XUYI, China—If you’ve ever gone bowling, there’s a decent chance you’ve used a ball made by a guy in China named Frank Zhao.

At a factory here, workers pour liquid polyester into rounded molds, churning out tens of thousands of bowling balls a year destined for the U.S.

Those balls, along with investments in bowling alleys and selling equipment, have made Zhao one of the kingpins of bowling in China.

A factory hand-turned-entrepreneur, he endured the Cultural Revolution, studied English by listening to lessons on cassette tapes, and partnered with Americans doing business in China to escape his poor background and achieve greater financial success than he had ever dreamed.

In 2016, around the peak of his success, Zhao built a bowling alley in Shanghai’s ritzy Bund neighborhood with disco lights and a bar (Bund Bowl) offering $200 bottles of Glenlivet Scotch. He catered to executives from McDonald’s, Under Armour and other American companies who wanted to throw parties. Some nights, he hired dancers from Brazil to perform.

Then came the government’s tightening grip over the economy and the Covid pandemic with its lockdowns. Since around 2016, Zhao says his business has shrunk by half as he has battled to stay afloat in a country where getting ahead is getting tougher. The bowling alley on the Bund is gone.

The factory churns out tens of thousands of bowling balls a year destined for the U.S.

With many young people shunning factory work, it has gotten hard to find cheap labor. Government officials, who used to blast through red tape to help small businesses grow, are now squeezing the private sector.

“Something needs to be done to change this,” says Zhao, 57. “This country, our economy, has grown so much since the ‘80s, and there were so many people working very hard and getting richer. But now we’re losing jobs, losing the spirit.”

China’s economic opening starting in the late 1970s unleashed a burst of pent-up the pragmatism of state officials who embraced market reforms—played a central role in lifting some 800 million people out of poverty.

But the era when it felt like anything could be achieved with hard work and some pluck is giving way to gloom.

The economy faces deep structural problems, including a massive overhang of debt, an aging population and an overbuilt property market, curbing opportunities for entrepreneurs.

On top of all that, unpredictable and draconian Covid-control measures, including lockdowns and three years of borders being all but closed, have left many business owners wary of taking risks.

Wages on the production line have risen 30% since Zhao moved his operation to Xuyi.

From rural life to factory floor

Zhao was born in 1966, as China was plunging into the Cultural Revolution, the decadelong period of upheaval that sought to cleanse China of capitalist influences, often violently.

His grandfather, a local official during the pre-Communist Kuomintang government, spent more than 20 years in a labor camp. One of Zhao’s early memories growing up in rural Sichuan province was seeing his father kneeling on a plank of wood, surrounded by angry villagers during a struggle session.

After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, China gradually embraced market reforms.

Zhao became a middle-school teacher. As China opened up its economy, he grew curious about life beyond Sichuan. He dropped two months of salary—equivalent to about $25—on English classes taught with cassette tapes.

He briefly flirted with activism. When student pro-democracy protests erupted in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, Zhao, then in his 20s, rallied college students in Sichuan to demonstrate locally in solidarity.

Zhao was investigated for his actions but avoided prison. Disenchanted with teaching in China’s state system, which had assigned him a black mark for his role in the protests, he decided to try his luck in the southern city of Shenzhen, where new opportunities were emerging in China’s burgeoning private sector.

On the two-day train journey in late 1992, Zhao crammed in knee-to-knee with the other migrants, with some sprawled horizontally underneath the seats. Hundreds of thousands of migrants were arriving every year in the cradle of China’s economic opening up.

He couldn’t afford a bed, and the crisp, autumn air made it too cold to sleep outside. So on his first night in Shenzhen, Zhao wandered for hours in the dark, clutching a backpack with a certificate from his English studies.

He eventually landed a job in the research-and-development department of a factory making shoes for Reebok. Working more than 70 hours each week, he rarely ventured beyond the factory’s gates, singularly focused on what each hour on the job could buy him.

“What can you do with two yuan? One hour’s overtime pay,” Zhao says. “I can have a plate of fried noodles. With three yuan, I can add one more fried egg to that. That’s a good meal.”

Zhao says China feels increasingly unpredictable.

