I Watched His Towers Rise: A Life of Xu Jiayin，The Rise and Fall of the Evergrande Empire, and the Secrets of Business and Power in China- BK25
Updated: Oct 23
I Watched His Towers Rise
A Life of Xu Jiayin: The Rise and Fall of the Evergrande Empire, and the
Secrets of Business and Power in China
Fang Tianliang
Autumn 2026
Translated from the Chinese 《眼见他起朱楼——许家印传》Twenty-seven chapters in four parts, with six appendices
Contents
Before We Begin
Part One: The Two Ends of Fate
Chapter 1: Two Property Tycoons, Two Fates
Chapter 2: The Poor Boy from Taikang
Chapter 3: The Little Emperor of the Wuyang Steelworks
Chapter 4: Heading South to Guangzhou – A Migrant Worker’s Ambition
Chapter 5: How Five Million Leveraged an Empire
Part Two: Two Card Tables
Chapter 6: The Hong Kong Card Game, and a Hole in the Accounts
Chapter 7: A Pledge of Allegiance: Football, Women’s Volleyball and New Masters
Chapter 8: Moving the Capital to Shenzhen
Chapter 9: Three Triple-As and One Junk
Chapter 10: Shengjing Bank – The Counting House, the Seals and the Bankers
Chapter 11: Pomp
Chapter 12: The Evergrande Daily, a Song and Dance Troupe, and a Tycoon’s Self-Image
Chapter 13: Celebrities, Publicity and 14 Billion Yuan in Advertising
Part Three: The Architecture of the Numbers
Chapter 14: Two Companies, One Model
Chapter 15: The Deferred Reckoning
Chapter 16: The 560-Billion Mirage
Chapter 17: Both Ends of the Cash Machine
Chapter 18: The Three Red Lines
Chapter 19: The First to Run
Chapter 20: Collapse
Chapter 21: The Meeting on Delivering Homes
Chapter 22: A String of Names
Chapter 23: Who Pays the Bill
Part Four: Heaven Is Bigger Than I Am
Chapter 24: Pan Shiyi’s “My Fate Is Up to Me – and Up to Heaven”
Chapter 25: Li Ka-shing, Ren Zhiqiang and the Men Who Saw the Bullet Coming
Chapter 26: Beginning With Zhufu Yan
Chapter 27: Epilogue: The World Like a Tide
Appendices
Appendix One: Chronology
Appendix Two: Principal Figures
Appendix Three: Table of Figures
Appendix Four: Items Awaiting Verification
Appendix Five: A Note on Sources and Method
Appendix Six: Judicial Developments in 2026
Before We Begin
On the morning of 20 August 2026, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in Guangdong province delivered its first-instance verdict, in open court, in the case of the Evergrande Group, Evergrande Real Estate and Xu Jiayin. Convicted on multiple counts, Xu Jiayin was sentenced to life imprisonment, deprived of political rights for life and ordered to forfeit all of his personal property.
This book is not about how a man came to be given a heavy sentence – a judgment has already said all that. It is about how a man could, on the same soil, in the same industry and under the same set of rules, rise to such a height, and then fall from it.
To that end, the book handles its material according to three disciplines.
The first is to distinguish three kinds of material. Whatever comes from court judgments, regulatory announcements, listed-company disclosures or stock-exchange documents is treated as confirmed information, with the nature of the source indicated where necessary. Whatever comes from named media reports, journalistic investigations or interviews with those involved is treated as single-source information and marked “according to such-and-such a report”. Whatever appears only in the monologues, interviews and live streams of independent online commentators, without a verifiable document or a second independent source, is treated as rumour, written explicitly as “so it is said” or “according to rumour”, and never mixed with the first two kinds.
A further point must be made in advance. Part of the material for this book comes from the spoken accounts of several commentators describing the same events, and the same episode often appears in different accounts with inconsistent dates, figures and spellings of names. The book does not try to reconcile these discrepancies – especially where they concern the timing of key judicial events – but marks each one, treating them as part of the subject of study. Readers will find the full list of discrepancies in Appendices Three and Four.
The second is to add nothing to the conclusions of the courts. Charges, sums and sentences mentioned in the book follow the public statements of the courts and regulators. Where people and relationships have not been addressed by any judgment but have already been judged by popular opinion, the book says only that they are “alleged”, “implicated” or “said to be involved”, and pronounces no verdict.
The third is not to turn a man into a parable. Xu Jiayin’s rise and fall does lend itself to ancient maxims, and each part of this book opens with an episode from history or a classical text as a mirror. But a mirror is only ever a mirror. Zhufu Yan is not Xu Jiayin; the Edict of Grace is not China’s system of land auctions; being boiled in the cauldrons is not a life sentence. History offers a way of seeing, not a verdict. Wherever the two men are laid directly one on top of the other, the book will draw the line in the text itself.
The title comes from a line sung in The Peach Blossom Fan, Kong Shangren’s great drama of 1699 about the fall of the Ming dynasty: I watched him raise his vermilion towers; I watched him feast his guests; I watched his towers fall. Those three lines come closer than any commentary to the thirty years this book sets out to describe.
Part One: The Two Ends of Fate
Zhufu Yan of Qi wandered and studied for more than forty years without achieving anything; his parents would not own him as a son, his brothers would not take him in, his fellow retainers cast him off. Once he reached Chang’an, he was promoted four times in a single year. The great ministers all feared his tongue, and the bribes they sent him came to thousands in gold. When someone urged him to restrain himself, Yan said: “The sun is setting and my road is long – so I go against the current and act against all rules.”
– after the Records of the Grand Historian, “Biographies of the Marquis of Pingjin and Zhufu Yan”
Chapter 1: Two Property Tycoons, Two Fates
On the morning of 20 August 2026, the light in the courtroom of the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court was cold, white and even. Xu Jiayin sat in the dock, his hair completely white, his face puffy, his eyes lowered – not much different from any ordinary man in his sixties. The prosecution had charged this former richest man in China with eight offences: illegally taking deposits from the public, fund-raising fraud, illegally issuing loans, illegally using funds, fraudulently issuing securities, illegally disclosing important information, embezzlement by an employee, and bribery by an entity. According to public reports, he admitted guilt and expressed remorse in court; the court eventually sentenced him, on multiple counts, to life imprisonment, deprivation of political rights for life and forfeiture of all personal property.
Earlier that year, on the far side of the Pacific, another property developer published a short essay on his WeChat public account – the blog-like channels through which Chinese public figures address their followers. It was titled “My Fate Is Up to Me – and Up to Heaven”. The account had been silent for more than three years. The essay was under 1,400 Chinese characters long, plain in tone and silent on current affairs; the phrase it kept returning to was “Heaven is bigger than I am”. Some readers noticed that when the essay was posted, the IP address showed Beijing, but when the author replied in the comments, it showed the United States. Some guessed that he had come back to China for the Qingming festival – the spring day for tending ancestral graves – and left again immediately; others thought he had used a VPN and forgotten to switch it when replying. Whatever the truth, one thing was clear: of the group who had once stood alongside Xu Jiayin at the very top of Chinese property, this author was no longer within sight of the public in mainland China.
The two scenes, separated by several months, made a rare contrast: one man in a courtroom admitting his guilt, the other in an essay abroad musing on destiny. Most onlookers would read it as a story about cleverness – who saw it coming earlier, who ran faster, who didn’t stoop to pick up the last copper coin. But what lies behind it is more worth looking at. For a long time these two men faced the same era, the same industry and the same rules governing business and power. They understood the world differently, handled risk differently, and in the end were treated differently by those rules.
Pan Shiyi was born in a village near Tianshui, in Gansu province. As a young man he moved around within the oil industry, and later went into property on Hainan island. In 1992, at the height of the Hainan property bubble, tens of thousands of property companies were registered in the city of Haikou alone, whose permanent population was under 300,000. His judgement was simple: supply without real demand is a bubble. At the end of that year he sold up, got out and headed north with his capital. The Hainan market then collapsed. To this day the episode is cited as one of the most famous exits in the history of Chinese property.
For the next twenty-odd years, his moves were always half a step ahead of his peers, and clearer. In 2005 he transferred all the shares held in his name to his wife, Zhang Xin, who had already taken American citizenship – an arrangement that would be endlessly interpreted in later years, but which was first and foremost a technical arrangement of law and shareholding, its significance being that it moved the vehicle holding the family’s assets offshore early, rather than being a one-off cashing-out. Around 2013 he began disposing of his heavy assets, and over the following years cashed out a total of about 30 billion yuan. In 2014 the couple gave 100 million US dollars to Harvard, Yale and other American universities to fund scholarships. In 2020, after Ren Zhiqiang – his friend of several decades – was publicly sentenced, his judgement of the climate for business and politics grew firmer still. He left behind, in an interview, a widely quoted line: for an entrepreneur, the greatest risk is not economic risk but political risk.
Xu Jiayin took a different road. He too was born poor, and he too seized the opportunities of property in the 1990s; but he staked almost everything on more expansion, more leverage and getting ever closer to power. In 2010 he bought the Guangzhou football club for 100 million yuan, poured money into foreign players and star coaches, and won the AFC Champions League – Asia’s premier club competition – in 2013. In 2015, Evergrande’s headquarters moved quietly from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. In 2017 he topped the Hurun Rich List. At the National Day celebrations of 2019 and the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, he twice appeared among the guests on the Tiananmen rostrum. Not until the “three red lines” were introduced in 2020 did this high-speed machine finally show cracks that could not be papered over.
Behind the two choices lay two understandings of the world. Pan Shiyi believed that laws of nature are greater than individual will, that political risk cannot be ignored, and that “Heaven is bigger than I am”. Xu Jiayin believed that scale, connections and resources could cover any risk – he built stadiums, endowed schools, collected honours and cultivated political and business ties far and wide, treating them all as amulets. In his logic, if the numbers were big enough and the connections strong enough, most problems could be solved.
It must be stressed that to write the two men’s fates as “wisdom triumphing over greed” is the laziest possible reading. Pan Shiyi got out through judgement, but also through luck: in 2021, Blackstone’s acquisition of SOHO China was blocked by Chinese regulators on antitrust grounds, and his last, most crucial step very nearly failed. In other words, it is not that the rules never stood in his way – only that when they did, there was still time. And Xu Jiayin’s problem was not that he did not understand the risks of leverage – a man who could refine a cash cycle down to “eighteen official seals” could not fail to understand them – but that he believed he himself could keep that cycle going for ever.
The courtroom and the WeChat post of 2026 laid the results of these two logics before the world in the same year. Whether Xu Jiayin’s end was fated all along is not a conclusion this book sets out to reach. But at least we can see how, on the same soil and in the same industry, different judgements carried people to different places.
Chapter 2: The Poor Boy from Taikang
Xu Jiayin was born in October 1958 in the village of Jutaigang, in Taikang county, Zhoukou, in Henan province. Taikang lies in eastern Henan, in the Yellow River flood zone, long ravaged by floods – a land of thin soil and many people, where every inch of ground had to be used to the full. His mother died when he was eight months old; his father was disabled, and he was brought up by his grandmother.
