A week ago in Shanghai, Ms. Tian, busy cultivating her online presence, shared a video of her spring home life. In the clip, she described bringing spring "indoors" through flower arranging, painting, and reading by the window of her European-style villa, carefully crafting an image of serene refinement.
The video also included an interactive segment where the self-styled "independent woman" video-called "Old Wang," who offered his opinions on artwork from the other side of the screen. This tranquility was shattered one evening a week later when a Weibo post claiming "Wang Shi has been arrested" went viral, trending across social media platforms.
Ms. Tian was compelled to personally address the situation, publishing two consecutive Weibo posts questioning the rumor. Wang Shi himself later spoke out, stating that it seemed others were more concerned about his whereabouts than he was, and confirming that he was safe and sound. His location was shown as Shenzhen.
In fact, within twenty minutes of the rumor emerging and before Wang's personal denial, I had already stated on Weibo that it was false. Wang Shi is indeed physically free and well, aside from being unable to travel abroad. Authorities did approach him to clarify certain matters, which he has done. Having stepped down as Chairman of Vanke's board in 2017, his connection to the company's current predicament is minimal. One could even argue that had he remained chairman, Vanke might not have reached its current state.
About ten days ago, Vanke released its 2025 annual report, dubbed a "death certificate" by some. It presented a balance sheet alarming enough to send chills down the spines of all professional managers.
Vanke recently published its first annual report following the comprehensive takeover by Shenzhen Metro. This financial statement replaced the philosophical rhetoric about "crisis awareness" with stark and brutal figures: an annual net profit loss attributable to shareholders of 88.556 billion yuan for 2025. This report allowed Vanke to surpass HNA Holdings' 64-billion-yuan loss in 2020, setting a new record for the largest quarterly loss in the history of the A-share market. Combined with the 2024 loss, Vanke evaporated over 138 billion yuan in two years, equivalent to half of the total net profit accumulated over the 32 years from its listing in 1991 to 2023.
Even more despairing was that Vanke's operating cash flow for 2025 was negative 988 million yuan, marking the first operating loss in seventeen years for a company that prided itself on "cash flow is king." When releasing this report, the management apologized sincerely to shareholders in a letter, admitting that resolving the burdens of its business model would still require time. However, Yu Liang, the former helmsman of Vanke, was no longer there to hear that apology.
On January 9, 2026, the day after Yu Liang signed his resignation letter, I sent him a WeChat message with four words: "Thanks for your hard work, take care." Surprisingly, he did not reply. Two days later, I asked two friends close to Yu Liang if he had been responding to messages or appearing at the company. One friend mentioned that while he hadn't replied to messages, they noticed he was still liking videos on his WeChat Channel. After stepping down, Yu Liang had voluntarily kept a low profile within the company. For a long period last year, employees relied on his video likes to gauge his latest activities. When asked about the most recent video he liked, the friend checked and said it seemed to be from several days prior. The other friend stated they had also messaged Yu Liang without reply, adding, "It doesn't look good."
Over two weeks later, media outlets began reporting on Yu Liang's disappearance. Calculating the timeline, it coincided with the day after he signed his resignation. Three months have passed since then. A friend at Vanke informed me that Yu Liang is expected to be handed over to judicial authorities soon, suspected of the crime of misappropriation of funds. This marks the most brutal legal conclusion to Vanke's four-decade-long myth of professional management.
The situation differs from that of Zhu Jiusheng. In October 2025, when news broke that Vanke's President Zhu Jiusheng had been subjected to criminal compulsory measures, he promptly reported his safety on his social media feed. The reason was simple: at that time, almost everyone was trying to preserve Vanke's reputation, tacitly acknowledging the company's significant impact on real estate, the stock market, and even the broader economy. That concern also served as the most crucial protective shield for Vanke's management. Now, that concern has vanished. With the release of the annual report naming Vanke the A-share loss leader, the lid is completely off.
To this day, many struggle to understand why Yu Liang, known for his strong crisis awareness, led Vanke to become the enterprise with the largest losses in A-share history. It should not be forgotten that Yu Liang is possibly the only market-oriented real estate executive in China to have experienced three complete industry cycles.
