood pulp consumption shrinking to barely over a hundred thousand tonnes is the clearest proof.

The turn runs in three directions. First, toward local packaging-paper capacity — large green packaging new-material projects like Longyuan's target Henan's own large demand for containerboard and corrugating medium from food, farm produce and equipment manufacturing, supplying locally what once had to be shipped in. Second, toward the narrow, deep lanes of specialty and functional paper — Jianghe's thermal, carbonless and release papers are the model, trading technical content for added value and sidestepping the red ocean of bulk grades. Third, toward equipment manufacturing — Qinyang's paper-machinery cluster pushes Henan's position up one rung along the chain.

For sales teams supplying paper and paper-products manufacturers upstream — whether providing wood pulp, recovered-paper feedstock and chemical additives, or supplying pulping, papermaking, coating, slitting and complete papermaking machinery and parts — reaching Henan's paper, paper-products and papermaking-equipment factory customers scattered across Jiaozuo, Xinxiang, Zhoukou, Luohe and Zhumadian can be done through Tianxia Gongchang, filtering the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Henan's paper and paper products industry along the two dimensions of region and sector — turning upstream customer development from driving down the highway firm by firm into following a map.

6. The Institute's View: A Province That Doesn't Rely on Raw Materials Relies on Finding a Different Position

Pulling the threads together, Henan's paper and paper products industry takes a shape quite unlike the coastal papermaking provinces. It has no port, no locally abundant wood pulp, and no multi-million-tonne super-giant; by the traditional logic of paper competition, it is at a disadvantage at every turn. But it has not gone head to head. Instead it has found, along the value chain, several positions others contend for less: drilling into the narrow lanes of specialty paper, filling the local gap in packaging-paper capacity, and — most crucially — standing in the upstream link of papermaking equipment. Qinyang, the country's only county-level papermaking-equipment base, is the line about Henan paper most worth remembering.

Its weaknesses are just as real. More than half its raw material is bought in, so its costs are forever tethered to outside prices for wood pulp and recovered paper. Among its leaders are firms like Jianghe that walk the specialty-paper line steadily, and firms like Yinge that had to delist, restructure and start over — its overall resilience is uneven. And the nearly three hundred firms scattered across several cities are mostly small in scale; upgrading under the twin thresholds of environment and capacity is no easy task.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: the real point of Henan paper is not whether it can squeeze into the top of the output rankings, but whether it can keep turning "not relying on raw materials" — a passive fact — into "finding a different position," an active one. Can Qinyang's equipment grow from selling machines and parts into selling technology and solutions; can specialty-paper firms like Jianghe drive their narrow lanes deeper; can packaging capacity like Longyuan's truly absorb the province's own demand rather than merely adding more bulk paper. An inland province with no coastline ultimately learned, within its raw-material disadvantage, to change position — and that, perhaps, says more about this industry's resilience than how many tonnes of paper it makes.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (factory directory and industry data for Henan's paper and paper products industry)
  • Henan Paper Society and Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics: number of pulp, paper and paper-products enterprises in 2023, total machine-made paper and paperboard output, revenue and profit, pulp consumption and raw-material structure, and the geographic distribution of firms
  • Public materials of Henan Jianghe Paper Co., Ltd., Baidu Baike, Sina Finance: Jianghe's product mix, national rankings for thermal and carbonless/release paper, production bases and capacity, and the Wuzhi-based Dazhi papermaking equipment firm and its provincial innovation leading-enterprise status
  • Paper-industry trade outlets and Henan paper-sector operating reviews: Henan Longyuan Paper's phased 2-million-tonne green packaging new-material project, containerboard and corrugating-medium capacity
  • Henan Provincial Bureau of Statistics, Sina News, China Paper Net: Qinyang's designation as China's papermaking-equipment manufacturing base and "home of paper machinery," its enterprise count and workforce, national market share, the Qinfu-highway cluster and export markets
  • The Paper, Henan Provincial High People's Court, Tonghuashun Finance: the listing and delisting timeline of Luohe Yinge, the "first straw-pulp stock" title, and the acceptance and completion of its bankruptcy restructuring
  • CRI Online, Zhoukou Municipal Government, and Ministry of Commerce public reports: the papermaking history of Zhidian town in Shenqiu, Zhoukou, and the background of its paper-products and packaging cluster