How poor was the village? He later told a reporter that his greatest childhood dream was to eat a steamed bun of white flour every day. The line is quoted again and again because, in the context of rural eastern Henan, it was exact: white flour was a luxury for festivals; the daily diet was sweet potato, coarse grains and cornmeal buns. His padded jacket was pieced together by his grandmother from scraps of old cloth, and going to school barefoot was normal. After leaving middle school he did almost every job the village could offer: driving a tractor, hauling a handcart, selling lime, breaking precast concrete slabs at the cement works. When the village dug a cesspit and everyone else held their noses and kept away, he was the first to roll up his sleeves and jump in.
Such details are often used by later writers as material for “hardship makes heroes”. But their real significance lies elsewhere: a child learned very young that nothing came from status, and that the only way to change his circumstances was through concrete ability to get things done – and through being noticed. He pursued those two things for the rest of his life; it was only that, gradually, the proportions fell out of balance.
When the gaokao – China’s national university entrance examination – was restored in 1977 after the Cultural Revolution, he failed at his first attempt. The next year he tried again, studying through the night in an old room at the tractor station; when his sweet-potato cakes went mouldy, he washed off the mould and kept eating. That year he scored over 400 points and was admitted to the Wuhan Iron and Steel Institute (now Wuhan University of Science and Technology), to study metal materials and heat treatment. His reason for choosing the subject was so plain as to be almost symbolic: his childhood name was “Factory” – his family had chosen it in the hope that he would one day get a factory job, with security from cradle to grave.
After graduating, Xu was assigned – in those days the state allocated graduates to their jobs – to the Wuyang Iron and Steel Company in Henan. It was the “order” he had dreamed of: a stable job, a clear path of promotion, a place where he could do things well. Much of his later life was, broadly, a relationship with rules – first learning them, then making them, then getting round them, and finally believing he could create them. That thread runs unbroken from the workshop at Wuyang to the courtroom in Shenzhen.
Rural poverty did not turn him into a simple grudge-bearer, but it planted in him a powerful sense of insecurity: only by doing things to a degree that others could not easily shake would he be truly safe. That mindset ran through his whole life. Whether drawing up three hundred management rules in the factory, using minimal capital of his own to leverage property developments in Guangzhou, or building Evergrande into a trillion-yuan enterprise, the driving force was the same – escaping the fragility that poverty brings, proving that he was no longer at anyone’s mercy.
Chapter 3: The Little Emperor of the Wuyang Steelworks
At the Wuyang steelworks, Xu quickly displayed formidable organisational ability and a strong desire for control. Not long after arriving as a newcomer, he led the drafting of Three Hundred Rules for Production Management, covering everything from shift handovers, safety standards and equipment maintenance to discipline and attendance – exhaustive and airtight. The rule later generations remember best was the “150-degree test”: if a night-shift worker’s body was opened out at an angle of more than 150 degrees, he could be deemed to be asleep on duty and fined. Today the standard sounds almost tyrannical, but it reveals how the man thought about management: any behaviour could be quantified, any loophole stopped with a clause.
This way of thinking was later copied wholesale at Evergrande. Many years on, Evergrande had an unwritten rule: if Xu Jiayin’s call rang three times without being answered, the person who should have answered was fined 20,000 yuan. One vice-president said that even when he was in the shower at home he had his wife stand by with his phone, for fear of missing a call from Xu. From attendance fines at a steelworks to telephone fines in a property empire, thirty years apart – the logic was the same.
In the workshop his nickname was “Little Emperor”. When former workmates remember him, the words they use most are “very hard-working, very capable”, usually followed by “but proud – he didn’t like flattering people, and he didn’t like people not doing what he said.” He once made a promotional film about the workshop, Heat Treatment Marches On, in which the furnaces were polished to a shine and the workers wore clean overalls; the film was eventually sent to the Wugang television station and shown again and again. That Spring Festival, he gave every worker in the workshop 100 kilograms of rice. The factory leadership was displeased and criticised him for giving away too much; he said nothing to their faces, and went on handing it out regardless. A former colleague summed him up: he cared about face, he cared about substance, and above all he cared about his own rules.
He worked at the plant for about ten years, rising from technician to head of the heat-treatment workshop. In the early 1990s, a scrap-iron heap behind the works had long been left unattended; he sold part of it to improve his workers’ welfare, and was criticised for “privately selling state assets”. That became the last straw. In a fury he resigned, left the factory his family had pinned its hopes on, and took a train south. When he left, he had 20,000 yuan in cash and a CV of more than thirty pages.
The ending says a great deal about the inner contradiction of his life. He could write a three-hundred-rule management manual with his own hand, and yet step without hesitation over the one rule that stood most in his way. He respected rules – but the rules he respected were those he had made and could adjust. The first made him a formidable organiser; the second meant that later, on a far bigger board, he treated regulation, financial statements and debt in the same spirit.
Chapter 4: Heading South to Guangzhou – A Migrant Worker’s Ambition
After Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour” of 1992 – the journey through southern China in which the ageing leader relaunched market reform – Xu took less than a week to decide to resign and head south to Shenzhen. He was thirty-four. Shenzhen was all noise, like a building site that never stopped. He slept in the corridor of a friend’s flat for three months before he found work at a trading company called Zhongda.
Zhongda’s boss, Li Zhiqiang, interviewed him personally. Xu produced the management scheme he had written in the workshop; Li took one look and hired him on the spot as deputy workshop head. A small unused kitchen at the company became his lodgings, and his monthly salary was 1,500 yuan. It was not a bad wage for the south at the time, but compared with nearly a decade of seniority at Wuyang the drop was obvious: he had gone from being a man who made the rules to being one who had to follow rules made by others.
He soon proved himself. He brought in business from the Wuyang steelworks, and his first deal earned the company 100,000 yuan; the whole company looked at him with new eyes. By his third year in Shenzhen, the company had made him a regional manager and planned to send him to Changchun, in the far north-east. He did not want to go, for the same reason as at the factory: he did not want to work inside boxes drawn by someone else. He proposed that the company try its hand at property, and volunteered to go and break new ground in Guangzhou.
In 1994 he got into a Peugeot saloon with a driver, a cashier and a salesman – four of them in all – and went to Guangzhou to do property. He rented a house in an “urban village” – one of the old farming villages swallowed by the expanding city – in Huangpu district to live in, but when meeting clients he would book a suite at a star-rated hotel in advance to keep up appearances. The detail is widely quoted because it captures his situation exactly at that stage: no money in the bank, but a show that had to be impressive, or he would not even get a seat at the table. The development he was responsible for, Zhudao Garden, used a strategy of small units at low unit prices and set a record by starting construction, going on sale and selling out all in the same year, earning the company 200 million yuan. His monthly salary was still only a little over 3,000 yuan.
Another account has it that he did not really understand property at all at the time – by his own later recollection, when he first arrived in Guangzhou he did not even know what “plot ratio” meant. If that is true, it shows all the more clearly that his talent lay not in technical expertise but in two things: seeing through the financial structure of a business, and seeing clearly its structure of power.
Buying or selling a flat required eighteen official seals. Within a year he had worked his way through all of them – by being, as the Chinese idiom has it, someone who “dances well in long sleeves”, a smooth operator in every company. He asked Li Zhiqiang for an annual salary of 100,000 yuan, and the two fell out. In 1996 he set up on his own, with registered capital of just 10 million yuan – an almost laughable figure for a property company. But by then he understood: the real barrier to entry in property was not capital, but the ability to link land, approvals, bank loans and pre-sales into one cycle – and not one link in that chain was to be found in the market.
Chapter 5: How Five Million Leveraged an Empire
Evergrande’s first project was Jinbi Garden in Guangzhou’s Haizhu district, on the former site of the Guangdong Pesticide Factory: remote, poorly served and badly polluted. The land price was 5 million yuan; Xu could raise only 3 million from the banks at the time, and negotiated to pay the remaining 2 million in instalments. He himself has described how he struck the deal – there is no need to fill in the details here, because what really matters is the result. The development opened for sale on 8 August 1996 at 2,800 yuan per square metre; the first batch of more than three hundred flats sold out within two hours, bringing in about 80 million yuan. From this he drew the logic that would sustain Evergrande for more than twenty years: you don’t necessarily have to buy land – you can also exchange for it; what determines your scale is not how much money you have, but how you use limited capital of your own to leverage the money of banks, suppliers and home-buyers.
At the time, this logic was not illegal; it could even be called shrewd. Chinese property differs fundamentally from manufacturing. Manufacturing needs technology, products, skilled industrial workers and cost control. Under China’s system of land auctions and pre-sales, the key factors a developer really needs to secure are few: land, planning approval, bank loans and project finance – all closely bound up with government and the state-owned financial system. So a developer’s most important homework is to secure two lines: the local government and the banks. Secure them, and scale can multiply geometrically.
Xu took this logic to the extreme. He paid for land in instalments and mortgaged it to the banks for loans as soon as he got it; he paid contractors and suppliers mainly with commercial paper – IOUs – handing over only a little cash; he put buildings on pre-sale as soon as the frame was up, recovering cash from buyers; then he used that money to buy more land and ran the cycle again. The method was not unique in the industry; its originality lay only in its speed and daring. From millions to tens of millions, then billions, tens of billions and hundreds of billions: for a long time Evergrande’s expansion curve moved almost in lockstep with the curve of rising house prices in China.
But the model carried a hidden danger from the start, and its location was very clear: it needed a continuous inflow of outside money, and a continuously relaxed policy environment. If any link in the chain came loose, the whole structure would collapse from within. Xu’s later problem was not that he did not understand this risk – a man who could time his cash cycle to the step could not fail to – but that for a very long time he believed he could keep the cycle going indefinitely. The first kind of security came from calculating precisely; the second from having strong connections. Increasingly, he came to rely on the second.
After Jinbi Garden, Evergrande established itself in Guangzhou. By around 1998 it was among the top ten developers in the city; from 2002 to 2007, boosted both by local political resources and by the industry’s upward cycle, it grew from a local developer building only in Guangzhou into a large company with projects in more than twenty cities. Evergrande’s website later explained its name, Hengda: “That which endures unbroken from ancient times to now is called heng; the growth and flourishing of all things between heaven and earth is called da.” Over the next twenty years, a grand-sounding name turned into a concrete verb: to leverage up.
Part Two: Two Card Tables
In the seventy-odd years after the rise of the Han, the state was at peace; save in years of flood or drought, every person had enough and every household plenty … The net of the law was loose and the people grew rich; wealth bred arrogance and excess, and some went so far as to swallow up the land of others and band together as local magnates, lording it over the villages.
– the Records of the Grand Historian, “Treatise on the Balanced Standard”
Chapter 6: The Hong Kong Card Game, and a Hole in the Accounts
The success of Jinbi Garden gave Xu capital, but it did not solve a more fundamental problem: where would the money come from – and keep coming from? Around 2003, mainland China’s banks began tightening credit to property, while land auctions demanded hard cash. To climb to the next level, the only way was the offshore capital markets: a listing in Hong Kong.
It is said that what he was really looking for was not Hong Kong capital but a road to Beijing. At this level the claim can only be treated as rumour in this book, since no verifiable document proves it. But the point of entry he sought is itself a matter of record: Hong Kong’s capital circles – more specifically, a cultural and business milieu in which a group of the territory’s top businessmen gathered at that time, including the family of Cheng Yu-tung of New World Development, Joseph Lau of Chinese Estates and Cheung Chung-kiu of Chongqing-based CC Land. These men, later dubbed the “Hong Kong tycoons” by the mainland media, played a decisive role in Xu’s rise.
