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Evergrande Founder Gets Life But Homebuyers, Suppliers Bear The Costs Of China's Property Collapse

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

The sentencing of China Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan to life in prison has brought a legal reckoning for one of the country's most spectacular corporate collapses. However, for hundreds of thousands of homebuyers, investors, and other creditors, the ruling does little to resolve the financial losses left behind by the property giant.

Xu Jiayin, also known as Hui Ka Yan, founder of property developer Evergrande, appears for sentencing at the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in Shenzhen, China, on Aug. 20, 2026. Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court /Xinhua via AP

Hui, the founder and former chairman of China Evergrande Group, was sentenced on Aug. 20 after being convicted of crimes including fundraising fraud and embezzlement. His personal assets were confiscated, while Evergrande and its property subsidiary were fined a combined 15.82 billion yuan ($2.35 billion).

Chinese authorities also ordered the continued recovery of illegal proceeds and repayment of losses where funds remain insufficient. Fifty-six other people involved in related Evergrande cases, including Hui's two sons, were given prison sentences ranging from 18 years to one year and 10 months, along with fines or asset confiscations.

Separately, on Aug. 21, the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court accepted a bankruptcy-liquidation application against Evergrande Real Estate Group and appointed a liquidation team as administrator, according to an official court bankruptcy notice. Creditors are being directed to file claims in that proceeding.

The penalties, however, do not automatically compensate the people who lost money when Evergrande collapsed.

Evergrande reported total liabilities of 2.437 trillion yuan at the end of 2022, including 721.021 billion yuan in contract liabilities, of which 664.244 billion yuan related to property development. Reuters later cited Gavekal Dragonomics as estimating that Evergrande's advance payments from homebuyers were equivalent to about 600,000 housing units.

Davy Jun Huang, a U.S.-based economist and former columnist for Chinese state media outlet CNTV, told The Epoch Times that Hui's life sentence answers the question of who committed crimes, but does not answer who should bear responsibility for Evergrande's enormous debts and unfinished projects.

"These are two completely different questions," Huang said. "The harsher Hui Ka Yan is punished, visually it feels like the problem has been solved, but in reality, the houses will not automatically be completed because of this, and creditors' money will not be recovered because Hui Ka Yan has been sentenced."

The question of who ultimately absorbs Evergrande's losses is likely to remain more consequential for ordinary Chinese than Hui's punishment.

Who Will Pay?

Evergrande's collapse has left losses spread among several groups, including homebuyers, suppliers, banks, investors, and other creditors.

Huang argued that the fines imposed on Evergrande and its property subsidiary do not themselves amount to direct compensation for homebuyers or unfinished projects. An official Supreme People's Court summary adds an important qualification: restitution for losses takes priority over enforcement of fines and confiscation, while illegal proceeds are to be recovered and any shortfall is subject to restitution. Huang argued that the losses from Evergrande had effectively been distributed throughout society among homebuyers, suppliers, and investors.

This has fueled broader debate over whether the regime should use other revenues associated with the property sector to compensate victims.

Huang said such demands were reasonable from both legal and economic perspectives. He pointed to the U.S. government's 2008 intervention in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as an example of the government assuming responsibility when a major part of the housing finance system was threatened.

China's regime, he said, played multiple roles in the property boom, as the dominant supplier of land, regulator, and major beneficiary of property-related revenue, but did not assume the corresponding losses when the market collapsed.

"When real estate was rising, the government used land-sale revenues, land-transfer taxes, and layers of extraction to squeeze out the last penny," Huang said. "When the real estate bubble burst, under the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) political model, the government would not bear any of the losses."

The halted under-construction Evergrande Cultural Tourism City in Taicang, Suzhou city, in China's eastern Jiangsu Province, on Sept. 17, 2021. Vivian Lin/AFP via Getty Images Suppliers Face Steep Losses

The impact of Evergrande's collapse extends well beyond unfinished apartment complexes.

Xu Zhen, a senior professional in China's capital markets, told The Epoch Times that China's local governments were among the biggest beneficiaries of Evergrande's expansion. He estimated that local governments collected roughly 1.2 trillion to 1.7 trillion yuan ($180 billion to $250 billion) in land-sale revenues and taxes directly associated with Evergrande between 2016 and 2021.

That money had already entered regime coffers and would not be affected by Evergrande's bankruptcy or Hui's imprisonment, Xu said.

Xu also argued that state finances would benefit from the penalties. That point is subject to the judgment's express restitution priority, which can affect the order in which recoveries are enforced.

Banks initially benefited from lending to Evergrande but later became creditors themselves. Some of their claims were eventually sold at steep discounts after the company's collapse. Xu cited a claim held by China Minsheng Bank that was ultimately sold for roughly 13.5 percent of its original value.

Homebuyers have faced a different kind of loss - years of waiting while continuing to carry mortgages on homes they may not be able to occupy.

However, Xu identified suppliers as the group that suffered the most severe financial damage.