Over the past decade, Vanke underwent three major periods of self-reflection and alarm, but for various reasons, the internal warnings failed to translate into strategic and tactical actions. Instead, the company moved in the opposite direction. The first was in 2014. Yu Liang was likely among the first in the real estate sector to firmly adopt a bearish stance on the property market, almost simultaneously with Pan Shiyi. In June of that year, Yu Liang wrote in the People's Daily that the property market had entered its second half, and following the "golden decade" would be a "silver era" of slowing growth. Yu Liang began to flatten, even slightly short, the real estate sector—reducing leverage, slowing the pace of land acquisition, refocusing on first-tier cities, and seeking new growth points through transformation.
He did not anticipate the ferocity of the shantytown reformation monetization and interest rate cuts. Aggressive players like Country Garden, Evergrande, and Sunac began to overwhelm the conservative Vanke from 2016 onwards. The second instance was on September 28, 2018. Vanke held a full-day executive meeting discussing responses to major emergencies in the morning, with departments submitting three-year plans in the afternoon. Yu Liang concluded with an eight-minute speech centered on the theme: "Survive." The following day at the autumn quarterly meeting, these two words, enlarged against a bright red background, spread across national media.
Actions, however, spoke louder than words. Just days after proclaiming "survive," Vanke took over several projects of China Fortune Land Development in the Beijing area. Months later, the largest single acquisition in Chinese real estate history—Vanke's purchase of the Guangxin Real Estate asset package—was completed. The third instance was in August 2020. After the introduction of the "three red lines" policy, Yu Liang emphasized the need to reduce leverage both internally and externally. I recall him stating clearly that this round of regulation was "penetrative," rendering financial techniques like off-balance-sheet maneuvers useless.
Yu Liang made correct judgments regarding the era, the industry, and the enterprise at that time. With 200 billion yuan in cash on hand, everything still seemed promising for Vanke. Yet, it was also Vanke that, in 2021, aggressively acquired multiple land kings through intense bidding in Wenzhou, Wuxi, and Chongqing. In Shaoxing, Vanke secured three plots of land within ten days for a total of 6.79 billion yuan. Even elementary students could see it was a wrong choice, especially after Sunac's Shaoxing branch had just issued a plea for help. In the first seven months of 2021 alone, Vanke acquired land worth 110.6 billion yuan, making it the only enterprise exceeding the 100-billion-yuan mark that year. That land acquisition spree completely drained Vanke's vitality. In less than three years, the cash on Vanke's books dwindled to just 854 million yuan, nearing exhaustion.
Yu Liang was a master strategist. Yet tactically, Vanke behaved like a gambler placing all remaining chips on "big" just before the casino closed. There seems to be only one explanation for this: Vanke's headquarters had lost control. Yu Liang was a complex contradiction. He was extremely disciplined, insisting on running ten kilometers every morning and maintaining a habit of reading consistently. He was also enthusiastic about holding book clubs within Vanke, sharing various books, and liked leading teams to exchange and learn from companies in different industries. These were the qualities that attracted Wang Shi and led to him being chosen as successor.
When Wang Shi first attempted to hand over power in 1999, the initial successor was Yao Mumin, but Yao soon emigrated to Australia, and Yu Liang succeeded to the general manager position. In his autobiography, Wang Shi described Yu Liang as steady, meticulous, and solid in his work—a "heavy sword without a sharp edge." Even after becoming general manager, others, including Ding Changfeng, were at times considered higher in the succession order. Yet, Yu Liang ultimately took the helm. Wang Shi always believed that "systems take precedence over individuals," trusting that even if a successor was incompetent, the system could correct the error.
As the leader of a real estate company, Yu Liang, whose background was in investment and business departments, had never directly been responsible for a real estate project. However, Wang Shi believed that what was more important for a leader was their understanding of Vanke's corporate culture, capacity for innovation and learning, and ability to包容 interpersonal relationships and coordinate social resources: "The squad leader leads a group of people and manages them; if you don't understand something, you appoint those who do."
In June 2017, after the Baoneng-Vanke dispute ended and Shenzhen Metro became the largest shareholder, Wang Shi formally stepped down as chairman of Vanke. It is said that Wang Shi was actually reluctant to resign at the time, but the management hoped he would retire. Wang Shi stated then that he was handing the baton to the team led by Yu Liang and that he had "complete confidence" in them. However, in the discipline of management, this direct disciple of Wang Shi seemed to consistently struggle. It was only after the Shenzhen Metro working group entered Vanke that they understood the awkward truth: Vanke's headquarters held very little actual authority.