When the global financial crisis broke in 2008, Evergrande’s listing plans stalled, leaving a funding gap of more than 10 billion yuan on its books; according to several Hong Kong media reports at the time, the company was one step from bankruptcy. Xu flew urgently to Hong Kong to seek help. The most legendary account of what followed has him playing cards with Cheng Yu-tung for three solid months, turning acquaintance into friendship at the card table, and finally winning an investment of more than 500 million US dollars from Cheng together with the Kuwait Investment Authority. The story was told again and again in Evergrande’s publicity after the listing, to build an image of Xu as the man who “can win over the hardest people to win over”.
On 5 November 2009, Evergrande listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising about HK$9 billion. The list of investors on the eve of the listing is revealing: Cheng Yu-tung and Joseph Lau each put in 50 million US dollars, and Cheung Kong subscribed for about HK$100 million. A local Guangzhou developer had, overnight, gained the endorsement of international capital.
The historical significance of this episode is worth a pause. All of Xu’s later expansion rested on this listing. With Hong Kong as a platform, he could issue bonds, place new shares, pledge his equity and obtain long-term, low-interest money that mainland banks could hardly provide. And what underpinned the success of the listing was not product, not land bank, not even a financial model, but the goodwill he had built up at those card tables in Hong Kong. Many times over, the golden age of Chinese property began just like this.
Chapter 7: A Pledge of Allegiance: Football, Women’s Volleyball and New Masters
After the 2009 listing, Xu had more money – and needed more political security.
The year 2012 was a watershed. A new generation of leaders took office, while the connections he had relied on in the preceding years belonged to the political lineage of an earlier era. Judgements of this kind can only be treated as rumour in this book, because the relationships at the very top that they involve have never been confirmed by any official or judicial document. What can be confirmed is that after 2012, Xu’s pattern of behaviour shifted markedly: he began, in a very public and very expensive way, to align himself with the dominant themes of the new era.
The first field he chose was football. China’s men’s team had long been in the doldrums, and “lifting Chinese football” was a wish the new leader had expressed publicly many times. As early as October 2009, on a visit to Germany, Xi Jinping had said he had “three wishes” for Chinese football: to qualify for the World Cup, to host the World Cup and to win the World Cup. It was a public political signal anyone could read.
On 1 March 2010, Evergrande bought the entire equity of the Guangzhou football club – relegated to the second-tier China League One after a match-fixing scandal – for about 100 million yuan. Ten minutes after signing, Xu ordered 20 million yuan to be paid into the club’s account at once, clearing in one go its chronic backlog of unpaid wages and ground fees. At his first meeting after taking over the team, the core of his speech came down to four Chinese characters: “whatever it costs”. The targets he set – the Chinese Super League title within three years, the Asian Champions League within five – sounded like a joke to the whole of Chinese football at the time.
Whatever it cost, it cost. At Evergrande’s all-hands meeting for the 2011 season, he unveiled the “513 policy” that shook Chinese football: 5 million yuan for the team for every win, 1 million for every draw, and 3 million deducted for every defeat – at a time when other Super League clubs’ win bonuses were generally only 400,000 or 500,000 yuan. The money had an immediate effect: in 2011, newly promoted Evergrande won the Super League with four rounds to spare.
There followed several years of burning cash: top foreign players, world-class coaches – including Marcello Lippi, who had led Italy to victory at the 2006 World Cup, brought to Guangzhou on a salary of 10 million euros a year. At the end of 2013, the second leg of the AFC Champions League final was played at Guangzhou’s Tianhe Stadium: Evergrande against South Korea’s FC Seoul. With the aggregate score 3–3, Evergrande won on away goals – the first Asian title for Chinese club football in twenty-three years, since Liaoning’s in 1990. That night Xu handed the team a single-match bonus of 14 million yuan. According to reports at the time, each of the starting eleven received close to a million yuan, the biggest bonus for a single victory in the history of Chinese football.
A photographer captured a banner in the stands: “Evergrande, you are China’s pride.” The match’s place in the history of Chinese football is beyond dispute, but its place in Evergrande’s accounts is equally clear: from 2010 to 2021, the club lost more than 7 billion yuan in total. That money was pure outlay; the return lay outside the stadium, and not in football.
The same script was later repeated with women’s volleyball. In 2009 Evergrande founded a women’s volleyball club and hired Lang Ping – the legendary star of China’s 1980s world-beating women’s team – as coach at great expense, going on to win league and Asian club titles in the following years. In the official discourse, women’s volleyball is a symbol of “national spirit”, and a sport in which the highest levels of the leadership have long taken a personal interest. That a private club could stand in both of the most “correct” positions – men’s football and women’s volleyball – was almost unique in the business world at the time. As with football, the return on these investments was written outside the balance sheet.
A sentence of restraint is needed here: these years of spending cannot simply be explained as “bribery”. The clubs were real, the trophies were really won, the fans’ excitement was real. But anyone studying this period would find it hard to deny that the spending built between entrepreneur and politics a channel of relationship that was non-transactional yet extremely efficient. It needed no receipt, because what it delivered was a statement: your wish, I have fulfilled for you.
Chapter 8: Moving the Capital to Shenzhen
Beyond football, he also needed someone who could put in a word at critical moments – someone at the centre, not merely in the provinces.
The name most widely circulated in this connection later became part of Evergrande’s fate: Ma Xingrui. Ma, a native of Shandong (one account says Yuncheng county, Shandong, which this book does not confirm), became Communist Party secretary of Shenzhen in 2015 – in China the party secretary outranks the mayor and is the most powerful official in a city – and his career had risen, in the eyes of observers of officialdom, at remarkable speed. Claims about his personal relationship with the family at the very top, and assertions that he “comes from the same place as Peng Liyuan” (Xi Jinping’s wife), appear very frequently in overseas independent media, but they are all rumour, and this book neither accepts nor pursues them.
What can be confirmed is that in 2015, Evergrande’s headquarters moved from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. At the time this was something of a wonder in the property world. Evergrande was already a trillion-yuan giant, and moving its headquarters should have meant elaborate approval procedures, several press conferences and changes affecting large numbers of staff and its place of registration. According to media reports and interviews at the time, the move was carried out very quietly – so quietly that Ren Xuefeng, then party secretary of Guangzhou, learned of it only afterwards and was furious that nobody had reported to him a change of business registration on such a scale.
A digression on Ren Xuefeng is needed here. He was transferred from Tianjin to become party secretary of Guangzhou in August 2014. He is said to have thought poorly of Evergrande’s way of doing things, and during his term never once visited its headquarters, deliberately keeping his distance. Xu evidently understood that he would not get past the Guangzhou obstacle, and so turned his gaze to Shenzhen. As for how many people were paid off in the course of the move, there is no evidence, and this book makes no inference.
Ren Xuefeng was later transferred to Chongqing as deputy party secretary. At the end of October 2019, while attending the Fourth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, he fell to his death at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing. A serving provincial-level deputy secretary falling to his death, during a plenary session of the Central Committee, inside the very hotel where the Committee was meeting: to this day the event has no full public explanation. Online speculation about “silencing” and “suicide” is equally lacking in evidence; this book records only the fact and its unresolved state.
By the end of 2015, Evergrande’s headquarters had completed its move to Shenzhen. The timing is worth remembering: in that same year, Evergrande’s position in the international capital markets changed significantly, and what happened that year would later be seen by many as the first turning point in its fate.
Chapter 9: Three Triple-As and One Junk
In May 2015, the international ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut Evergrande’s long-term credit rating from BB- to B+, with a negative outlook. By international standards this was clearly speculative grade – “junk”, in plain language – meaning that in the professional agency’s judgement the company’s finances had serious problems and the risk to investors was very high.
The news caused an uproar in China. Some outlets accused S&P of “spreading rumours”; some voices elevated it to the level of “American imperialists slandering China’s capital markets”. But what happened next was truly unusual. China’s three big domestic ratings agencies – China Chengxin International, Dagong Global and China Lianhe – published credit ratings for Evergrande at almost exactly the same time, with an identical conclusion: all three gave it their highest grade, AAA, with a stable outlook.
What does AAA mean? It is the highest grade any ratings agency in the world can give. In China, almost all the companies that receive it are giant central state-owned enterprises: PetroChina, State Grid, China Merchants, CITIC Group and the like. And normally, even for such a large state enterprise, only one agency gives the top grade. This time Evergrande received AAA from three agencies at once – almost without precedent in the history of Chinese corporate credit ratings.
On one side, S&P said it was junk; on the other, three domestic agencies said it was top-notch. This “ratings war” left international investors dumbfounded: how could a property company deep in debt by any normal financial standard obtain three top ratings that even PetroChina would struggle to match? The answer is not in the financial analysis – nor in this book, because to this day no public investigation has revealed how those three ratings came to be issued.
What can be confirmed is that the three ratings did their job: they preserved Evergrande’s ability to raise money from mainland banks and the domestic bond market. Looking back, financial fraud was already operating on a large scale during this period, and the three AAAs amounted to an authoritative stamp on those statements. Whether there was an organised link between the ratings and the falsified accounts has not been established by any court, and this book cannot conclude from a coincidence in timing that there was collusion.
The episode also explains a puzzle that long troubled outsiders: why the judgements of international investors, offshore ratings agencies and mainland regulators remained divided for so long. When a rating itself becomes a form of political endorsement that institutions inside the system can “bestow”, price signals stop working; and when a market’s price signals stop working, what harms those who ultimately foot the bill is not any one person’s greed but the failure of the entire signalling system.
Chapter 10: Shengjing Bank – The Counting House, the Seals and the Bankers
If the ratings agencies provided reputation, the institutions that actually gave Evergrande money were financial ones. Of all its operations, the one that drew most attention afterwards was Shengjing Bank.
Shengjing Bank was the largest city commercial bank in north-east China. Through several rounds of share purchases, Evergrande became its largest shareholder around 2016; in 2019 it invested a further 13.2 billion yuan, raising its stake to about 36.4 per cent and becoming a shareholder with significant influence over the bank. Once it had control, its methods were very direct. Evergrande parachuted its own executives into Shengjing Bank, while the bank’s former chairman was moved the other way, into Evergrande as a vice-president – a striking traffic of senior executives between a bank and a property company.
What followed is on record in reporting by Caixin and other media. Shengjing Bank, under Evergrande’s control, bought large quantities of bonds issued by Evergrande – about 150 billion yuan in all, according to disclosures at the time – when the bank’s own market value was only a little over 60 billion. Its total outstanding loans subsequently climbed to around 547 billion yuan, more than 50 per cent of it to property, far above the usual regulatory limits on concentration in a single sector. A city commercial bank with total assets of about a trillion yuan had, in this way, become strapped to a property company.
In 2025, Shengjing Bank was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Public information on the matter stops there; whether it was down to the bank’s own operating problems or to risk transmitted from its shareholder, this book does not speculate. But it can be said that the additional 13.2-billion-yuan investment around 2019 was the most hidden and the most dangerous link in Evergrande’s funding chain. It exposed potential conflicts of interest between a financial institution and its main shareholder, and the danger of credit risk being transmitted into the financial system.
Of the people implicated along this line, the one who drew most attention was Tang Yijun. A former governor of Liaoning province and minister of justice, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2024 for taking more than 100 million yuan in bribes. According to Caixin and other media, while serving in Liaoning he helped Evergrande push through its acquisition of control of Shengjing Bank, and a considerable part of his bribes came from Evergrande.