Good times roll

Zhao got a lucky break. Through an acquaintance, he was hired as an interpreter for Americans building bowling alleys in China. At the time, he had never seen an alley, and puzzled over the lingo. Gutters? Pinsetters?

Then, in 1995, Zhao moved to Shanghai to help set up the local office of an Oregon businessman’s bowling company in China. Investors were racing to open more new alleys.

“They didn’t want to lose one day, one hour,” Zhao says.

His then-wife and son joined him in Shanghai, and he later had a daughter through a second marriage. Zhao began building wealth on a scale he had never experienced, acquiring three apartments. He took his first overseas trip in 2001 after enrolling in a master’s of business administration program in Scotland. Returning to China the following year, Zhao found a bowling industry plagued by overexpansion, with many alleys closing their doors.

He sensed an opportunity. Zhao launched his own business, called Longmarch Bowling, in 2003 with the idea that he could acquire used pinsetters and other equipment from failed
alleys, spruce them up and sell them overseas.

The Long March is the name given to the retreat by Communist troops to bases in central China during the 1930s—from which they emerged strengthened and, ultimately, victorious in the civil war.

Zhao says he admires the spirit the words represent: “No matter how difficult, you keep fighting.”

His idea worked and Longmarch sold equipment to projects from Germany to Australia and Afghanistan. With the profits, Zhao turned next to the trickier prospect of making balls.

For four years, Zhao and a business partner tinkered to make a decent ball. Zhao  says many of the first ones were duds, with their cores crumbling like sand. Over time the balls improved, and industry executives took note.

Bigwigs from Brunswick Bowling, the American producer of balls and other equipment, started stopping by Zhao’s booth at an industry expo in Las Vegas.

In Shanghai, Zhao opened Longmarch Bowling Center, his first alley. He began hobnobbing with top industry figures, even arranging for Walter Ray Williams Jr., considered by many bowlers to be the Tom Brady of the sport, to visit China in 2013.

The next year, he partnered with the U.S. Professional Bowlers Association to launch a pathway for Chinese bowlers to compete in PBA events.

“Frank Zhao was becoming the guy in China for bowling,” says PBA Commissioner Tom Clark.

Zhao’s bowling-ball factory was also flourishing, producing 120,000 balls a year at its peak. And in 2016, he opened his fancy bowling center, Bund Bowl, in the riverside area of Shanghai.

Zhao, in the center in a black coat, at his now-defunct bowling-ball factory in Shanghai in 2008. PHOTO: FRANK ZHAO

New economic reality

But the tide was already starting to turn. All around his Shanghai factory, other manufacturers were going dark as they were closed by a city government that increasingly sought to project a wealthy, sometimes glamorous, image internationally.

By mid-2016, Zhao was ordered to close his factory. The reason given, he says, was that the land wasn’t supposed to be used for a factory, although he had been allowed to do so for years.

Shanghai’s government confirmed in a response that the factory was closed for operating in an unlicensed space and that it had been torn down as part of efforts to improve the local ecology.

He moved his operation 200 miles inland to Xuyi, in the province of Jiangsu. There, he encountered a more fundamental problem: Many young Chinese don’t want factory work anymore.

China’s one-child policy, which leaders decided to scrap in late 2015, had resulted in shrinking numbers of working-age people. Many parents, having experienced similar hardships as Zhao, were eager to shield their kids from factory work.

The bowling-ball factory workers in Jiangsu are typically in their 40s, double the age of his staff in Shanghai. He says wages on the production line have risen 30% since he moved. Some workers now earn more than back-office staff, such as accountants—the opposite of how it used to be.

Unpredictable enforcement of government regulation is another major problem,
Zhao says. Regulations on business have tightened on everything from environmental standards to the treatment of employees.

Zhao says he would be fine with that if regulations were implemented equally across China. Instead, he says, business owners operate at the whims of local officials, forcing them to cultivate personal relationships with authorities instead of relying on the law.

In Jiangsu, Zhao produces 70,000 balls annually, nowhere near as many as he was doing in Shanghai.

While Zhao’s manufacturing operation generates about $2 million in annual revenue, margins have been tight because of rising labor costs and stiff competition.