Under a 2023 Supreme People's Court interpretation, qualifying consumers who bought homes for residential use can, if statutory conditions are met, assert delivery or refund claims ahead of construction-price priority claims, mortgages, and other claims. Construction contractors and secured creditors otherwise retain separate priority rights. Evergrande's June 2023 interim results reported 1.05657 trillion yuan in trade and other payables, including 596.17 billion yuan in construction-material payables.

The debts affected thousands of small and medium-sized companies, many of which had limited bargaining power and few legal resources.

Some construction contractors and materials suppliers collapsed after failing to collect commercial bills issued by Evergrande. In the liquidation of an Evergrande project company in Zhanjiang, ordinary creditors ultimately received a recovery rate of about 0.69 percent, according to Chinese financial reports; Reuters also cited the figure in April 2026.

Evergrande said its targeted wealth-management financing products totaled approximately 92.1 billion yuan, with about 34 billion yuan in unpaid principal and interest as of the end of 2022. Separately, Reuters reported in 2021, citing an Evergrande Wealth sales manager, that more than 80,000 people had bought wealth-management products that raised more than 100 billion yuan over five years.

Evergrande's shares have also been delisted, leaving many retail investors with substantial losses.

Construction workers rent shared bicycles as they leave a building site for a new office tower in the Central Business District of Beijing on April 3, 2025. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images A Boom Built on Political Ties

The collapse has also revived questions about how Evergrande grew so rapidly in the first place.

Taiwan-based Japanese journalist Akio Yaita, a prominent critic of the CCP, told The Epoch Times that the company's downfall was not simply the result of excessive leverage and a bursting property bubble. He said it exposed deeper problems in China's system of political and business relationships.

As long as entrepreneurs maintained strong political connections, Yaita said, access to land, regulatory approvals, and financing becomes much easier. Rising property prices then allowed companies to expand rapidly.

However, such a model was inherently vulnerable to changes in political power, he said.

"China's system makes it difficult to produce people like Konosuke Matsushita, YK Pao, and Morris Chang, who build corporate culture and industrial foundations over decades, and it is also difficult to produce entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, who rely on technological innovation to change the global industrial landscape," Yaita said.

Instead, he said, the system was more likely to produce entrepreneurs who rose rapidly through political connections and then fell just as quickly when those political relationships changed.

Huang described Evergrande's rise as a form of mutually beneficial cooperation between business and the regime.

During the property boom, he said, developers helped local governments generate land revenue and economic growth, while banks expanded lending and met credit targets. The interests of developers, banks, and government officials were therefore aligned.

Huang said he visited Evergrande's headquarters in 2018 to give a lecture on policy analysis and forecasting and warned Hui that the company should stop expanding after 2018. Hui and the company did not heed the warning, he said.

That does not absolve Evergrande or Hui of responsibility, Huang said.

However, the collapse illustrates a broader problem. According to Xu, private property developers can become highly dependent on a system in which land and access to capital are heavily controlled by the state.

"From an employee to a scapegoat is the fate of private real estate owners under the CCP's monopoly over land and capital," Xu said. "Hui Ka Yan is a typical example."

"If you do well, the CCP lets you gain both fame and fortune; if you do badly, it makes you a prisoner," he said.

Hui's imprisonment therefore does not end the questions raised by Evergrande's collapse. For the company's former customers and creditors, the larger issue remains who will ultimately bear the cost and whether any of the money and homes lost in the collapse can be recovered.

Tang Bing and Luo Ya contributed to this report.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 08/23/2026 - 22:45

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Has Trump Turned The Tables On Iran - Or Is Another Round Of War Coming?

Authored by Trita Parsi via Antiwar.com, reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi's Substack.

The Trump administration believes it has turned the tables on Iran. Washington assesses that the rerouting of maritime traffic through the Omani corridor, combined with a global shift away from Persian Gulf oil, has reduced the effectiveness of Tehran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, the U.S. blockade has sharply constrained Iran's ability to sell its oil. The result, in Washington's view, is a status quo that imposes greater costs on Iran than on the United States.

That calculation changes the strategic equation. Rather than being forced to accommodate Iranian demands, President Donald Trump now believes he can afford to wait Tehran out. For the first time since the war began, the White House has concluded, time is working in America's favor.

Assuming that assessment is correct, the more important question is what Trump intends to do with this newfound leverage. If Washington interprets Iran's vulnerability as an opportunity to extract capitulation rather than to negotiate a durable settlement, the result is more likely to be another round of war than an end to the conflict. Tehran has already demonstrated that when confronted with a choice between surrender and escalation, it will choose the latter. Giving Iran the same choice again is therefore unlikely to produce a different outcome.

The only way to turn this unexpected shift in the balance of leverage into a political victory is through diplomacy. If Washington's assessment is correct, it now has an opportunity to use its leverage to secure a compromise that addresses its core interests while giving Tehran sufficient reason to accept an agreement. If, instead, the administration pursues maximalist demands, it risks converting a moment of leverage into another cycle of war.

Historically, however, Washington has tended to make precisely this mistake. Whenever U.S. policymakers have concluded that time and leverage are on their side, they have often treated Iranian weakness not as an opening for compromise, but as an opportunity to seek capitulation. The danger is that Trump will repeat that pattern. He will mistake leverage for victory and turn a potentially favorable negotiating position into the continuation of the tragedy that is US-Iran relations.