This is the political economy of the Evergrande model. For an entrepreneur to gain control of a financial institution in another province, he must go through the administrative will of the highest local officials – and administrative will is not free. Conversely, once that chain is established, the bank’s money becomes leverage for the company’s expansion, while the risk stays on the bank’s balance sheet.
Chapter 11: Pomp
The pomp of Evergrande at its height is the most important chapter in this book – and the most easily misread.
The misreading lies in treating it as gossip: how extravagant, how absurd the tycoon was – satisfying to read. But read only as gossip, its function is missed. Xu’s pomp was not a by-product of his private life but a language of organisation. In a company where he believed he could create the rules, pomp was a ritual for confirming the hierarchy of power.
On 9 October 2018, Xu Jiayin turned sixty. That night’s banquet was held on the forty-first to forty-third floors of the Evergrande Centre tower in Guangzhou. Within Evergrande these three floors had clearly defined access: only honoured guests, senior staff and members of the Evergrande Song and Dance Troupe were allowed in, and the forty-fourth floor, it is said, was off limits to everyone except Xu himself. The private lift to the club on the top floors ran without a sound of machinery; the indicator lights on the lift panel, the emergency lights along the corridor ceilings, even the faint lights on the air purifiers had all been covered by security staff with black, light-proof tape – because Xu was acutely sensitive to light. The club was kept at a constant 24 degrees Celsius, with the humidity just so, and the air was scented with a bespoke fragrance.
In the kitchen on the other side of the wall from the banqueting hall, staff in silk gloves examined with magnifying glasses, one by one, Shizuoka melons flown in by private jet from Japan that very morning. If even a hairline crack or a blemish was found, the whole melon was thrown away. The banquet served a Moutai specially made for Evergrande by the Kweichow Moutai distillery – China’s most prestigious liquor – along with top-growth Bordeaux at hundreds of thousands of yuan a bottle. The guests included Evergrande’s core executives and Xu’s close friends in politics and business.
A few days later, a second birthday banquet was held on the top floor of the Island Shangri-La hotel in Hong Kong. Dozens of bodyguards brought from the mainland, together with local Hong Kong security teams, sealed off every entrance and passage to the banqueting area. The guest list took in half of Hong Kong’s capital markets: Henry Cheng, Joseph Lau, Cheung Chung-kiu and others. Their birthday gifts included bespoke gold statues, top-quality jade and works of calligraphy and painting by famous artists; between toasts, they also discussed arrangements for Evergrande’s offshore bond issues, its shares and its mergers and acquisitions.
Most symbolic of all was the third celebration – in Jutaigang village, Taikang county, Zhoukou, Henan: his birthplace. Evergrande’s Henan branch first sent an engineering team into the village as an advance party. They paved the potholed dirt track at the village entrance with concrete, brought in asphalt from the county town and the township, and worked through the night to lay a tarmac road all the way from the county town to the door of the Xu family’s old house, planting neat rows of saplings along both sides. Most strikingly, the team moved every grave from the village’s communal burial ground and built for the Xu family alone an ancestral cemetery of more than ten mu (over two-thirds of a hectare), called “Garden of Fortune and Longevity”, with rockeries scattered within three-metre walls and dozens of Evergrande security guards brought in from Zhengzhou to patrol it around the clock. Xu and his father, then ninety-six, then arrived in two separate private jets. To make sure his father was in good health, Evergrande booked an entire floor of the Taikang County People’s Hospital and brought a team of medical specialists from Shenzhen.
On the day he entered the village, his motorcade was led by police cars, dozens of black luxury cars following nose to tail, bodyguards stationed at every junction. Xu and his wife, Ding Yumei, stepped out amid the crowd and handed out sweets along the way, giving every household in the village a red envelope of 3,000 yuan in cash, plus a five-kilogram bag of Evergrande-branded rice and a five-litre drum of Evergrande-branded cooking oil. In rural eastern Henan, where a household’s monthly income was no more than a thousand yuan, 3,000 yuan was no small sum, and the scene erupted.
The main event came afterwards. Surrounded by countless cameras, Xu sat with his elderly father, his wife and a few village elders around a worn old wooden table set with several plates of steamed sweet potato, black cornmeal buns, boiled cabbage and tofu soup. This was a “remember the bitterness, savour the sweetness” meal – a ritual inherited from the Mao era, in which one recalls past hardship by eating the food of the poor – arranged by the public-relations team. The richest man in China lifted a coarse earthenware bowl, broke off a piece of black bun and bit into it, sighing to the villagers about how hard it had been to study in those days. High-definition cameras captured every detail precisely, and pictures of him “never forgetting his roots, never forgetting home” were widely carried by the media.
In front of the cameras, black buns and cabbage soup; behind them, private jets, a police-escorted motorcade and an ancestral cemetery covering more than ten mu. This contrast is the key to understanding Xu. He knew perfectly well the performative value of “simplicity” before the public, and he thoroughly enjoyed the real privileges of an “emperor” within. The narrative of simplicity in public and the lavish arrangements of internal hospitality form a contrast that demands questioning.
The pomp extended to everyday life. According to internal Evergrande hospitality documents circulating on social media and the accounts of several interviewees, when Xu stayed at a hotel the whole floor had to be booked, and the lights in the corridors and rooms, the lift indicator lights, the emergency lights and every other light source had to be covered with black tape. Attendants who served him personally had to wear special silent, soft-soled shoes. He had extremely strict requirements for how his personal belongings were arranged: the limited-edition Cuban cigars, cigar case and matches he carried had to be placed at precise angles, facing in precise directions. His everyday drinking water was premium Japanese or French mineral water; the bottles had to be set down with the label facing the direction in which he would reach for them, and the water kept between 10 and 12 degrees Celsius – its temperature, it is said, checked every half hour.
His food was a whole system. The private club on the forty-first to forty-third floors of the Evergrande Centre in Guangzhou was his base, with a resident team of fifteen to twenty chefs; the Hong Kong headquarters had eight to twelve more; and two further teams of five to eight chefs stood by on his private jet and his yacht – about fifty in all across the four teams. The menus were mainly high-end Cantonese cuisine, with Liaoning sea cucumber, wild golden-swiftlet bird’s nest and large deep-sea abalone as routine ingredients; every day there were also air-freighted deliveries of wild Yunnan mushrooms, top-grade Japanese wagyu, French Gillardeau oysters, Shizuoka crown melons and black-skinned watermelons. Breakfast, it is said, was Da Hong Pao tea from ancient trees on Mount Wuyi with Italian truffle omelette.
For travel, he had customised Rolls-Royce Phantoms, one with the number plate “Yue 98888” (Yue being the abbreviation for Guangdong) and another on Hong Kong plates. He had several private aircraft, including long-range business jets in the class of the Gulfstream G650, and an Airbus A319 converted from an airliner – originally able to seat more than a hundred, refitted with just nineteen seats, a private bedroom, a meeting room and a bar. In 2015, when he went to London with Joseph Lau and Cheung Chung-kiu to sign a property deal worth billions of pounds, each of the three sent his own private jet – and the two Hong Kong tycoons preferred to play cards on Xu’s plane, letting their own fly alongside empty, simply because his had the most space and a luxurious lounge. His private yacht was custom-built at a Dutch shipyard at a cost of about 600 million yuan, with a helipad, a cinema on the water and a private spa.
Another kind of detail was hidden in the daily routine. Evergrande employed about twenty full-time lift operators, each paid about 300,000 yuan a year, working three shifts round the clock, solely to make sure that when Xu reached a lift, its doors opened at exactly the right moment. Evergrande had an internal Daily Briefing on Inspections by the President’s Office. According to versions circulating online, the procedure for a local branch receiving Xu was planned to the minute. On one inspection trip to Shenyang, the branch set up a special reception team in advance and liaised with headquarters dozens of times. Because he was used to riding in a stretch Rolls-Royce Phantom and there was none in Shenyang, the company brought one from Dalian at a daily hire of 20,000 yuan. A whole floor of presidential suites was booked at his hotel, at nearly 30,000 yuan a night. He required the humidity in his room to be kept within a specified range and the air purifier to be silent; Shenyang had no such machine, so one was air-freighted from headquarters in Guangzhou. He required hotel staff to wear soft-soled shoes so as to make no noise.
I do not intend to pass moral judgement here. What needs pointing out is the organisational meaning of these arrangements. One of the daily tasks of the local branches of a listed company worth a trillion yuan was to revolve around the personal habits of its chairman; the head of a local branch, before the chairman arrived, had to confirm melons, humidity, shoe soles and car-hire fees in dozens of rounds of liaison. In an organisational culture like this, whether dissent could ever effectively reach the decision-makers becomes a question that demands asking. It is not only a question of personality; it also concerns the structure of corporate governance. After 2021, when outsiders asked “Why did nobody inside Evergrande stop all this?”, the answer lay in those melons and soft-soled shoes.
Chapter 12: The Evergrande Daily, a Song and Dance Troupe, and a Tycoon’s Self-Image
Self-veneration within a company is another form of pomp.
Evergrande had its own newspaper, the Evergrande Daily. According to observers who have seen its contents, its front page was almost always devoted to reports on Xu Jiayin. One headline read “Chairman Xu Jiayin Attends This Year’s Guizhou Investment Fair”, and the article said that he had “received Guizhou provincial party secretary Sun Zhigang and acting governor Chen Yiqin”. That a private company’s internal newspaper should use the verb “received” – the language of protocol used of a superior meeting an inferior – to describe its boss’s dealings with a provincial party secretary and governor said something on at least two levels: first, how Evergrande internally understood Xu’s social status and political clout; second, Xu’s tacit acceptance of that understanding. Chen Yiqin, whom he “received”, later rose to become a State Councillor, a post of state-leader rank.
The business card is equally telling. In 2013, Xu’s card bore four titles in bold, the last of which was “doctoral supervisor”. He funded an Evergrande scholarship at his alma mater, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and the university appointed him a doctoral supervisor in management; the papers he published were filled with the Evergrande experience – an enterprise that had pushed leverage to its limits, packaged as a case study in management. There is a very Chinese kind of absurdity in this detail: he needed the academy to crown him, yet would not accept the constraints the academy might bring.
The Evergrande Song and Dance Troupe is another presence that cannot be avoided. In public accounts, it was a professional performing company belonging to Evergrande’s cultural industries group; its director was paid several million yuan a year, its members were required to dance and to speak foreign languages, and their costumes were studded with diamonds. At Xu’s sixtieth birthday banquet in 2018, the troupe gave a special performance for him in the club’s in-house theatre. In popular accounts, it had another function too: entertaining political and business connections. On this there is no verifiable evidence of any kind; this book can only record the shape of the rumour, and the reason it spread so widely – it fits what people imagine of that world of business and power, and that imagining is itself part of the history.
The most widely circulated story concerns a deal with Jack Ma. Xu himself told one version: he and Ma were talking over drinks, and once Ma was drunk, Xu asked whether he would like to invest in Evergrande’s football club; Ma agreed. The next day the two spoke on the phone and settled it in about fifteen minutes, with Alibaba taking a 50 per cent stake in the restructured Evergrande football club for 1.2 billion yuan. The market version adds racier details involving the song and dance troupe and the arrangements on certain floors of Evergrande’s headquarters, but these are unverifiable rumours. All that can be confirmed is the outcome: on 5 June 2014, Alibaba and Evergrande announced their partnership, with each holding 50 per cent. It was the largest equity deal in the history of Chinese football clubs, and a snapshot of the era in which Xu could “decide 1.2 billion at the dinner table”.
