This article only represents the author's own views.
As a young man, Hou Zhengyu, who harkens from a small town in Hongze county of Jiangsu province, was focused on owning an 80-square-meter apartment in Shanghai and marrying a Shanghainese woman. A fresh break-up in the early 2000s had sent him from his hometown to China’s commercial capital where he found work as a safety inspector at a local shipyard.
When the labor department from his hometown asked him to help place workers with foreign companies in Shanghai, he seized on the opportunity, using an aging bicycle and pager as his main work tools. In 2004 he acquired his first company, Shanghai Zhengdong Human Resources Co., from the Shanghai Pudong Labor Department. That would become the nucleus of his current company, BridgeHR Tech Group Inc., which two decades later has filed for an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