Trump failed militarily, but thinks he can win economically

America has run out of military options. The clearest indication is that the Trump administration has stopped striking Iranian targets even as Tehran continues to attack ships transiting the Strait. On Monday, an Iranian attack killed a sailor aboard a vessel using the southern corridor. Yet Washington did not respond militarily - even though the second round of the war began precisely because the administration had declared that it could not accept Iran firing on ships.

According to Reuters, U.S. forces have used virtually all of their global stockpile of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) during the five-month Iran conflict. Moreover, roughly 65% of Patriot interceptors, 38% of THAAD interceptors, and almost half of the Navy's Tomahawk cruise missiles have been expended.

The depletion of these stocks appears to have forced Trump to abandon its pursuit of a military knockout and instead shift the burden of economic pressure onto Tehran. That strategy, in turn, appears to be producing results faster - and to a greater degree - than the administration anticipated.

In the American description of events, this success is mainly due to three factors: New, much larger ships are being used that carry primarily crude oil. These VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carrier) can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil. In comparison, other oil tankers can transport between 350,000 and 1 million barrels.

Before the outbreak of the war, approximately 21 million barrels of petroleum and crude oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis. These were carried by 65 to 80 tankers. Roughly the same amount of oil transition through the strait can now be achieved by only ten VLCCs a day. And given that the vast majority of ships transitioning through the Strait in the Southern Corridor have their transponders off, this traffic has not been noted by outlets tracking the traffic.

Secondly, demand for Persian Gulf oil has significantly dropped as numerous economies have started to transition to other sources of supply. Brazil, for instance, has increased its exports and started to serve markets that previously relied on Persian Gulf oil. Most importantly, Beijing appears to have deliberately reduced its oil consumption to prevent prices from remaining above $100 a barrel and thereby aggravating the risk of a global recession.

Third, the war has created economic incentives strong enough to attract ships and crews willing to assume substantially greater risks. The growing volume of traffic through the Southern Corridor, despite the obvious dangers, is evidence that these incentives are surprisingly powerful.

Unlike its earlier illusions about the blockade as a guaranteed knockout blow against the Iranian theocracy, Washington no longer expects economic pressure to produce a quick surrender. Instead, the administration appears to be betting on a slower process of economic strangulation that will eventually force Tehran to capitulate. Faith in a knockout blow has given way to the more fragile hope of prolonged strangulation.

Tehran isn't worried - for now

Iran's calculation is effectively the opposite of Washington's. Tehran doubts the United States can sustain the flow of VLCC traffic through the Strait and believes Trump will have little choice but to return to the Islamabad MOU within the next two to three weeks. Trump may have made progress on oil exports, but LNG and many petrochemical products, including fertilizers, remain unable to leave the Persian Gulf.

Tehran also appears to believe that it retains the ability to halt the VLCC traffic, but is deliberately refraining from doing so for now. The calculation is to avoid escalation while waiting to see whether the United States' depleted military options ultimately compel Trump to return to the MOU.

In short, Tehran does not appear overly concerned - for now. But that could change. If Trump refuses to return to the MOU, or succeeds in turning the balance of economic pain against Iran, Tehran will face a far harsher reality. Just as Washington underestimated Iran's resilience, Tehran may have underestimated the both resilience of the global economy and Trump - the former's ability to shift away from oil and the latter's craftiness in finding non-military ways to effectively reopen parts of the Strait.

Between surrender or escalation, Iran will almost certainly choose escalation. Even if Trump has gained the economic upper hand, Tehran still believes it holds a military advantage. Its options range from more aggressive attacks on VLCCs to strikes on Emirati pipelines that bypass the Strait, and potentially to renewed escalation in the Red Sea.

Indeed, it was precisely Trump's erroneous assumption that Iran would choose surrender over war that helped drive the United States toward escalation in the first place. Washington's recurring search for Iran's breaking point has repeatedly produced escalation rather than capitulation. There is little reason to expect the pattern to be different this time.

The US-Iran tragedy

Herein lies the tragedy of the lethal dance between Washington and Tehran. America's winner-take-all approach makes agreement unacceptable when Iran has the momentum. When the momentum shifts to Washington, the United States comes to believe that nothing short of Tehran's full capitulation is palpable.

Because Iran fears surrender more than war, the cycle oscillates between economic pressure and military escalation, interrupted only by brief and often fragile periods of diplomacy. Put simply, the structure of the situation favors war.

This is particularly visible today as neither side is investing in any real diplomacy with the other. Tehran's "diplomacy" is to simply wait for Trump to return to the MOU, while Trump has barred U.S. officials from engaging with Iran and committed himself instead to economic warfare.

When you don't negotiate when you're weak, because you are weak, and you don't negotiate when you are strong, because you are strong, then war becomes the baseline.

Trita Parsi is the Executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him "one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran"

Tyler Durden Sun, 08/23/2026 - 22:10

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