A young man from rural Henan who had once fretted over a 5-million-yuan down payment on a plot of land could now settle a 1.2-billion-yuan deal over laughter and drinks. There is no irony in that sentence – only time. But from 2014 onwards, he and his company set off down a road that could be sustained only by ever larger numbers.
Chapter 13: Celebrities, Publicity and 14 Billion Yuan in Advertising
The brand was the only “soft asset” in this system, and Xu may have spent more on it than any other Chinese entrepreneur.
The years from 2010 to 2017 were the golden age of the deep entanglement between Chinese property and entertainment capital. Fan Bingbing was the most prominent name in that relationship. Xu’s partnership with the actress began after Evergrande’s Hong Kong listing. Evergrande was then transforming itself from a pure property company into a conglomerate spanning culture, sport and consumer goods, while Fan had just progressed from a supporting role in the hit television drama My Fair Princess to a fixture on international red carpets; their ideas of “transformation” fitted perfectly. She appeared at the launch ceremonies of Evergrande’s flagship developments across the country, at the ground-breaking of its shopping plazas and at Evergrande music festivals, always billed as the star turn. Under this powerful publicity offensive, Evergrande was hyped from a local property firm in southern China into a property giant known to every household in the country. In return, Fan gained resources: Evergrande’s film and television arm was behind several of the big-budget productions in which she starred, including the television series The Empress of China.
The other side of the partnership must be made equally clear. According to public reports, Evergrande Real Estate’s advertising and promotion expenditure in the five years from 2010 to 2015 totalled 14.025 billion yuan – the highest of any property company listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong over the period, and equivalent to about 27 per cent of its net profit over the same years. Most listed developers did not report advertising expenses as a separate line, which made Evergrande’s figure all the more conspicuous. It was both an investment in building the brand and a lubricant for good relations with local governments – building ties with local media, sporting events and public activities through heavy local advertising.
In 2018, when Fan Bingbing’s “yin-yang contracts” – the practice of signing a low-value contract for the tax authorities and a high-value one in private – came to light, Xu swiftly distanced himself: Fan vanished from all of Evergrande’s commercial activities, and Evergrande ended all its brand tie-ups with her. Popular legend has it that Xu paid part of her back taxes for her, but no financial record of this exists on either her side or Evergrande’s. The source of the story, like that of “the richest man eating cornmeal buns”, may have been Evergrande’s public-relations team – building up a public persona of Boss Xu as a man of loyalty and feeling. The real cost of such “persona engineering” was not, in the end, paid by Xu.
Part Three: The Architecture of the Numbers
All under heaven, bustling and jostling, come for profit; all under heaven, thronging and pushing, go for profit.
– the Records of the Grand Historian, “Biographies of the Money-Makers”
Chapter 14: Two Companies, One Model
To understand Evergrande, it is best to look first at two other companies – ones that started almost at the same time and took the same road.
The first is Vanke. For a long time it was regarded as the model of professional management in Chinese property: dispersed shareholding, management-led, no family control, an emphasis on expansion and standardisation. Its founder, Wang Shi, was almost the godfather of the industry. In 2017, after the “Baoneng–Vanke battle” – a hostile stake-building campaign by the insurer-led Baoneng group – he left Vanke’s board. In the following years Vanke came under mounting pressure; according to its published results, it lost more than 130 billion yuan across 2024 and 2025 combined, and its senior management changed frequently. In April 2026, rumours circulated in the market that one of its senior executives had been “taken away”, which the company promptly denied. In the same period, Wanda too was selling off assets and shrinking, while Country Garden fell into the same liquidity trap not long after Evergrande collapsed.
The second is not a company but their common background: the whole of Chinese property.
The leaders of these companies differed from one another – Wang Shi preached professional management, Wang Jianlin of Wanda military-style discipline, Xu Jiayin execution and discipline. But their balance sheets were the same sheet: land banks, pre-sale receipts, commercial paper, bank loans, offshore bonds. Their profit margins traced the same curve, their risk exposures had the same shape. When, on 20 August 2020, the central bank and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development summoned Evergrande and nine other large developers to a meeting and then drew the financing rules that came to be called the “three red lines”, the rules changed for the whole industry, not just for Evergrande. Over the next three years and more, Evergrande, Country Garden and Vanke went into crisis one after another.
So to say that “Xu Jiayin single-handedly brought down Chinese property”, or that “the collapse of Chinese property was caused by Xu Jiayin alone”, is wrong. He was the one who ran fastest and gambled biggest under the same rules of the game – not the only one gambling. That is why he cannot escape responsibility, and why he should not be made to carry the whole story alone.
But it must be said just as clearly: he really was the one who ran fastest and gambled biggest.
Chapter 15: The Deferred Reckoning
Before the crisis truly arrived, Evergrande had a brush with a reckoning.
That was in 2012. The American short-seller Citron Research published a report on Evergrande accusing it of serious problems in its financial statements, including concealed liabilities and inflated assets. In hindsight the report was accurate: several of its central allegations were broadly borne out by later regulatory investigations. But at the time, Evergrande organised a massive counter-attack. On 21 June 2012 it held a press conference, attended by Xu himself, at which it rebutted the report point by point; Hong Kong’s regulators then investigated Citron and its principal and imposed sanctions, and Xu’s side won the round both legally and in the court of public opinion.
The round was won – at the cost of pushing the problem back by nine years.
Had the questions raised in 2012 been taken seriously and checked internally, Evergrande might have been forced to retrench much earlier. It was not. For the next eight years Evergrande charged ahead with higher leverage, greater scale and more intricate accounting, until the three red lines of 2020 drove it into a corner. A system’s error often lies not in having no early-warning mechanism, but in the fact that when the alarm sounds, the first thing dealt with is always the person who raised it.
Chapter 16: The 560-Billion Mirage
The specific scale of Evergrande’s financial fraud is clearly recorded in the regulators’ penalty decision.
According to published regulatory information, Evergrande Real Estate inflated its revenue by a total of about 564 billion yuan in 2019 and 2020, and its profits by about 92 billion. To grasp the weight of that figure: it is roughly equivalent to the annual GDP of a province in western China; spread across the two years, it means the finance department had to conjure up more than 100 million yuan of revenue every single day.
Technically, the methods of inflation were not complicated: booking revenue from undelivered, unrecognised sales early; dressing up related-party transactions as sales; shifting out expenditure that should have been counted as costs. But the fraud was “useful” because of how it meshed with the outside world. Good-looking statements were needed to keep issuing bonds in Hong Kong; to obtain mortgage loans from banks; to win approval in the domestic bond market; to keep those three AAA ratings.
Some material gives an even more glaring ratio: at one point, Evergrande’s inflated profit accounted for more than 86 per cent of that year’s total profit – meaning that real profits had been magnified almost sevenfold. These figures were established afterwards by the regulators, so this book treats them as confirmed information.
One detail is worth noting: this was not as simple as “cooking the books to fool shareholders”. The other face of more than 500 billion yuan of inflated revenue was the concealment of real liabilities – and concealed liabilities do not vanish. They became, later, the 2.4 trillion.
Chapter 17: Both Ends of the Cash Machine
Of all the money Evergrande obtained, the Shengjing Bank line deserves the most attention, because it shows best how “money” flows in Chinese property.
Between 2016 and 2019, through several rounds of share purchases, Evergrande became Shengjing Bank’s largest shareholder, with a stake of about 36.4 per cent. Having taken control, it parachuted managers into the bank and moved the bank’s former chairman to Evergrande as a vice-president. Over the following years, Shengjing Bank – under Evergrande’s effective control – bought Evergrande-related bonds totalling around 150 billion yuan, according to disclosures by Caixin and other media; the bank’s total outstanding loans subsequently climbed to about 547 billion yuan, more than 50 per cent of it property-related. By 2025, Shengjing Bank had been delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
This line has a clear judicial endpoint. Tang Yijun, former governor of Liaoning and minister of justice, was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking more than 100 million yuan in bribes; according to Caixin, during his time in Liaoning he helped Evergrande gain control of Shengjing Bank, and a considerable part of his bribes came from Evergrande. In other words, the relationship between business and power here was not some abstract “friendship”. It had a specific price, specific buyers, specific intermediaries and a specific judgment.
Several other names on similar chains have been mentioned publicly. Sun Zhigang, former party secretary of Guizhou province, was found according to his judgment to have taken more than 800 million yuan in bribes and was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve – in China usually commuted to life imprisonment; the judgment states that he provided assistance with property development. He, like Xu, is from Henan, and also an alumnus of the Wuhan Iron and Steel Institute – a connection repeatedly mentioned in public discussion, though not established by any court as a channel of bribery. In addition, a number of people from the banking system have been implicated, including several former presidents of large state-owned and joint-stock banks, and Li Xiaopeng, former chairman of the China Everbright Group. The degree of connection varies from name to name: some appear in judgments, others only in media and independent online accounts, and this book treats each according to its source.
Seen over a longer span, the key to this structure lies not in any one official’s corruption but in the way it bound financial institutions, ratings agencies and local administrative power into one. For a company to obtain excessive financing, it needed a ratings agency to give the top grade, banks to lend, and local government to cooperate on land and approvals – and all three were held within the system. When an institution within the system is willing to issue a rating for a company that contradicts its real financial condition, the risk has already moved from the company to the whole financial system. After Evergrande collapsed, the banks, bondholders and suppliers affected across the country were paying the bill for precisely this structure.
Chapter 18: The Three Red Lines
On 20 August 2020, the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development summoned Evergrande and nine other large developers to a meeting, and then introduced the property financing rules that came to be known as the “three red lines”. At the public level their content was very clear: a liability-to-asset ratio, excluding advance receipts, of no more than 70 per cent; a net gearing ratio of no more than 100 per cent; and a cash-to-short-term-debt ratio of no less than one. On this basis developers were sorted into four tiers – red, orange, yellow and green – and those breaching the limits were barred from adding interest-bearing debt.
Evergrande breached all three lines and was barred from taking on new interest-bearing loans. In September 2021, Evergrande formally blew up. Between the introduction of the three red lines and the collapse lay just one year and one month.
Among interpretations of the policy, one saying that circulates widely in Chinese financial circles holds that the three red lines were personally approved by the very top leadership. No public document confirms this, and the book treats it as rumour. But whatever level the decision was taken at, the policy itself was public, universal and had clear metrics. It was a brake on more than twenty years of leveraged revelry in Chinese property – only the brake was applied at the softest point.
In hindsight, the chain of transmission by which Evergrande’s funding chain snapped is very clear, and very classic. Tighter financing meant projects could not proceed normally; halted construction meant buyers dared not buy; falling sales meant shrinking cash receipts; tight cash meant suppliers stopped advancing funds and commercial paper began to default; spreading defaults meant credit collapsed entirely and every channel of financing closed. From falling finance to falling sales, from falling sales to drained cash, from drained cash to collapsed credit – each link was the result of the one before, finally returning to the starting point: nobody would lend it money any more.
