He built China’s biggest property empire and became Asia’s richest man. Now Evergrande’s Hui Ka Yan is in prison for life, here’s why

Less than a decade ago, Hui Ka Yan was worth more than almost anyone else on the continent. This week, a court in Shenzhen stripped him of everything and sent him to prison for the rest of his life. The story of how he got from one point to the other says a lot about what went wrong in China's property market, and about how far Beijing is now willing to go to make an example of it.

From Rice Fields to the Rich List

Hui, also known by his mainland name Xu Jiayin, didn't start with money. He grew up poor in rural China, raised largely by his grandmother, at a time when private business barely existed in the country. In 1996, as China began cautiously opening its economy, he founded Evergrande. Two decades later, he had turned it into the country's largest property developer and, for a stretch around 2017, the richest man not just in China but in all of Asia.

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How the Empire Was Built, and Why It Broke

The growth wasn't organic. It was borrowed. Evergrande expanded by taking on enormous amounts of debt and betting that property prices would keep climbing fast enough to cover it. That bet worked for years. Then, in 2020, Beijing introduced strict new limits on how much debt property developers could carry, aiming to cool an overheated market. Evergrande's entire business model depended on borrowing more, not less. Within months, the company was selling half-built apartments at fire-sale prices just to make interest payments. By 2021, it had collapsed under liabilities of roughly $332 billion — at the time, the most indebted developer on Earth.

What the Court Actually Found

The sentence handed down this week wasn't for the collapse itself, it was for what prosecutors say Hui did in the years leading up to it. The list of charges is long: illegally taking public deposits, fraudulent fundraising, unlawfully issuing loans, faking securities filings, and hiding material information from regulators, on top of embezzlement and corporate bribery, which he'd already pleaded guilty to back in April. Fifty-six other Evergrande executives were convicted alongside him, including his own two sons, with sentences ranging from under two years to eighteen. Hui himself was stripped of his political rights for life, and every asset he owns has been ordered seized. His personal fine alone comes to 8.82 billion yuan; the company's mainland unit was fined a further 7 billion — together, close to a billion US dollars, among the largest corporate penalties a Chinese court has ever imposed.

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A Crisis That Outgrew One Man

Evergrande's fall didn't stay contained to one company. New commercial housing sales across China dropped from about 18.2 trillion yuan in 2021 to 9.7 trillion yuan last year. Home prices in many regions are down roughly 30% from their peak. Millions of families who had prepaid for apartments were left waiting on units that, in some cases, may never get finished — a source of real, ongoing public anger that local governments are still trying to manage.

Why Now, and Why So Harsh?

Analysts see the verdict as sending a message well beyond Hui himself. Property once accounted for close to a quarter of China's economy, and the "borrow big, build fast" model he pioneered defined an entire generation of developers before it collapsed under its own weight. Punishing its most prominent architect this severely, some argue, is Beijing's way of formally closing that chapter. The timing adds weight to that reading: China's economy grew just 4.3% last quarter, its slowest pace since late 2022, and the property slump Evergrande triggered still hasn't fully worked its way out of the system.

Hui Ka Yan spent two decades building the biggest fortune in Asia on borrowed money. This week, the debt finally came due — in a prison sentence that will last the rest of his life.