For a while, he hoped the swanky Shanghai bowling alley would make up for the challenges in Jiangsu. At first, the concept seemed to be working—imported beers, a DJ booth, soccer games on TV, all besides the bowling.

By 2019, Zhao says investors were even talking to him about turning the concept of Bund Bowl into a chain.

Those discussions died after the pandemic struck in early 2020, and Zhao was forced to temporarily close Bund Bowl and his other alley across town.

A few months later, after China managed to beat back its initial Covid outbreak, Zhao was permitted to reopen his alleys.

But the multinationals he had relied on as customers scrapped their parties, with many shrinking their China operations as the country largely sealed its borders, the economy stagnated and relations with the West soured.

Zhao was forced to close Bund Bowl for good, suffering what he estimates was a $1.5 million loss. Inside the closed alley, he ripped out its equipment and hauled it to a warehouse in Jiangsu.

By the spring of 2022, much of the world had largely moved on from Covid. Restrictions in Shanghai were only getting more severe. As the highly contagious Omicron variant swept over Shanghai, officials imposed a two-month lockdown for the city.

In the end, the government forced Zhao to keep Longmarch Bowling Center, his other bowling alley, closed for six months in 2022, long beyond when Shanghai’s lockdown officially ended. A gymnasium that shares the building with the alley had been turned into a quarantine center and authorities had cordoned off the entire area.

Zhao says he didn’t get a single yuan of state support. What’s more, Zhao says the facility’s property-management company wants him to pay more than $100,000 in rent for the time he was forced to close. He’s refusing, and has appealed to officials for help, so far unsuccessfully.

Shanghai said in its response that the city will continue to support private companies. It pointed to recent remarks by its Communist Party secretary, who said the city’s private economy has played an important role in building Shanghai into a “modern, socialist, international metropolis with world influence.”

The Xuyi factory produces 70,000 balls annually, far fewer than in Shanghai.

‘We’re kind of  lost’

As Zhao’s businesses suffered, clampdowns on well-known entrepreneurs intensified, sending chills through the private sector.

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Some days, Zhao says he fears he has lost his business drive. He’s rooting for China but worries about its future.

“We’re kind of lost,” he says of China today.

“We love the country, want the economy and everything doing better. But we don’t know…” Zhao sighs as his voice trails off.

For now, China remains his best option, he says, in part due to its vast networks of raw-material and logistics suppliers—an ecosystem that is tough for other countries to replicate. Yet China also feels increasingly unpredictable, so he is reluctant to invest much more in the country.

Zhao has one more idea that he hopes will revive his business. He has been working on a new technique to print images onto bowling balls—such as a person’s face or a company’s logo—which he says won’t scratch when the balls are bowled. Zhao says he wants to secure patents to protect his innovation.

This year, several balls made with his technique won approval from the U.S.  Bowling Congress, and he has recently begun putting them into commercial production.

Some early balls made with the new technique for Utah-based bowling company Storm Products should begin appearing on the shelves of pro shops early next
year, says Storm President Tyler Jensen.

Now in the twilight of his career, Zhao says he wishes he was spending more time with his family in Shanghai, rather than still toiling in a factory in Xuyi, where he lives in a rented apartment. But after the failures of the past few years, he sees the new balls as his best chance at success.

On a Thursday in December, Zhao grew flustered as he strolled through the factory, with its sharp odor of chemicals and barren concrete floors.

“This is pretty much about it,” he says. “Probably not as great as you were expecting.”

When he retires, Zhao says he doesn’t want his children to take over Longmarch.  His son has been working in e-commerce, while his daughter graduated from the  University of Washington last year. She has married, settled in Seattle and is still figuring out her career. She says she misses the food in China but has no desire to move back.

For three decades, Zhao has largely avoided politics to focus on business. Despite his recent challenges, he says he doesn’t oppose the government or the Communist Party.

But he says the government’s tightening control is eroding opportunities for the next generation.

At least he managed to give his daughter a chance in the U.S. “I ’m very, very happy with that,” he says.

Frank Zhao says he is rooting for China but worries about its future.

Note: Certain sections of the original article have been omitted. To access the complete version, please click here to visit the Wall Street Journal website