Yu Liang never exerted strong control over the regional companies and business units. He lacked the ability to restrain the ambitions of regional heads to expand their turf and compete for land kings. Over the past decade, Yu Liang constantly restructured Vanke's organizational framework. From the early "5+2+2" regional structure, to the later Business Unit (BU) system, and then drastically abolishing the development and operation headquarters, recentralizing power to the head office and dividing it into 16 regional companies. He championed flat structures and decentralization, but these frequent organizational changes ultimately proved to be mere wandering in a labyrinth of power.
Yu Liang's personnel style was sometimes perplexing. A widely circulated story within Vanke is that he once deemed a manager incompetent in a key position and transferred them. However, after the transfer, he did not demote the individual but instead placed them in an even more important role. Many of the people he promoted in later years often ended up undermining him. Even two key figures, the general manager of the Development and Operation Business Group and the general manager of the Property Services Group, dared to openly express completely opposing views in meetings later on. This caused Yu Liang, who lacked deep understanding of development业务, to lose authority within the company.
Of course, the person Yu Liang restrained the least was his own president, Zhu Jiusheng. Yu Liang's greatest contribution to Vanke was arguably fending off two hostile takeover attempts. But the real "barbarians" were not only outside. In 2016, during the sensitive period of the Baoneng-Vanke dispute, Zhu Jiusheng was dispatched outside Vanke to Pengjinsuo. There, he built a shadow empire comprising "Pengjinsuo" and the "Boshang系." Pengjinsuo engaged in P2P financing, channeling Vanke's idle funds through employee wealth management products and co-loan arrangements, then lending them out at annualized rates exceeding 20%, exploiting suppliers.
The Boshang系 operated like a giant octopus. Using minimal capital, it leveraged massive funds from financial institutions like Galaxy Asset Management and China Merchants Wealth. These tentacles then reached into every corner of Vanke. At the beginning of each year, tens of billions of yuan flowed out of Vanke, only to return to Vanke's accounts by year-end. During the industry's upcycle, this was an excellent business model. But during the downturn, these highly leveraged funds ultimately consumed everything. That shadow Vanke had, to some extent, slipped beyond Yu Liang's control. Later清算 revealed that the 28.83 billion yuan in bad debts reported in Vanke's annual reports actually originated from several shell companies with registered capital of only 10 million yuan and zero employees enrolled in social security.
The most absurd episode involved one company named "Chenyao Investment," which used 5.35 billion yuan from Vanke to invest in the already defaulted Evergrande. The "idealism" touted by the professional managers ultimately, entangled with shadow companies and self-financing networks, turned into a disastrous gamble that wiped out the principal. January 27, 2025, was the day Yu Liang stepped down as chairman of Vanke's board. He only learned of his new assignment the night before. The next day, he voluntarily cleared out his office and moved to a "remote" smaller office, an action consistent with his style and character.
The driving force behind the working group's entry into Vanke was actually Yu Liang himself. After the group's arrival, Yu Liang no longer involved himself in any actual operations and rarely contacted other Vanke executives. One of the few instances of contact was after the 2025 Spring Festival, when he called some regional heads, instructing them to proactively report work to the newly arrived Chief Li Feng. Xin Jie, who succeeded Yu Liang as chairman, was very diligent, once giving Vanke staff hope for the company's revival. However, fate is unpredictable. Neither Yu Liang, Zhu Jiusheng, nor Xin Jie escaped their respective predicaments.
In September 2025, Xin Jie, the chairman appointed by Shenzhen Metro to Vanke, was taken away for investigation. In October 2025, Zhu Jiusheng was formally subjected to criminal compulsory measures. Then, not long ago, the hidden hand behind the Baoneng-Vanke equity battle also faced severe清算.
In early spring last year, Yu Liang reportedly arranged a meal in Shenzhen with a friend, Zhang Yadong, who was then the chairman of Greentown China. At the dinner, the two chairmen, both professional managers controlling real estate giants, found mutual respect. They allegedly exchanged insights about "shareholders." Yu Liang was keen to understand how Zhang Yadong skillfully navigated the interests of three major shareholders. Zhang Yadong wanted to know how, during the Baoneng-Vanke dispute, Vanke managed to have three shareholders exit, leaving behind only one large shareholder who did not interfere in operations. Not long after this meal, Zhang Yadong went to Hong Kong, was voted out by the board of directors, and never returned. And Yu Liang, within the script he had partly written himself, moved towards his own tragic finale.
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