He Built an Empire. Then He Buried It.

At ten o'clock on the morning of August 20, 2026, in the Second Trial Court of the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court, the gavel fell with no echo.

The presiding judge began to read the verdict. Xu Jiayin stood in the dock and heard the numbers: life imprisonment, deprivation of political rights for life, confiscation of all personal property. Evergrande Group was fined 8.82 billion yuan. Evergrande Real Estate was fined 7 billion yuan.

In other courtrooms that same day, fifty-six people—Zhen Litao, Ke Peng, Xu Tenghe, Xu Zhijian, Du Liang, Liang Dong, and others—received sentences ranging from eighteen years to one year and ten months.

The indictment turned to page twelve. The charges began there. The first was illegal absorption of public deposits. The last was embezzlement by taking advantage of one's position. Between them sat six others: fundraising fraud, illegal granting of loans, fraudulent issuance of securities, failure to disclose important information, bribery by a unit, and illegal use of funds.

Eight counts.

Under the rules of combined punishment for multiple crimes, if any one offense carries life imprisonment, the rest are absorbed into it. Fundraising fraud carried it. Embezzlement carried it too. When the judge read the sentence, there was no pause between those two counts.

The court found that the criminal period spanned six years, from 2016 to 2021. Over those years, Evergrande's liabilities on the balance sheet swelled while its annual reports showed profits climbing upward. The two ran in opposite directions for six years. The finance department had a name for inflating assets and concealing liabilities: "smoothing things out." That meant hiding what should not appear in the footnotes and boldfacing what should not disappear.

More direct than accounting fraud was another path. Xu Jiayin and Evergrande Group bribed their way into controlling financial institutions. Credit funds and insurance funds flowed from public pools into Evergrande's accounts. This was not financing. It was a company turning on the banks' own taps.

Xu Jiayin did one more thing. After orchestrating the accounting fraud, he took money out in the name of dividends. While the company was already insolvent on paper, he paid himself from fabricated profits. The elements of embezzlement—taking advantage of one's position and illegally appropriating for oneself—were both met.

The final paragraph of the judgment contained a line more important to creditors than all the numbers before it: restitution of losses takes precedence over fines and confiscation of property. Every penny recovered from Xu Jiayin's assets goes first to victims. Only the remainder goes to the state treasury.

But there might be no remainder.

Evergrande's publicly disclosed debt stood at 2.43 trillion yuan. Behind that figure sat concrete things: more than a thousand unfinished residential buildings across more than two hundred cities. Tower cranes cut their silhouettes into the sky. Some had rusted.

At Evergrande's peak, Xu Jiayin wrote on the inside cover of the annual report: "Building homes for six million families." The people in those families now look up and see tower cranes.

In 2021, Evergrande Wealth stopped redemptions. In 2022, a winding-up petition was filed in Hong Kong. In 2024, the Hong Kong High Court issued a winding-up order. In 2025, Evergrande was delisted.

Before the criminal verdict came down, another track had already been running for years. Liquidators were tracing Xu Jiayin's assets worldwide, estimated at roughly 7.7 billion US dollars. Where those assets had gone, in what form, and who controlled them now—the liquidators' reports used phrases like "to be confirmed" and "further investigation required."

The restitution process from the criminal judgment and the liquidation process run in parallel. One pursues compensation for victims of illegal fundraising. The other handles corporate debt settlement. The creditors on the two tracks may overlap, but the procedures are separate.

Before Evergrande's books were opened, the money in presale fund supervision accounts was supposed to go only to construction sites. Those three words—"in theory"—had never been taken seriously in this industry. Money flowed out of supervision accounts, into the group's central pool, and from there to land payments for the next project, interest on the previous project, executive salaries, and shareholder dividends.

Audit reports were signed off every year. Rating agencies gave AAA ratings. Financial institutions' risk control reviews went through the motions. Every procedure that was supposed to stop something ended with a stamp on it.

A company carrying 2.43 trillion yuan in debt did not get there overnight. Every link that allowed it to reach that level needs to be seen.

In 2017, Xu Jiayin became China's richest man. That year's annual report had his photo on the inside cover—dark suit, the title "Dream Navigator" beneath it. That same year, Evergrande began moving some liabilities off its balance sheet through structured entities and related-party transactions. The numbers no longer appeared on the parent company's books. On the edges of accounting standards, some finance directors called this "management." Some later called it something else in court.

The 2021 annual report was released four months late. There was no photograph of Xu Jiayin in that report.

The sentencing hearing on August 20, 2026, lasted a full morning. In the public gallery sat delegates to the People's Congress, members of the Political Consultative Conference, relatives of the defendants, and representatives of fundraising participants. The court did not broadcast the proceedings. After the hearing, the court's website issued a press release.

That afternoon, outside the sales office of Evergrande Royal Peninsula in Guangzhou, a 2020 poster had not been fully torn down. It read: "Buy Now, Move In Now." Rain had curled the edges, peeling them back to expose the concrete wall beneath.

The judgment included a sentence after listing all the crimes and sentencing factors: "The amount of the crimes is particularly huge, the circumstances particularly heinous, the economic losses caused particularly severe, and the social harm particularly grave." Four "particularly"s in a row, with no commas between them.

To the poster outside that sales office, those four words changed nothing. To six million families, they changed nothing either. Restitution first is written in the judgment. But where the restitution money will come from, when it will arrive, whose hands it will reach—that process is still unfolding, much longer than the criminal trial.

When the gavel fell, its sound had no echo. It fell on the shell of a company already liquidated, already delisted, already insolvent. A shell does not feel pain. But people live under those tower cranes.

The words "Buy Now, Move In Now" were a promise in 2020. On August 20, 2026, they became a phrase that required rereading. "Buy now" and "move in now"—between those two verbs sits a line that cannot be crossed.

The weather in Shenzhen was clear that day. The windows of the Second Trial Court faced south. Sunlight cut through the gaps in the blinds and fell on the backrests of the chairs in the public gallery. Someone rose to leave and knocked over a chair. The wooden backrest struck the concrete floor with a sound louder than the gavel.