The tycoon exposed by his son: A deep dive into Mingyuan Group of Li Songjian | Kr-Event

Author | Wang Hanyu

Editor | Zheng Huaizhou

On Father's Day this year, June 15th, Li Xinye published an article titled "My Father, Li Songjian", fully exposing his father's various illegal and immoral behaviors as a real - estate developer.

According to his public profile, Li Xinye won a gold medal in the National Olympiad in Informatics for Youth and the first place in the US Computer Olympiad. He graduated from the "Yao Class" at Tsinghua University and the computer science majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He has worked as a software engineer at Amazon, Meta, and Citadel Securities. The latest update of his career shows that he is currently the founder and CEO of Alpha Star Research - a fintech company that focuses on basic R & D in artificial intelligence and combines it with quantitative finance.

Introduction to Li Xinye on the official website of Alpha Star Research

Meanwhile, in some market rumors about this incident, Li Xinye is also called a "private - equity tycoon". Previously, he uploaded a video on his social media with the title "How I Earned One Billion". However, this video has been taken down.

Li Xinye's father, Li Songjian, is the chairman of Mingyuan Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Mingyuan Group"). Currently, he and his ex - wife, Ling Feifei, each hold 49.2% of the group's shares. How he runs his real - estate business and handles his relationship with Ling Feifei seems to be the main source of the conflict between him and Li Xinye.

"Artistic Real Estate" on the Fast Track of the Times

Li Xinye's article mainly accuses his father of three types of behaviors: being eager to curry favor with the powerful, spending money lavishly on his "goddess", and despising employees and subordinates while blindly believing in the logic of ever - rising housing prices.

Li Songjian was born in Chenghai, Guangdong in 1963. He made his first fortune by founding Guangdong Mingyuan Plastic Products Factory. Later, he entered the Shanghai market and established Mingyuan Group in 1994, mainly engaged in real - estate development.

The first large - scale residential project he developed in Shanghai was Mingyuan Century City, located on Fuxing Middle Road in Xuhui District. The ingrained idea among Shanghai people that "one should buy a house in Xuhui" has persisted to this day, which shows the strength behind Mingyuan Group's acquisition of this land plot back then.

What really made Mingyuan Group well - known was that in 2001, it purchased 408 mu of land from Shanghai Paper Machinery Factory for a total price of 304 million yuan to develop the urban complex project, Urban Forest.

According to the plan, the project is to be built in four phases. After completion, it will integrate high - rise apartments, multi - story residences, office buildings, commercial buildings, a five - star hotel, low - density villas, an art club, a school, etc. Before 2014, the first, second, and third phases of the project had been completed. It was also from this period that Mingyuan Group began to focus on creating the label of "artistic real estate".

In an interview in 2012, Ling Feifei, the then president of Mingyuan Group, said that Mingyuan Group had always wanted to develop personalized products. "Previously, we always focused on adding art to our products, such as introducing artworks into the community. This was actually a relatively elementary stage. Now, we hope to integrate art into life."

According to this report, the concept of an artistic lifestyle is the theme of the Urban Forest project.

Art has once become a label for Li Songjian and Ling Feifei as the founders of Mingyuan Group. On the official website of Mingyuan Group today, under the "Diversified Businesses" list, "Culture and Art" still stands as a separate business segment. The group owns the Shanghai Mingyuan Art Museum and Ming Contemporary Art Museum, and the latter is a supporting project of the aforementioned Urban Forest complex.

In addition to culture and art, Li Songjian's Mingyuan Group also involved in fields such as environmental protection materials, financial investment, and medical health - just like its real - estate peers that grew up in the era of blind expansion, each company stepped on the gas pedal to expand its business territory.

The diversified industrial layout listed on the official website of Mingyuan Group

In March 2004, during the asset restructuring of Shanghai Electric Group Corporation, Shantou Mingguang Investment Co., Ltd., controlled by Li Songjian, became one of the shareholders of Shanghai Electric Co., Ltd.

In the Hurun "Rich List" in 2006, Li Songjian ranked 191st with a net worth of 1.7 billion yuan.

 The Illusion of "Housing Prices Never Falling"

However, in 2007, there was a turning point in Li Songjian's booming real - estate career. That year, he was involved in the case of misappropriating social security funds in Shanghai. For misappropriating 50 million yuan and bribing 700,000 yuan, he was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. This was one of the costs of his father's shortcut - taking business development, as accused by Li Xinye.

According to Li Xinye's article, before Li Songjian was investigated and imprisoned, his then - spouse, Ling Feifei, divorced him first and took half of the assets, worth billions of yuan. After Li Songjian was released from prison, the two "reconciled", but it was not clear whether they remarried. Therefore, some people questioned that their divorce was for the purpose of quickly cutting off ties and protecting their property.

As of now, the Aiqicha App shows that Li Songjian and Ling Feifei still hold shares or serve as senior executives in many companies under Mingyuan Group.

Information from the Aiqicha App

Information from the Aiqicha App

After Li Songjian was released from prison, Mingyuan Group seemed to make no major moves in terms of investment and land acquisition. Only two projects, Jiulongwan in Nanchang and the Financial City in Shantou, are listed on the official website.

Later, in 2017, the strictest real - estate regulation in history spread across the country. In 2021, the industry officially entered a downward cycle.

But at that time, Li Songjian seemed to be very confident about the future of the real - estate market. According to Li Xinye, when he returned to China in 2021, he expressed his judgment that the real - estate market had reached its peak and tried to persuade his father to adjust the business layout. However, Li Songjian did not agree. He believed that Western economics was not suitable for China and that "housing prices in China will always rise".

This view was the same as that of many industry practitioners and even potential homebuyers in the market at that time, who were dominated by years of inertial thinking and the "belief in ever - rising housing prices". The subsequent market trend gave them a wake - up call: starting from the second half of 2021, real - estate companies' debt defaults broke out intensively, and housing prices in many cities entered a downward range one after another.

Li Songjian's view represents a large group of people who have experienced the era of extensive real - estate development. They believe that housing prices will always rise, and the natural financial attribute of real estate provides endless motivation for ordinary people to take over the market, thus supporting their own wealth accumulation. However, the current in - depth adjustment of the industry has forced them to break away from their past development concepts.

However, it is currently impossible to confirm whether the content of Li Xinye's article "My Father, Li Songjian" is objective and accurate. Recently, Li Xinye posted a video saying that he had received a personal safety threat from his father and had reported the matter to the police. But the video was taken down soon after it was posted.

There are also doubts that Li Xinye's exposure of his father in this article may be an inevitable move under the background of the industry's downturn, actually aiming to draw a clear line in advance and protect his property.

36Kr tried to contact Li Xinye for further information about the latest progress after he reported to the police, the reason for the video being taken down, and the outside doubts. However, as of press time, he had not replied. In addition, Mingyuan Group has not responded to this incident either.

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