That is the whole truth of the leverage model: it is a juggling act that demands extreme precision of timing. Thirty years of rising house prices made the trick look like a law of nature – until one day it no longer held.
Chapter 19: The First to Run
Evergrande’s balance sheet was exposed to the public only in September 2021, but some people inside the company and in related institutions had begun leaving the ship a year or more before that.
The Xu family. According to media compilations, from 2018 onwards Xu moved assets overseas through dividends, dollar bonds and other means. In the ten-plus years after Evergrande’s listing, he and his wife Ding Yumei received more than 50 billion yuan in dividends between them. Around 2019, the family set up a trust fund in the United States worth about 2.3 billion US dollars, with their two sons as beneficiaries. In August 2023, an announcement by Evergrande New Energy Vehicle described Ding Yumei for the first time as “a third party independent of the company and its connected persons” – wording that implied the two had already completed what is usually called a “technical divorce”: assets on one side, debts left on the other. As the climate grew tighter, Ding left Hong Kong. According to public reports, she has since lived mainly in London, and her assets in Canada, Gibraltar, Jersey and Singapore have been covered by freezing orders of the Hong Kong High Court.
Inside Evergrande. Du Liang, general manager of Evergrande Wealth, the group’s wealth-management arm, redeemed early – in May 2021, four months before the collapse – wealth-management products worth about 33 million yuan held in his own and his father’s names, on the grounds of “a family emergency”. The unpaid principal and interest owed by Evergrande Wealth ranges, on different measures, from about 30 billion to 41.1 billion yuan, involving between 70,000 and over 100,000 investors.
The banks. From the first half of 2021, when Evergrande’s problems could not yet be seen in its accounts, several big banks – including China Minsheng Bank, the Agricultural Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – had already begun reducing their exposure to Evergrande; by the time of the formal collapse in September, they had extricated themselves relatively cleanly.
Local governments. The best and most valuable plots in Evergrande’s national land bank were, after the collapse, taken back or rearranged under various pretexts, returning to the land reserves of local governments or to subsequent development.
Put these four groups together and one conclusion is unavoidable: this was not an accident but an orderly evacuation. Those who could leave first were those with information, power or professional judgement; those left behind were families who had bought off-plan flats, suppliers who had advanced money for construction, and employees and investors who had bought wealth-management products. This book must state it with restraint: it was neither a fraud in which everyone took part, nor a disaster created by any single person, but a structural accident in which some people got off the train first.
Chapter 20: Collapse
The two or three years after 2021 were Evergrande’s period of public collapse.
Debt defaults at home and abroad, rating downgrades, trading suspensions, stalled projects, lawsuits by suppliers and unpaid wages made up the news day after day. On 17 August 2023, Evergrande filed for protection in the United States under Chapter 15 of the US Bankruptcy Code, which recognises foreign insolvency proceedings; in September the same year, Evergrande-group shares were suspended on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the company subsequently entered liquidation proceedings.
When all this happened, Evergrande’s total accumulated liabilities were usually put at 2.4 trillion yuan (some say 2.44 trillion; the appendix lists the discrepancy). What does that figure mean? It is equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of China’s GDP that year, more than the annual output of most countries. It meant that the company could not repay through any normal business activity. It meant that someone would inevitably bear the losses – and that those bearing them would not be those who could leave first.
Chapter 21: The Meeting on Delivering Homes
On 28 September 2023, Xu Jiayin’s life was cut in two.
The story of that day is remarkably consistent across the retellings of several interviewees and independent online commentators. Although the details vary between versions, this book records its main thread.
That morning he received notice that the Guangdong provincial government would hold a “special meeting on guaranteeing the delivery of homes” at three in the afternoon, and that he was required to attend. To Xu at the time, such a meeting was entirely routine: Evergrande had hundreds of stalled projects across the country, and every month brought coordination meetings of every kind on “guaranteeing delivery” – the government campaign to get unfinished, pre-sold flats completed and handed over to buyers. He agreed without a second thought.
Shortly after two o’clock his motorcade reached the government building. He got out, accompanied by a secretary and two personal bodyguards. At the door, a security guard stepped forward and said, very politely, that the meeting was confidential and that those accompanying him should wait in the ground-floor lounge. This was the most ingenious step in the whole arrangement: only on grounds of “meeting confidentiality” could his bodyguards and secretary be kept out legitimately.
He went into the lift alone and pressed the button for the tenth floor.
When the doors opened, several people in plain clothes came forward and showed the identity documents of discipline inspection investigators – officers of the Communist Party’s internal anti-corruption apparatus. According to the account, he froze for two seconds, then roared that he had been summoned by the government to a meeting on delivering homes, demanding to know who they were, shouting and shoving at the people surrounding him. Only by force of numbers did they pin his arms behind him and push him into the meeting room. Waiting for him there were discipline inspection staff preparing to read out a document. According to the same account, he broke free of the two people holding him and lunged at someone sitting a few metres away; investigators then brought him to the floor, a knee in his back, handcuffed him, put a black hood over his head and bundled him into a police car. Of the dozens of senior executives involved in the Evergrande case, he was the only one handcuffed, hooded and taken away on the spot.
That night he was taken to Shenzhen No. 1 Detention Centre. The next day, Evergrande published an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange: Xu Jiayin, executive director and chairman of the board, had been placed under “compulsory measures” in accordance with the law on suspicion of illegal crimes.
From that day there followed two and a half years of silence. Whether he was held under “residential surveillance” at his own home or detained in a detention centre, the outside world never had definite information. One interviewee claimed to have seen him at a detention centre in Shenzhen, held alone in a separate block, but such claims are single-source and cannot be verified.
On 13 and 14 April 2026, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court tried Xu Jiayin and the Evergrande case at first instance. He was charged with eight offences – illegally taking public deposits, fund-raising fraud, illegally issuing loans, illegally using funds, fraudulently issuing securities, illegally disclosing important information, embezzlement by an employee and bribery by an entity – spanning four fields: finance, securities, corporate governance and anti-corruption. For an entrepreneur to face so many charges at once is extremely rare among major economic cases in recent years. He admitted guilt and expressed remorse in court.
On the morning of 20 August that year, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court delivered its first-instance verdict in open court: convicted on multiple counts, Xu Jiayin was sentenced to life imprisonment, deprived of political rights for life and ordered to forfeit all his personal property; illegal gains would continue to be pursued, and any shortfall made good by restitution. The day happened to be exactly the same date on which, six years earlier, the central bank and the housing ministry had summoned the developers and then drawn the three red lines. The three red lines of four years before and the judgment of four years after closed on the same date. The coincidence need not be given too much meaning, but it does complete a timeline.
Chapter 22: A String of Names
After Xu was placed under compulsory measures, an obvious question followed: what had he confessed, and whom had he implicated?
In cases of this kind, “confession” is institutional: the person under investigation cooperates and describes the recipients of bribes and transfers of benefit. Over the following two years and more, a series of officials fell, and the timing of their falls overlaps noticeably with the timeline of the Evergrande case.
According to public information, Tang Yijun was placed under investigation in April 2024 and later sentenced to life imprisonment for taking more than 100 million yuan in bribes; he is reported to have helped Evergrande gain control of Shengjing Bank while governor of Liaoning. In September 2024, Sun Zhigang, former party secretary of Guizhou, was expelled from the Party; his judgment found that he had taken more than 800 million yuan in bribes and assisted property development, and he was sentenced to death with a reprieve. Several former presidents of state-owned and joint-stock banks, along with Li Xiaopeng, former chairman of the China Everbright Group, and others were also implicated, facing allegations of facilitating huge loans to Evergrande.
Of these names, the one that drew most attention was Ma Xingrui. Formerly party secretary of Shenzhen, then governor of Guangdong and later party secretary of Xinjiang, he was removed from his post in Xinjiang in July 2025. Nine months later, on 3 April 2026, the Xinhua news agency announced that he was suspected of serious violations of discipline and law and was under disciplinary review and supervisory investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission. Ten days later, the Evergrande case opened in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, and Xu admitted guilt and expressed remorse in court. In the accounts of overseas independent media, these two dates were linked directly as cause and effect – “ten days after Ma Xingrui’s fall was announced, Xu Jiayin pleaded guilty” – and interpreted as proof that Ma was indeed on the list of names Xu had given. This inference can be neither proved nor disproved: the closeness in time is a fact (according to public reports); the causal link is an inference. As noted earlier, Ma and Xu are known to have had working meetings (in 2015, Ma, then party secretary of Shenzhen, met Xu), which is a matter of public record; as for the depth of their relationship and the decision-making behind Evergrande’s move to Shenzhen, this book treats these as rumour.
As for rumours concerning figures of even higher rank – including the claim that Xu “gave up a long list of senior officials”, and assertions that several names are indirectly connected with Evergrande – this book neither accepts them nor repeats them in its text. The reason is simple: to this day these claims are unsupported by any judicial document or authoritative media evidence, and in a case that is still unfolding, any repetition of unproven relationships becomes a way of misleading the reader.
What can be determined is the structure. The actual controller of a property company ran two lines at once, at home and abroad – money and connections. When one snapped, the other was exposed with it. This is not something peculiar to one man; it is how this system of business and power operates.
Chapter 23: Who Pays the Bill
The judgment records crimes and punishments; the bill records names and numbers.
Home-buyers. According to the various public tallies, Evergrande’s unfinished or delayed developments nationwide are commonly put at between one million and 1.5 million homes, spread over hundreds of cities and involving millions of families – tens of millions of people, at three to a household. Most of these families emptied the savings of two or even three generations to pay a deposit, and then took on mortgages of twenty or thirty years. They do not get their homes, but they still pay the mortgage every month. Some have had no choice but to move into bare, unfinished blocks without water or electricity, living off their own generators and buckets. The median sums involved are not startling, but for them it is everything.
Wealth-management investors. The shortfall of principal and interest on Evergrande Wealth’s unpaid products at the time of the collapse is put, in different tallies, at about 40 billion yuan (the two common figures are 30 billion and 41.1 billion), involving about 70,000 to 100,000 investors. They include large numbers of Evergrande’s own employees, who were required or encouraged to buy the company’s wealth-management products in the name of “company benefits”. It is a textbook case of shifting risk internally: when a company struggles to raise money, it borrows first from those who trust it most and are least able to refuse.
Suppliers and contractors. Thousands upon thousands of businesses up and down the supply chain were dragged down. This part of the figures is rarely counted in full, because it is scattered across the country and consists mostly of small business bankruptcies rather than listed-company losses. But it is the most silent, and the largest, part of the collapse.
Shareholders and creditors. Evergrande’s shares were suspended in Hong Kong and the company entered liquidation; offshore creditors pursued claims in courts in many places. According to public reports, in the Hong Kong liquidation the assets frozen (including those in the names of Xu, Ding Yumei and related entities) run to tens of billions of Hong Kong dollars, while the amount that can actually be recovered and distributed to creditors is far smaller. The gap speaks for itself: the assets on the books and the debts on the books do not live in the same world.
Xu Jiayin himself. Forfeiture of all personal property. In the year he was taken away, he was sixty-four, his hair entirely white.
The most disturbing point in all these accounts is this: of everyone who managed to run first, not one has been prosecuted. Du Liang’s early redemption of 33 million yuan, the banks’ early reduction of exposure, the local governments’ early recovery of land – most of these acts did not constitute crimes in law, and were even entirely compliant in procedure. They simply read the signals one step earlier than others, inside a structure that was about to collapse. The cruelty of this world is that reading the signals is a skill – and whether you can read them depends on where you stand.
