New China Life Brand Guidelines: Beijing 1996, a Twin 2011 Listing & Elderly-Care Communities

A Beijing life insurer of 1996.

New China Life is a Beijing life insurer founded in September 1996, according to Chinese Wikipedia and Wikidata. Its full English name is New China Life Insurance Company Limited. In Chinese it is Xinhua Renshou Baoxian, usually shortened to Xinhua Baoxian, “New China Insurance,” and English Wikipedia also gives the short form NCI, which China Daily uses too.

The company is based in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, in its own New China Insurance Tower, Chinese Wikipedia says; Wikidata likewise records its headquarters in Beijing and its listings on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges. It sells life, health and pension cover to individual and corporate customers through a large sales force and a national network of branches, and it owns New China Asset Management, alongside subsidiaries for elderly-care communities and health investment.

Its stated direction is plain. China Daily, which called New China Life one of China’s largest insurers in March 2022, reported that the company planned a business centred on life insurance, backed by wealth management and by the health and elderly-care industries, and powered by technology.

Two exchanges in one week.

The company went public in December 2011 with a simultaneous listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Chinese Wikipedia dates the listing to 15 December 2011, and its record of the share capital gives 16 December 2011 as the first trading day for the A shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange; further H shares joined the Hong Kong exchange on 11 January 2012, partly from an extra sale and partly transferred by state shareholders, Chinese Wikipedia says. The H-share sale was a global offer, split mainly into an international tranche with a smaller public offer in Hong Kong. Its A shares trade in Shanghai under the code 601336 and its H shares in Hong Kong under 1336, Chinese Wikipedia says, so the two lines share the same last four digits.

Its shareholders are a matter of record. At the listing, its largest holder was Central Huijin, followed by Baosteel and Zurich, Chinese Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia describes the state as owning more than half of the company through Central Huijin, the steel group and China Securities Finance, and lists Swiss Re, with 4.90 percent, and Fosun International, with 3.28 percent, among the holders of H shares at the end of 2015. The lock-ups ran out in stages: the A shares placed with institutions became tradable on 16 March 2012, and a larger block of restricted A shares on 17 December 2012, Chinese Wikipedia says.

One foreign holder left early. Zurich sold part of its H shares in July 2013 and the rest in November 2013, when Swiss Re bought a portion of them, according to Chinese Wikipedia.

The insurer is also an investor in listed companies. English Wikipedia records stakes in 2015 in Hikvision, in Industrial Bank and in Tianqi Lithium, the last at 5.20 percent.

The shares sit in several market indexes. English Wikipedia names the CSI 300, the FTSE China A50 and the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, and says the company was formerly a member of the SSE 50, the Shanghai exchange’s blue-chip index. It also gives New China Life a 427th place in the 2016 Fortune Global 500 and 297th in the 2016 Forbes Global 2000.

How the category presents itself.

China’s large insurers and securities firms are mostly listed groups with sizeable state shareholders, and many trade in more than one market, typically Shanghai or Shenzhen alongside Hong Kong, and in a few cases London. Their brands therefore have to work in at least two scripts. A full Chinese company name usually sits beside a shorter Chinese form and a set of English initials, as with PICC and 人保, or CPIC and 太保, and designers need all three versions to stay recognisable together.

The visual language this guide looks at includes wordmarks in reds, blues and golds, lettering with roots in Chinese calligraphy, and square, seal-like symbols that echo a traditional name chop. Websites and reports commonly pair those marks with photography of office towers and city skylines, and with images of the people and places the companies serve.

The products shape the pages. Insurers organise their sites around life, property, health and pension cover, policy and claims services and branch finders, while securities firms present brokerage, investment banking, asset management and the wealth apps through which retail investors trade. Group sites often link out to separate websites for each subsidiary, each carrying the parent’s initials.

Much of the most carefully designed material is financial reporting. Annual and interim reports, results presentations and ESG or sustainability reports are published in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English for investors on several exchanges, and they set the tone that the rest of a brand often follows. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and where it is listed — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Life cover and later-life communities.

Elderly-care communities are a visible part of the company. On 18 May 2021, China Daily reported, New China Life released a new community in Beijing’s Yanqing district with about 2,000 apartments, due to open at the end of that year, while its communities in Boao, on Hainan, and at Lianhuachi in Beijing were already in operation. In its first phase, the report said, the Yanqing community would offer about 200 long-term apartments designed for older residents and 100 short-term guest rooms, with dining, sport, entertainment and social programmes, according to the insurer. The report placed it among several Chinese insurers building such communities and launching pension products as the country’s population ages.

The same report quoted the company describing products that combine life insurance with elderly-care and health services in major cities, drawing on the long duration and large size of insurance funds. Chinese Wikipedia lists an elderly-care management subsidiary under the Xinhua Jiayuan name beside the asset-management company.

It remains one of the country’s main listed insurers. In September 2026 China Daily counted New China Life among China’s five major A-share listed insurers, with China Life, PICC, Ping An and CPIC, all of which reported higher investment income for the first half of 2026.

The name works in two languages. In English the company calls itself New China Life; in Chinese the short form, Xinhua Baoxian, means New China Insurance, so the same company can appear as New China Life, New China Insurance, NCI or Xinhua Baoxian; China Daily has used both New China Life Insurance and NCI in its English-language reports.

For a design guide, New China Life shows a bilingual name carried across two exchanges and from policies into homes for later life. Compare Taikang, another Beijing insurer, and China Life. For this guide we use a deep red, a slate blue and a night ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep New China Life’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.