Sitting in his modest, sawdust-choked workshop on the outskirts of Shanghai, 67-year-old Shen Jian wonders aloud if he has wasted his life. The craftsman and factory owner has devoted more than four decades to a single occupation: making and selling accordions. Shen has survived layoffs, the challenges of building a business almost from scratch, the divorce of his marriage after years of long hours with little success, and most recently, the collapse of sales during the pandemic.

Now he sometimes wonders if he made the right decisions. “In reality, I think my decision (to stay in the accordion industry) was probably a mistake,” Shen tells Sixth Tone. “But it’s the decision I made, and now I have to face the consequences.”

When Shen started making accordions in 1976, he had no particular interest in music, let alone a passion for it. When he got a job at the accordion factory in Shanghai after graduating from a vocational middle school, his only connection to the instrument was a faint childhood memory of a neighbor playing the accordion. “Back then, I thought it sounded beautiful, with full tones,” he says. “It was an elegant instrument.”

Although accordions do not have a long history in China, they were quickly adopted by musicians after their widespread introduction in the first half of the 20th century. After the Russian Revolution, numerous Russian accordionists and music teachers fled their homeland and settled across China, from Harbin in the northeast to Shanghai and Guangzhou in the east and south respectively. There they made a living performing and teaching music, gradually helping to cultivate a generation of accomplished Chinese players.

It was this group that brought the instrument to national attention. In the 1950s and 1960s, military bands toured China as part of the People’s Republic’s efforts to bring culture to the masses. On these tours, big bands and orchestras typically eschewed heavy and cumbersome pianos and used accordions instead, allowing many Chinese to hear for the first time the “full tones” that Shen remembers from his youth. And because the accordion was seen as a socialist instrument – somewhat ironically given the circumstances of its introduction to China – it was more accessible to ordinary Chinese who feared the “bourgeois” consequences of learning Western instruments such as the guitar or piano.

Although Shen joined the factory at the end of that period, he experienced a boom in demand for accordions in the early years of his career. The introduction of “reform and opening up” brought new wealth to China, and Chinese who grew up with the instrument began buying their own. By 1980, the factory was producing about 20,000 accordions a year, according to Shen; by 1988, that number had risen to 53,000. Demand for the instrument was large enough to support two major state-owned accordion brands. Parrot, in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, was modeled after factories in the USSR and Germany, while the Shanghai Accordion Factory’s Baile brand mimicked the design language of Italian manufacturers.

But by the end of the 1980s, the industry was beginning to falter. The country’s reforms not only brought new wealth, they also ensured that a flood of Western music and culture swept over China. More and more parents wanted their children to learn more classical instruments such as the piano; the accordion, with its links to the staid socialist past, was out.

The state-owned factory where Shen worked was slow to adapt to this new reality. Demand was falling and new competitors were popping up in the countryside, undercutting them on price. By 2003, Shen had risen to a management position, but the factory, which had originally promised lifetime employment, was at the end of its rope.

When he was laid off, Shen received a severance package of 40,000 yuan (about $4,830 at the time). After nearly 30 years in the same job, he was unemployed, nearly 50 years old, and living in a city where the cost of living was rising rapidly.

“In Shanghai, it was particularly clear: those who were laid off could not maintain their standard of living,” says Shen. Many of his colleagues simply could not accept the loss of their jobs. He remembers friends who would pretend to go to work, leaving the house at seven in the morning in smart shirts and then wandering the streets until nightfall.

Shen, for his part, was also unwilling to change industries. When he came to the factory, he may not have been a passionate accordionist, but over the course of nearly three decades, he had developed a bond with it. “Even though I can’t play the accordion, I understand it very well,” says Shen. “I came to the factory straight after vocational school. I’ve been doing this all my life, which means I have a certain fondness and sentimentality for the process.”

So he made a decision that he now considers hasty: He scraped together his savings and his severance pay, bought as much equipment as he could from his old employer, and set up a new factory. The name he gave his new company, Xiangle, contained a hidden reference to his old company. It means “missing Baile.”

It was, he admits, an emotional rather than a logical decision. He had no answer to the flood of cheap accordions being produced in new, often village-based factories across China – or, for that matter, any business plan. In fact, he says, at first his new factory couldn’t even produce accordions, only individual parts: “I couldn’t bring a single mold with me. I had to buy them and make the rest from scratch.”

He soon found himself pouring more and more money into the factory while the business made ends meet by selling spare parts. But he had an ace up his sleeve: a contact with an Italian manufacturer who was interested in sourcing accordions from China.

Italy is a center of accordion production and Shen knew a lifeline when he saw one. Rather than trying to compete with low-cost suppliers serving the domestic market, Shen focused on making parts and assembling them for export. He even brought in an experienced Italian accordion craftsman to guide his workers and improve the quality of their work, although he says the partnership soured due to the language barrier and other disagreements. “He told me that if I followed his instructions and guidance, my factory could meet Italian standards,” Shen recalls, adding, “Even if I didn’t reach the Italian level, I could certainly improve and reach a higher level.”

For the first time since opening his factory, Shen had a business model. But his problems were far from over. To meet the higher standards of his new customers, he and his employees often had to work overtime. He says he arrived at the factory around 8 a.m. and didn’t leave until 11 p.m.

He spent almost no time at home, and what little free time he had was spent worrying about the future of the factory. “I didn’t want to sleep,” says Shen. “I was thinking about too many things, like the possibility of going bankrupt.”

In 2016, after the two had barely seen each other for more than a decade, Shen’s wife filed for divorce. “I feel very guilty,” he says. “For the past 20 years, I have neglected my responsibilities at home, neither my son’s education nor my daily life. My family needed me, but I was not there.”

From his perspective, it was a binary decision: Either he devoted his life to the accordion factory and kept it afloat, or he spent more time with his family and watched the factory go under. “If I had stayed with my family, that would have meant bankruptcy,” he says. “If I had continued working at the factory, that would have meant divorce. The decision not to file for bankruptcy and to carry on was incredibly difficult. It almost felt like a stupid decision, but I couldn’t let my life’s work be ruined by my own hands.”

He agreed to the divorce. At the civil registry, Shen’s ex-wife gave him a piece of candy, a reference to the traditional Chinese custom of giving sweets at weddings. They signed the papers together with the candy in their mouths.

Meanwhile, his factory was still not on solid ground. In 2019, just before the pandemic hit, Shen received a large order but had to stop production before it was finished. Shen describes this period as the time when his factory came closest to collapse. “Production orders couldn’t be fulfilled, and I had to reassure my customers,” he says. “Wages couldn’t be paid on time, so I had to talk to my workers too. And the landlord also put pressure on me about the rent. The stress was too much.”

“My workers showed great understanding and tolerance towards the delayed wages,” Shen recalls. “During this period, they provided tremendous support. Sometimes the factory delayed paying wages for one, two, or even up to five months, but they continued to support me. I am extremely grateful for their help and understanding.”

Now, Shen says, business is picking up again. His factory has enough orders to ensure constant production, and he has been able to hire younger workers willing to learn the craft. Last year, after a lengthy court case, he even managed to secure the Baile trademark, allowing him to once again produce instruments under the venerable brand.

“When I think back to why I made this decision (to start a factory) so many years ago, it was because I felt I owed something to all the artisans I had worked with for decades,” Shen says.

Whether it was worth it depends. “If we can keep the Baile brand alive, then I think it was all worth it,” he says. “I just want to do it right.”

Contributions: Liu Zhuo’er and Ding Yining.