Part Four: Heaven Is Bigger Than I Am
To be rich and honoured and arrogant is to bring disaster on oneself. To withdraw once the work is done – that is the Way of Heaven.
– Tao Te Ching, chapter 9
I have heard it said: know contentment and you will not be disgraced; know when to stop and you will not be imperilled; so you may long endure.
– Tao Te Ching, chapter 44
Chapter 24: Pan Shiyi’s “My Fate Is Up to Me – and Up to Heaven”
On 6 April 2026, the last day of the Qingming holiday, a short essay appeared on a WeChat public account that had been silent for three years. Titled “My Fate Is Up to Me – and Up to Heaven”, it ran to about 1,400 Chinese characters. It did not touch on current affairs; it was about how one man understands fate. Its argument deserves to be recorded here, because it is this book’s other thread.
The essay starts from a popular slogan – “my fate is up to me, not up to Heaven” – a rousing line people use to steel themselves in hard times. Pan writes that whenever he heard it, he felt the sentence was unfinished, and that he silently supplied its second half: my fate is up to me, and up to Heaven.
The first half of the essay is about the part that is up to us. A life still has to be lived by one’s own effort, one step at a time; his mother’s homely saying was that even when a pie falls from the sky, you still have to open your mouth. He describes how, as a young man, he thought only some great achievement would count, and only later came to see that the foundations of a life are small, plain things: keeping one’s word, not dodging what is one’s own to bear, honesty, not taking advantage. He recalls a frightening night in childhood when his father fell suddenly ill, and his grandmother’s reassurance – the old proverb that if you have done nothing to be ashamed of, you need not fear the ghost knocking at midnight. What a person seeks in the end, he suggests, may be not excitement but a measure of peace of mind.
The second half turns to what he calls “Heaven”. However hard we strive, there are things beyond our reach: the sunlight, the air, life itself, waking each morning able to see, walk, hear and eat – none of it earned by ability. Thinking of this, he writes, one dares not speak too boldly: “Heaven is bigger than I am.” Heaven, as he understands it, is neither simply the sky nor simply fate, but something closer to what people cry out to when they say “Lord Heaven!” in a crisis – a presence whose wisdom far exceeds ours, as a gardener understands more than the tree he planted. From this comes gratitude for the many people who helped along the way, often with no more than a word or a glance. The essay ends with a plea for quiet: not always calculating, competing and straining against oneself; doing what one should and then letting the rest go – which, he insists, is not admitting defeat but knowing that Heaven is bigger than I am.
The essay itself is not complicated, but its timing gave it weight. That same week, Xu Jiayin admitted his guilt in a Shenzhen courtroom. The man who wrote of “Heaven is bigger than I am”, and the man surrounded by eight criminal charges in court, had once stood at the same height in Chinese property.
And those words – “up to me, and up to Heaven” – can be turned back on Xu Jiayin. There was a great deal in Xu’s life that was “up to me”. He drew up the workshop’s three hundred rules; he negotiated the instalments on Jinbi Garden; he worked through the eighteen official seals within a year; he settled a 1.2-billion-yuan deal at the dinner table; he had the lift doors open at exactly the right moment. He never lacked “up to me”. What he lacked was the other half, “up to Heaven” – the acknowledgement that some things are not his to decide, that cycles turn, that some people should not be crossed.
A boundary must be drawn clearly here: it would be unfair to treat the essay as a moral verdict on Xu. Pan himself did business in the same system, and his exit, too, owed something to luck. Even so, that line in his essay remains a mirror.
Chapter 25: Li Ka-shing, Ren Zhiqiang and the Men Who Saw the Bullet Coming
Besides Pan Shiyi, two more names must be included, because they offer a more direct point of comparison with Xu’s situation.
Li Ka-shing. Hong Kong’s richest man was the earliest to leave. It is said that in 2012 he sought a meeting with the newly installed leader and waited a long time without a response; thereafter his flagship Cheung Kong began selling off its mainland Chinese assets en masse. At the time the move was widely mocked as “running too early”, missing out on the gains of the following years. But a few years later, when the whole industry sank into an unprecedented debt crisis and giants such as Evergrande and Country Garden fell one after another, people looked back and finally understood the signal. A saying of his was later quoted again and again: “Small wealth depends on people; great wealth depends on Heaven.” This is not mysticism but an accurate description of his environment: the larger a person’s fortune, the more it depends on things he cannot control – policy, cycles, and the stability of the power with which he works. Li understood this better than anyone, and so he left while he still could.
Ren Zhiqiang. He and Pan Shiyi were friends of several decades and often appeared together on programmes discussing the economy. In 2020 he was publicly sentenced – officially for corruption, though widely seen as punishment for an essay criticising the leadership. For Pan, this was almost a direct signal: if even someone like Ren – with a “red second-generation” background, the child of a senior revolutionary official, and deep connections within the system – could be held to account for his words, then so-called “strong enough connections” might not be reliable at all. Pan’s judgement of the climate for business and politics thereafter grew firmer. And his own line – that the greatest risk an entrepreneur faces is not economic but political – serves as a footnote to this history.
Place Li Ka-shing, Pan Shiyi and Xu Jiayin on the same timeline and three different speeds of reaction appear. One ran when he heard the bullet being chambered; one ran when he heard the shot; and one only knew what had happened when the bullet hit him. The line is often taken as a quip, but it describes precisely the differences in these three men’s positions within the same institutional environment. Their abilities to judge danger differed, but all their judgements pointed to the same fact: in this environment, the safe boundaries of wealth and freedom are set by politics, not by the market.
A word in passing: there were others scattered between these two poles. Wang Shi left Vanke; Wang Jianlin was selling assets; Jack Ma disappeared for a time and then reappeared; Ren Zhiqiang went to prison. They do not form a single type, but together they make up that history: in the same game, nobody truly had the “right of exit”. The only difference was whether one could finish reading the instructions before the rules changed.
Chapter 26: Beginning With Zhufu Yan
There is a story in the Records of the Grand Historian – the great history of China written by Sima Qian in the first century BC – that belongs here.
Zhufu Yan was a man of Qi, in what is now Shandong, who studied hard for forty years. In his own words: “I have wandered and studied for more than forty years without achieving anything. My parents would not own me as a son, my brothers would not take me in, my fellow retainers cast me off. I have been in straits for a long time.” His parents disowned him, his brothers refused to shelter him, and even the hangers-on who drifted from patron to patron drove him out. When he was so poor he could barely go on, he made a decision: to submit a memorial directly to Emperor Wu of Han.
The memorial dealt with nine matters. Eight were proposals for legal reform; the last concerned the campaign against the Xiongnu, the nomadic confederation on the northern frontier. Zhufu Yan argued, against the prevailing view, that it should not be fought – and made his case watertight. The memorial went in in the morning, and he knew that if it failed he might well die in Chang’an; that same evening, a summons came from the palace. When Emperor Wu met him and two other memorialists, he said: “Where have you gentlemen all been? Why have we met so late?” – the origin of the Chinese idiom for “if only we had met sooner”.
From that day he was promoted four times in a single year: gentleman of the palace, internuncio, palace attendant, palace grandee. Everyone understood that this was now the man closest to the emperor’s ear. A stream of visitors began arriving at his door, bringing gifts, bringing gold. He did not ask, but nobody dared not to give. The original text of the Records needs only eight characters: “The great ministers all feared his tongue; the bribes they sent came to thousands in gold.” The ministers feared his tongue because at any moment it could say a word against them in the emperor’s presence – and so the gold they sent mounted to a thousand pieces. What did a thousand in gold mean? An ordinary Han farming household earned no more than a few thousand copper coins a year; a thousand in gold was as if several hundred farming families had handed over their life’s savings.
When someone urged him to restrain himself, he said: I have suffered for forty years and still not got what I wanted; I have little time left and cannot wait; I will use any means necessary. He also spoke the words that would be quoted ever after: “If a man of mettle does not eat from five cauldrons in life, then let him be boiled in five cauldrons in death!” – if he could not dine in the style of the highest nobility, he would rather be boiled alive in their cauldrons.
In the second year of the Yuanshuo era (127 BC), he devised the Edict of Grace: kings of the feudal states were to divide their lands among all their sons. On the surface it was an act of imperial kindness; in reality the domains grew smaller with every division, and a problem that had troubled the Han for decades was solved. The same year, Emperor Wu made him chancellor of Qi and sent him back to investigate the King of Qi. Returning to the place that had once humiliated him, the first thing he did was not to open the investigation but to summon all the brothers and retainers who had spurned him, have money scattered on the ground before them, and say: when I was poor, you would not give me a garment or a bowl of rice, nor let me through your gates; today I am chancellor of Qi, and some of you have come a thousand li to welcome me. From this day I break with you for ever. With that, he rose and left.
Afterwards, he had something on the King of Qi, and sent someone to expose it to the king’s face; the king drank poison and died. The King of Zhao promptly denounced Zhufu Yan to Emperor Wu for taking bribes from the feudal kings and driving the King of Qi to his death. The emperor had him arrested and interrogated. He freely admitted taking money but denied forcing the king’s death. The emperor did not originally want to kill him, but the Imperial Counsellor Gongsun Hong said: the King of Qi is dead and his state abolished; all this is Zhufu Yan’s doing; if Your Majesty does not kill him, there will be no way to answer to the realm. After a moment’s silence, the emperor ordered the extermination of his clan – not just his own execution, but the killing, one by one, of his entire family.
The similarities between this history and Xu Jiayin are superficial: both of humble birth, both turned their fortunes on a single venture, both were surrounded in a short time by immense power and money, and both fell very hard. The similarities are worth writing about because they reveal a recurring structure: when a person gains power or wealth much faster than he acquires restraint, collapse is almost inevitable. Zhufu Yan’s forty years of study taught him only how to get, never how to stop; his “go against the current and act against all rules” was really a form of self-justification, counting all his excesses as compensation for those forty years. When Xu was writing his three hundred rules in the workshop, he was probably following much the same logic: everything must be decided by me.
But the differences matter just as much, and they are not superficial. Zhufu Yan’s power came directly from imperial favour; he was himself a component of the power structure. Xu was an entrepreneur in a market, and his leverage came from a whole system of banks, ratings agencies, investors and home-buyers. Emperor Wu killed Zhufu Yan in order to answer to the realm; the verdict in the Evergrande case was the outcome of a judicial process. To lay the two directly on top of one another and say “Xu Jiayin is a modern Zhufu Yan” is convenient but inaccurate. History can offer a way of seeing, not a verdict.
Some commentators like to sum up Xu’s life with “eat from five cauldrons in life, be boiled in five cauldrons in death”. The rhetorical force of the summary is obvious, but so are its limits: Zhufu Yan died by the blade, Xu Jiayin in a written judgment; the first is the story of a man defying fate, the second the story of how a system creates and then discards its beneficiaries. Both deserve to be written, but they must not be written as one.
Chapter 27: Epilogue: The World Like a Tide
One programme ended with these words: Xu Jiayin’s life was won by his daring and lost to his greed.
