In the 11th lunar month, breath hangs visible in Hangzhou’s cold air. The year-end was near. By Yang Yinfeng’s count, he had lived in Hangzhou for fifteen years. “At this rate, I’ll have spent more time here than in Hunan,” he said, laughing. The city under his feet had become, for all practical purposes, a second hometown.
Half a lifetime in study, half in building a business — “founder of FANJIA” is not merely a label for Yang Yinfeng. It carries a dream that has followed him from youth to middle age.
The First Step: A Business Born on an Electric Scooter
Every entrepreneur is asked where it began. Yang Yinfeng’s answer is plainer than expected: “I didn’t overthink it. I was young, just out of school, and I wanted to build something of my own.”
Born in rural Hunan, he grew up on plain advice from his parents — stay grounded, treat people well, honor your teachers, and walk your own road. In 2008, with 700 yuan in his pocket, the young man came to Hangzhou alone.
That year, the U.S. subprime crisis dragged the global economy into recession. Few realized 2008 would also mark the start of China’s decade-long domestic growth cycle. Yang Yinfeng, freshly graduated, could not have known that one small move would tie his venture to the rise and fall of the Chinese economy for the next fifteen years.
“Starting with ticketing was coincidence,” he recalled. New to Hangzhou, he first worked as a hotel waiter and, on the side, coached table tennis. Weekday evenings at the ping-pong hall turned acquaintances into friends. A client later pulled him into sales. There, talking with owners and managers across industries, he saw the friction in corporate travel: slow booking, manual reimbursement, fragmented suppliers.
“Why not pool those needs and handle them end to end?” he thought. In 2009, Hangzhou FANJIA Aviation Service Co., Ltd. was founded.
“My first client was a former boss. He trusted me, and when people heard ‘Xiao Yang’ was starting out, they gave FANJIA their travel,” Yang Yinfeng said. The industry had no map. Everyone who trusted FANJIA then was, in his words, a benefactor. The answer was simple: listen, improve, and never waste the trust.
On winter nights like this one, he would take a call, ride his electric scooter across Hangzhou, and deliver tickets by hand. The wind was sharp. The streetlights were dimmer than today’s. As a newcomer, his mental map of the city soon ran deeper than many locals’.
The name “FANJIA,” pitched to clients back then, would still echo across Zhejiang’s business community more than a decade later.
The Turn: Toward Digital Services
The ticketing business grew fast. Capital accumulated. And then, at the safest moment, Yang Yinfeng looked away from the cash register.
By 2009, Chinese enterprises were feeling the pull of information technology. “If we want to keep rising, FANJIA has to go digital,” he said. The idea met internal resistance. Yang Yinfeng did not blink. “One road paid now. The other might pay never. I knew that. But digitalization wasn’t optional — it was the direction of the era.” In 2012, the FANJIA corporate travel platform went live.
He had no IT background. His desk filled with technical books. “If you want clients to trust something new, you have to believe in it twice as hard.” The market pushed back. Early returns barely covered cost. Yang Yinfeng iterated on complaints, refined the system, and waited. When the platform proved it could compress corporate travel workflows into a browser tab, adoption climbed — and FANJIA’s growth curve bent upward.
Today, the FANJIA Travel app does more than book flights, hotels, trains, and cars. It consolidates global supply chains, applies multi-dimensional travel data analytics, and supports flexible payment methods so corporate travelers avoid out-of-pocket spending, reimbursement paperwork, and invoice chasing. The outcome is transparent, compliant, and efficient travel management that helps enterprises cut cost and raise productivity.
The TMC sector has crowded. Many vendors promise “easy booking,” “cost savings,” and “efficiency.” Services blur. Yang Yinfeng’s answer is differentiation: one-on-one service, enterprise-specific data, and customized travel management.
FANJIA now serves over 10,000 listed and large-to-medium enterprises. Nearly half of China’s A-share listed companies are clients.
“I’m a VIP user of the FANJIA Travel app myself,” he said, scrolling his own trip history. “Traveling is how I test the product. Nothing sells better than my own experience.”
Setting Out Again: Hangzhou Entrepreneurs’ Spirit, People First
From the office entrance to Yang Yinfeng’s door, one detail stands out: no desks and no offices carry title plates. “Mine included,” he said. “It wasn’t planned, but it says something.”
He does not want to be “the leader.” At FANJIA, people are partners. “They call me Lao Yang.” The warm young man who once played ping-pong with clients has not changed much in fifteen years. That people-first instinct — part of the Hangzhou entrepreneurs’ spirit — runs into the product too.
FANJIA’s principle, “Enterprise Growth, Employee Well-being,” reaches past the P&L. “Work means overtime. Nobody likes it,” Yang Yinfeng said plainly. So FANJIA built WorkBee: employees earn WorkBee tokens through overtime compensation, travel savings, and corporate incentives, then spend them across partner merchants, banks, and service providers. Cost control stops feeling like punishment. Saving becomes reward. “Employee well-being and enterprise health move together,” he said. “We want the company to feel like a real family.”
Small care scales into larger care. During the pandemic, the FANJIA Travel app opened an agricultural assistance channel, putting fresh produce directly in front of millions of enterprise-employee households. Centralized procurement cut logistics cost. Demand matched supply. Farmers gained a channel; employees got fair prices. Today, the “My Hometown Premium Products” section aggregates seasonal goods from across China; tens of thousands of enterprise employees shop there daily. A rural-born founder and self-made Hangzhou entrepreneur, Yang Yinfeng has not forgotten where he came from.
“The market’s tolerance for failure is low. FANJIA is stable now, but I won’t relax,” he said. The ease of the opening conversation gave way to caution. “But the core doesn’t move. Clients and society come first.” Tough yet thoughtful, people-first — that may be the quiet reason FANJIA keeps climbing.
Life sets no fixed number. The future sets no finish line. Fifteen years in, Yang Yinfeng and FANJIA are still on the road — heading somewhere farther.
