There was a time when Xu Jiayin traveled by private jet, sat alongside China’s political elites, and led a conglomerate that built housing developments across the country, owned his own football team, and spent millions signing foreign stars. In 2017, his fortune was estimated at 43 billion dollars and the son of a humble peasant family from Henan became the richest man in China. His real estate empire, Evergrande, was then one of the great symbols of the country’s dizzying economic rise. Xu seemed to have reached a peak from which a fall was hard to imagine.
Read more Front page of EL MUNDO on Friday, August 21, 2026
This Thursday, Xu, also known by his Cantonese name Hui Ka Yan, was sentenced to life imprisonment for a series of financial crimes, including fraud in fundraising, misappropriation of public deposits, and fraudulent issuance of securities. The court also ordered the confiscation of all his assets.
The sentence puts a judicial epilogue to one of the stories that best summarize the last four decades of China. Because Xu’s biography is also that of a country that went from rural poverty to building more homes, highways, and skyscrapers than any other; that of a generation of entrepreneurs who amassed fortunes by taking advantage of that transformation; and that of an economic model that ended up accumulating mountains of debt until Beijing decided to hit the brakes.
Xu was born in 1958 in a village in Zhoukou, Henan province. His father, a veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War, worked in a warehouse. His mother died when he was barely one year old. During the last throes of the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a security officer in his village and sold coal and rice. Later he studied Metallurgical Engineering in Wuhan and got a job at a state steel factory.
Years later, he would recall that poverty to some students. He said that during university he barely had a change of clothes, which he washed at night to wear again the next day, and that when he had no money for food he nibbled on hard bread to fool his stomach. Then the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping appeared on television. His famous tour of southern China in 1992 accelerated economic reforms and convinced Xu that the future was no longer in a state factory.
He left his job and went to Shenzhen, the epicenter of the Chinese capitalist experiment. He ended up working in Guangzhou for a company dedicated to the real estate business and in 1996 founded Evergrande. His first project had 323 apartments. They sold out in just 12 hours.
Xu had found the perfect business at the perfect time. Millions of Chinese were leaving the countryside to settle in cities growing at an unprecedented speed. Local governments needed to sell land to finance themselves. Banks granted credit. Families bought apartments as their main form of savings. And developers discovered they could sell homes even before building them and use that money to buy more land, launch new developments, and take out even more loans.
Evergrande turned that wheel into a gigantic machine. In 2009 it went public in Hong Kong. It came to accumulate around 1,300 projects spread over more than 280 cities and to have about 200,000 employees. Xu also did not want to limit himself to real estate. He bought a football team, Guangzhou Evergrande, which dominated the Chinese league for years; invested in electric cars, theme parks, hospitals, nursing homes, bottled water, and dairy products. He even planned a monumental stadium for 100,000 spectators.
In record time, Xu had become one of the great symbols of the new Chinese capitalism, also cultivating his ties with the political elites and was part of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, one of the country’s main advisory bodies.
But behind that expansion was a weakness that for years remained hidden by growth: Evergrande needed increasingly large amounts of money to keep its machinery running.
The developer requested loans, issued bonds, raised funds, and sold off-plan apartments that did not yet exist. The money from new buyers was used to maintain previous projects while the group continued buying land and launching developments. As long as housing prices rose and credit flowed, the wheel could keep turning.
Until Beijing decided to stop it. Alarmed by the real estate bubble, Xi Jinping’s government tightened financing conditions for developers from 2020 through the so-called “three red lines,” limits aimed at reducing their indebtedness. For Evergrande, it was like cutting off the oxygen supply. The company had huge obligations but increasingly less access to the money needed to refinance them.
Defaults and debts
In 2021 the defaults began. Construction stopped. Suppliers demanded unpaid invoices. Investors demanded to recover their savings. And thousands of families who had handed over much of their wealth to buy off-plan apartments began to wonder if they would ever receive the keys.
When the empire began to collapse, its liabilities exceeded 300 billion dollars. Evergrande then became the international face of a much deeper real estate crisis. Real estate had been for decades one of the main engines of the Chinese economy and around it revolved builders, steel and cement manufacturers, banks, local governments, and millions of families who had invested their savings in a home.
The business collapse also turned into a criminal investigation. The Shenzhen court now holds that between 2016 and 2021 Xu and the companies under his control participated in a “sustained and large-scale” financial fraud, inflating assets and hiding liabilities. The sentence also points out that Evergrande gained control of financial institutions and illegally diverted funds from credit and insurance to the conglomerate.
The judges also attribute to Xu having used his position to organize financial frauds and appropriate corporate assets through dividend payments. The court considers that the amounts involved were exceptionally high and that the crimes caused economic losses and social damage of enormous severity.
The bill does not end with its founder. Evergrande has been fined 8.82 billion yuan and its real estate subsidiary Hengda Real Estate another 7 billion. In related proceedings, 56 other people linked to the conglomerate have received sentences ranging from 22 months to 18 years in prison.
Xu’s fall takes on a dimension far beyond the story of a billionaire. Evergrande represented like few companies the model that drove China’s spectacular growth: accelerated urbanization, cheap credit, pre-sale of homes, local governments dependent on land, and families convinced that apartments would never stop appreciating. That model was taken to the extreme.
The life sentence handed down in Shenzhen closes more than just the career of a businessman. It also symbolizes the end of that golden age of a time when it seemed possible to build entire cities on debt and sell apartments before laying the first brick.
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