This is not a rigorous judgement. A man who could build a business to that scale cannot be explained by simple greed; a man who, after 2020, could never turn back may not truly have believed that “the bigger, the safer”. But the line does capture one thing: from his twenties onwards, Xu believed that the world could be calculated, and that whatever could not be calculated was only so because he had not calculated fast enough. He calculated correctly for thirty years – until the year when the equation no longer held for him.
Back to the two ends with which we began.
Xu Jiayin’s end was not entirely “fate”. He made a great many specific choices: he doubled every lever, added a few digits to every statement, and every time he had a chance to stop, he did not stop. The eight offences the court found him guilty of are the judicial expression of those choices.
Nor was Pan Shiyi’s end entirely “wisdom”: at the last critical juncture, he really did get through on luck. So the contrast between the two men is less a moral opposition than an opposition of positions. Both understood part of the same set of rules; the difference was that one treated the rules as a boundary to be held in awe, and the other as an opponent to be defeated.
The real question may not lie with the two of them at all. When, of the two cleverest men in this system, one must go to the far side of the ocean to say “Heaven is bigger than I am”, and the other can only end up in a courtroom facing eight charges, it may be the system itself that most deserves questioning:
In a market where the highest grade of a ratings agency can be bestowed by administrative power, where market signals are generated not by buying and selling but by endorsement, where an entrepreneur must stake everything on being “too big to fail” in exchange for safety – then the one who is hurt in the end will not be him alone, but everyone who had no chance to leave first.
The world is like a tide, and people like water. Xu Jiayin’s era has been written to its end. The question that remains is whether the same equation will find another man to carry it out.
Appendices
Appendix One: Chronology
Date | Event |
October 1958 | Born in Jutaigang village, Taikang county, Zhoukou, Henan |
1977 | The gaokao is restored; fails at his first attempt |
1978 | Admitted to the Department of Metallurgy, Wuhan Iron and Steel Institute (now Wuhan University of Science and Technology) |
c. 1982 | Assigned to the Wuyang Iron and Steel Company, Henan; drafts Three Hundred Rules for Production Management |
1992 | After Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour, resigns and heads south to Shenzhen; joins the Zhongda trading company |
1994 | Goes to Guangzhou to develop Zhudao Garden |
1996 | Sets up on his own, founding Evergrande; Jinbi Garden goes on sale |
2002–2007 | Evergrande grows from a local Guangzhou developer into a national one |
2008 | Financial crisis; Evergrande’s listing stalls; Xu seeks help in Hong Kong |
5 November 2009 | Evergrande lists on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising about HK$9 billion |
1 March 2010 | Buys the entire equity of the Guangzhou football club for about 100 million yuan |
2013 | Guangzhou Evergrande win the AFC Champions League; “doctoral supervisor” appears among the titles on his business card |
June 2014 | Alibaba takes a 50 per cent stake in Evergrande’s football club for 1.2 billion yuan |
May 2015 | S&P cuts Evergrande’s rating to B+; three domestic agencies give it AAA |
2015 | Evergrande’s headquarters moves from Guangzhou to Shenzhen; Ma Xingrui meets Xu Jiayin |
2016–2019 | Evergrande buys into Shengjing Bank and becomes its largest shareholder, with about 36.4 per cent |
2017 | Tops the Hurun Rich List for the first time |
October 2018 | Sixtieth birthday; celebrations in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and a triumphant homecoming to Taikang |
2019–2020 | Evergrande Real Estate inflates revenue by a total of about 564 billion yuan |
2019 and 2021 | Twice watches celebrations from the Tiananmen rostrum |
20 August 2020 | The central bank and the housing ministry summon developers to a meeting, then draw the “three red lines” |
September 2021 | Evergrande formally collapses |
2021 | Blackstone’s acquisition of SOHO China is blocked by regulators |
17 August 2023 | Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in the United States |
28 September 2023 | Xu Jiayin is placed under compulsory measures and taken to Shenzhen No. 1 Detention Centre |
April 2024 | Tang Yijun placed under investigation |
September 2024 | Sun Zhigang expelled from the Party |
July 2025 | Ma Xingrui removed as party secretary of Xinjiang |
3 April 2026 | Official announcement that Ma Xingrui is under review and investigation |
6 April 2026 | Pan Shiyi publishes “My Fate Is Up to Me – and Up to Heaven” |
13–14 April 2026 | First-instance trial at the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court; Xu admits guilt and expresses remorse in court |
20 August 2026 | First-instance verdict delivered in open court: convicted on multiple counts, life imprisonment, deprivation of political rights for life, forfeiture of all personal property |
Appendix Two: Principal Figures
The Evergrande camp: Xu Jiayin (founder, chairman of the board); Ding Yumei (his wife; according to public reports, later living mainly in London); Xu Jiayin’s elder and younger sons (beneficiaries of the family trust; according to public reports, both since sentenced); Xia Haijun and other core executives; Du Liang (general manager of Evergrande Wealth); Bai Shanshan (director of the Evergrande Song and Dance Troupe – rumoured).
Politics: Sun Zhigang (former party secretary of Guizhou; took more than 800 million yuan in bribes; sentenced to death with a reprieve); Tang Yijun (former governor of Liaoning and minister of justice, later chairman of the Jiangxi provincial Political Consultative Conference; took more than 100 million yuan in bribes; life imprisonment); Li Xiaopeng (former chairman of the China Everbright Group); Ma Xingrui (former party secretary of Shenzhen, governor of Guangdong and party secretary of Xinjiang; announced in April 2026 to be under review and investigation); Ren Xuefeng (former party secretary of Guangzhou; fell to his death at the Jingxi Hotel in October 2019); Chen Yiqin (former acting governor of Guizhou, later State Councillor).
Hong Kong capital and business: Cheng Yu-tung and Henry Cheng (New World Development); Joseph Lau (Chinese Estates); Cheung Chung-kiu (CC Land); Jack Ma (Alibaba); Fan Bingbing (actress, partner of Evergrande’s film and television arm); Wang Shi (Vanke); Wang Jianlin (Wanda); Pan Shiyi (SOHO China); Li Ka-shing (Cheung Kong); Ren Zhiqiang (publicly sentenced in 2020).
Institutions and judicial bodies: China Chengxin International, Dagong Global, China Lianhe; Standard & Poor’s; Shengjing Bank; the High Court of Hong Kong; the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court; the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development.
Appendix Three: Table of Figures
Item | Common figure | Note |
Evergrande’s total liabilities | 2.4 trillion yuan / 2.44 trillion yuan | Both figures in circulation |
Inflated revenue (2019–2020) | About 564 billion yuan | Regulatory finding |
Inflated profit (2019–2020) | About 92 billion yuan | Regulatory finding |
Xu family dividends (ten-plus years after listing) | More than 50 billion yuan | Media compilation |
Size of family trust | About US$2.3 billion | Media compilation |
Evergrande bonds held by Shengjing Bank | About 150 billion yuan | Caixin and other reports |
Shengjing Bank total outstanding loans | About 547 billion yuan | Media reports |
Evergrande football club cumulative losses | More than 7 billion yuan | Media tallies |
Evergrande advertising and promotion (2010–2015) | 14.025 billion yuan | Published accounts |
Evergrande Wealth unpaid principal and interest | 30 billion / 41.1 billion yuan | Two measures |
Evergrande Wealth investors affected | 70,000–100,000 | Two measures |
Unfinished and delayed homes | 1–1.5 million | Two measures |
Home-buying families affected | About 6 million households | Common claim |
Pan Shiyi’s total cash-out | About 30 billion yuan | Media compilation |
Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin’s donations (2014) | US$100 million | Public reports |
Appendix Four: Items Awaiting Verification
The following items are disputed in the material on which this book draws, or lack reliable sources, and should be cited with caution:
1. Spelling of names. The material uses both 马兴瑞 and 马新瑞 for Ma Xingrui, sometimes side by side in the same account; this book uses the officially published form throughout.
2. The death of Ren Xuefeng. The public explanation of his fall at the Jingxi Hotel in October 2019 is incomplete; neither the “murder” nor the “suicide” accounts has evidence behind it.
3. The function of the Evergrande Song and Dance Troupe. Claims that it entertained political and business connections are widespread, but there is no verifiable evidence.
4. The details of Jack Ma’s football-club deal with Evergrande. Accounts involving the dinner table and the song and dance troupe cannot be verified; all that can be confirmed is the outcome – Alibaba’s acquisition of a 50 per cent stake for 1.2 billion yuan.
5. Rumours of links to the very top. Claims linking the family of Zeng Qinghong – a former vice-president and long-time power-broker in the Communist Party – and figures of even higher rank to Evergrande are all rumour, and this book does not accept them.
6. The “list of names”. The account that Xu confessed a long list of senior officials comes from overseas independent media and is unsupported by any judicial document or authoritative media.
7. The proportion of Evergrande Real Estate’s inflated profit. Some material says the inflated profit accounted for more than 86 per cent of that year’s total profit; this book treats it as “a figure given in some material”, not as a regulatory finding.
8. Numbers of Evergrande developments and affected families. Measures range from one million to 1.5 million homes; this book gives them side by side.
9. Recovery of offshore assets. The gap between the scale of frozen assets and the amounts actually recoverable is huge, and reports differ; citations must state the date and source.
10. Details of who was present. The people and arrangements in scenes such as the 2008 trip to Hong Kong for help and the 2015 signing in London come mostly from independent online accounts, and this book treats them as rumour or single-source information.
Appendix Five: A Note on Sources and Method
This book is based mainly on three bodies of material: first, transcripts of the spoken accounts of the Evergrande case given on a number of independent online programmes, which contain many unverified details and rumours; second, the relevant content of publicly available court judgments, regulatory penalties, listed-company announcements and stock-exchange documents; and third, investigative reporting by Caixin and other media.
Its principles of writing are as follows. Facts established by the courts and regulators are treated as confirmed information; media reports with a clear source are marked “according to such-and-such a report”; single-source spoken accounts and rumours are explicitly marked as rumour and never mixed with the first two kinds. Where moral evaluation of individuals is concerned, the book writes only about the link between conduct and structure, and draws no conclusions about character. Wherever ancient history and classical texts are cited, their limits in relation to the subject of this book are made clear.
Readers should also be reminded that a considerable part of the book’s material comes from commentary programmes on platforms outside mainland China, whose positions, value judgements and narrative tendencies have a clear direction, and whose accounts of the same events are not always consistent. In citing them the book has tried as far as possible to distinguish fact from commentary, but readers should still stay alert – especially to any claim that begins “it is said” or “reportedly” and leads nowhere that can be checked.
Appendix Six: Judicial Developments in 2026
On 20 August 2026, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in Guangdong province delivered its first-instance verdict, in open court, in the case of the Evergrande Group, Evergrande Real Estate and Xu Jiayin. Convicted on multiple counts, Xu Jiayin was sentenced to life imprisonment, deprived of political rights for life and ordered to forfeit all his personal property; illegal gains would continue to be pursued, and any shortfall made good by restitution. According to a judicial report issued by Xinhua the same day, Xu’s elder and younger sons were also each sentenced. The first-instance trial was held from 13 to 14 April 2026, at which Xu admitted guilt and expressed remorse in court.
These are the judicial milestones on which the book’s account rests. The details elsewhere in the book concerning private conversations, particular scenes of hospitality, undisclosed flows of money, relationships between political and business figures, and personal psychology all retain the narrative threads of the original material; in the absence of verifiable original records, readers should not treat them as established fact.
– The End –
Comments