From Beijing to the World Stage: The Story of Hailun Chen and the Piano Company That Changed What "Made in China" Means
- Aug 5
- 4 min read
There is a story that gets told frequently in the piano industry, and it goes roughly like this: piano manufacturing is a European art form, perfected over centuries by family workshops in Vienna, Hamburg, and London, and any instrument made outside that tradition will inevitably be a compromise. It is a story with real historical grounding. It is also a story that Hailun Chen has spent the better part of four decades quietly proving wrong.
Hailun Chen — the founder and driving force behind Hailun Piano Co. — is not a businessman who stumbled into piano manufacturing. He is a trained piano technician who met his wife, Faye, at the Piano Technology School in Beijing in the 1980s, built his first enterprise making piano parts in 1986, and has never stopped learning from the craftspeople who have forgotten more about piano building than most manufacturers will ever know. Understanding how Hailun became what it is today requires understanding the choices Chen made at each stage — choices that were, in almost every case, harder than the alternatives.
Starting From Parts
When Hailun Chen and Faye began their business in 1986, they did not start by building pianos. They started by building components — the individual parts that go into a piano's action, keybed, and cabinet. This was deliberate. Making parts well requires understanding what those parts are supposed to do; it is a foundation in the craft that many piano manufacturers — including some well-known names — never fully acquired before scaling to full instrument production.
The company's early structure included a co-ownership arrangement with the Chinese government, which was common for Chinese industrial enterprises of that era. In 1998, Chen bought out the government's stake in the company. That decision — taking on the financial risk of full private ownership — gave him something more valuable than equity: it gave him complete control over quality standards and hiring decisions. What followed was a transformation in the kind of piano Hailun could build.
The European Partnership That Changed Everything
By the late 1990s, Chen had a factory, a workforce, and a product. What he needed was a deeper connection to the tradition of European piano building — the accumulated knowledge of timber selection, voicing, action regulation, and scale design that European craftspeople had developed over generations.
He found it in Peter Veletzky, a Viennese piano builder and the fourth-generation descendant of a family with centuries of piano manufacturing experience. At 22, Veletzky had become the youngest person in Austria at that time to receive a license to produce pianos. He transferred technical knowledge and manufacturing methodology to Hailun Chen directly, establishing the philosophical and practical foundation of what Hailun's instruments would become.
Veletzky was the first of what would become an international team of piano engineering authorities assembled by Chen. The team has included George F. Emerson, an American piano designer; Zlatkovic Sibin, a Viennese specialist in piano tuning and voicing; Ema Shigeru, a Japanese production specialist; and Stéphane Paulello, a French scale designer and piano builder whose work on Hailun's larger grand pianos — including the HG218 — has contributed directly to their tonal character and dynamic range.
The decision to build this kind of team was expensive and logistically demanding. It was also the decision that made everything else possible.
Building a Factory Worth Working In
The Hailun factory in Ningbo, China, has grown to over 430,000 square feet of production capacity and now employs more than 800 workers and 37 seasoned piano engineers. What distinguishes it from many large-scale manufacturing operations is how those workers are treated.
Chen made a deliberate decision to pay significantly higher wages than other piano makers in China — a choice that has allowed Hailun to attract and retain the most skilled craftspeople available. The company runs an in-depth training program conducted by piano builders and technicians from the United States and Europe, ensuring that the knowledge brought in from outside is transmitted into the permanent capabilities of the workforce rather than departing with the consultants.
The result is a factory where modern manufacturing methods and large-scale efficiency coexist with a substantial amount of skilled manual labor — the kind of hand-work that mass production often eliminates first. The care in the final stages of piano assembly and regulation — the voicing of hammers, the regulation of action geometry, the fine-tuning of tonal character across the instrument's range — cannot be entirely mechanized. Hailun has not tried.
What the Industry Now Says
It takes time for a reputation to build, and longer still for an industry known for its conservatism to update its assessments. But by the mid-2010s, Hailun's position in the piano world had shifted materially. Piano Buyer Magazine — the most authoritative independent consumer reference in the American piano market — ranked Hailun in the Premium-Level category of Consumer-Grade Pianos and designated the brand at the Upper level for three consecutive years (2011, 2012, and 2013). The Musical Merchandise Review (MMR) named Hailun's acoustic piano line "Acoustic Piano Line of the Year" in 2012, 2013, and 2014, before awarding the brand its "Legacy Award" in 2015 and inducting it into the MMR Hall of Fame.
These are not niche recognitions from within a narrow circle. They are assessments from editors and industry professionals whose job is to evaluate instruments on their merits.
The story of Hailun is not a story about cheap alternatives to real pianos. It is a story about what becomes possible when a founder with deep knowledge of the craft, access to the world's best engineering minds, and an uncompromising standard for his workforce decides to build something that can stand alongside the best instruments in the world. Forty years in, that story is still being written.
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