The Cantonese call him Hui Ka Yan, Beijingers Xu Jiayin, his Mandarin name. He was born in a small village in Henan, central China. His father, a veteran of the war against the Japanese, sold wood there. A good student, he became an engineer and joined state-owned companies. He soon resigned and moved south to Shenzhen and then Canton, where money and opportunities were flowing in the late 1990s.
He founded the Evergrande Group in 1997. Twenty years later, he became China's richest man, with a fortune estimated at almost €40 billion. He owns the Guangzhou soccer club and, in 2019, decided to start producing electric cars. He is a member of the Communist Party elite and relies on his connections in high places. Today, he is being held by the police and his company is on the verge of liquidation.
Following the publication of the news of his arrest by Bloomberg, the listing of Evergrande's various entities on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was immediately suspended on Wednesday, September 27. The company, the country's second-largest property developer, is in the process of collapsing under the weight of its debt: nearly 307 billion euros. The company has an appointment with the Hong Kong courts on October 30 to rule on its possible liquidation.
Evergrande isn't the only property developer to find itself in hell. Country Garden, Sunac and many others are trapped in debt. The authorities decided to tighten credit conditions to clean up the market and punish all those real estate tycoons who thought they were masters of the world. But at the same time, the market turned upside down with the Covid-19 crisis and the loss of confidence of fewer and fewer buyers.
As if that weren't bad enough, the country's monetary policy has also been working against them. According to the Japanese daily Nikkei, more than a quarter of Evergrande's debt is denominated in dollars. China's currency, the renminbi, is at its lowest level against the US dollar in 16 years. As a result, the company's accounts are still burdened by exchange losses, and new money is harder to come by.
The rating agency Moody's has downgraded the entire Chinese property sector. Of course, it is out of the question for Beijing to change its policy of low-interest rates, responsible for the fall in the renminbi, in order to please a few business megalomaniacs. However, the government is watching this affair like a hawk to prevent it from further aggravating the situation in a sector that alone (including construction) accounts for more than a quarter of the national economy. For Xi Jinping, stories like Xu Jiayin's are a thing of the past.