A Lawsuit Uncovers the Capital Flight Network of the Chinese Elite｜What Red Lines Did Zhao Wei Cross?｜Yaoyaojiang
This video takes a 2020 lawsuit in the Hong Kong High Court as a starting point to exclusively conduct an open-source investigation and reconstruct a capital flight and money laundering channel used by China's top elite for over fourteen years. The video connects key figures and events including Xiao Jianhua of the Tomorrow Group, Alvin Chau (Xi Mi Hua) of Suncity Group, Huang Youlong, Qi Ming, Sun Lijun, and She Zhijiang of the Myanmar KK Park, revealing the deep connections between rent-seeking, casino money laundering, nominee holding systems, offshore landing, and cross-border underground financial networks for telecom fraud.
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Hello everyone, I am Yao Yao Jiang. At the end of June 2020, a lawsuit that had dragged on for nearly five years in the Hong Kong Central High Court finally reached a verdict. The plaintiff, Choi Yat-fung, is a Hong Kong socialite, former executive director of Asia, wife of Shang Pinru, and vice president of the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia. The defendant, Huang Youlong, is a businessman from Shaodong, Hunan, a Singaporean citizen, and the ex-husband of Zhao Wei. Choi Yat-fung sued Huang Youlong to recover over 100 million HKD in agency fees and interest.
The origin of the case dates back to 2015, when Huang Youlong borrowed 60 million Euros—equivalent to 280 million HKD at the time—at an Australian casino and lost it all in six days. Choi Yat-fung was the casino vice president who arranged the gambling funds for Huang Youlong back then. Although the tens of millions in gambling debts were repaid long ago, the agency fees and years of interest that Huang Youlong verbally promised have yet to materialize.
The verdict was a total defeat for Choi Yat-fung. Huang Youlong never appeared in court in France, yet he won the case. The bizarre nature of this lawsuit unexpectedly exposed a channel for capital flight and money laundering used by China's top elite for over a decade. This channel connects Zhongnanhai to Macau casinos and finally extends to the KK Park in Myanmar. The person who pulled the thread on this pipeline was Huang Youlong, the ex-husband of "Little Swallow" Zhao Wei. Our open-source investigation into this channel is exclusive; it is a bit brain-burning, but packed with solid information.
Suppose you are an ordinary entrepreneur in Beijing today and want to move 50 million RMB to Melbourne, Australia to buy a house. What are the ways? Legally, you can use each ID card to exchange 50,000 USD per year, which is slow. A grayer method is to find an underground bank, pay a few percentage points in fees, and have it arrive in a week; or you could use cross-border fake trade contracts or cryptocurrency to move the money out. But suppose the person wanting to move money today is not an ordinary entrepreneur, but a member of an elite family who cannot publicly own overseas assets. Then all the aforementioned methods fail—not because the amount is too large, but because the person moving the money cannot be tracked.
Underground banks can transfer money in a week, but when the funds reach overseas accounts, banks will ask about the source of funds. Most of the elite's money comes from rent-seeking, equity nominee holdings, or gray-area profit sharing, and they cannot provide proof of legal income. What they really need to solve is having a set of records that can explain the source of funds once the money is overseas. Because casinos have large cash flows and stable long-term operations, they can solve the problems that underground banks cannot.
To understand this capital flight pipeline, we must start with this lawsuit from June of this year. Before 2019, Choi Yat-fung was a socialite active in Hong Kong circles, a close friend of Guo Jingjing, and a regular guest at elite banquets. Her jewelry brand operated from Macau to Paris. This was the social level, but beneath the social surface was her family's gambling business. Her mother was an investor in Macau's Suncity Group—the gambling intermediary giant founded by Alvin Chau. Choi Yat-fung herself served as the casino's marketing vice president, responsible for connecting with high-end gamblers. Her specific job was to help high-end clients exchange funds for chips and arrange guarantees and endorsements. After all, high-end guests often deal with tens of millions in gambling funds; they can't just carry a suitcase of cash to a casino in Australia.
High-end intermediaries like Cai Yifeng would arrange gambling funds for high-end clients in advance, and verbally negotiate intermediary fees and guarantee fees. One day in 2015, Zhao Wei's husband, Huang Youlong, came to the Crown Casino in Australia, and Cai Yifeng was responsible for receiving him. Huang Youlong proposed to borrow $60,000,000 split into two transactions. The first transaction of $40,000,000 was completely lost by him within 48 hours, and the second transaction of $20,000,000 was lost within a few days. In six days, the $60,000,000 was completely lost without winning a single cent.
The creditors of this money were jointly provided by four parties: Cai Yifeng herself, Cai Yifeng's mother, Brother Nan from the Macau casinos, and Suncity Group operated by Alvin Chau (Sancai). Cai Yifeng was also the intermediary and guarantor of this loan. Since Huang Youlong borrowed the money in Australia, why was it all from people in Macau? Because the Australian casino he went to was not a standard Australian casino in the full sense. Suncity Group leased an entire VIP private room inside the Crown Casino in Melbourne, named Suncity Junket. In the gaming industry, this term also refers to an intermediary, specifically connecting casinos with high-net-worth gamblers, serving as an important link in the casino ecosystem.
The title held by Cai Yifeng as Vice President of Casino Marketing corresponded to the high-end clients in this Suncity VIP room. Legally, this VIP room belonged to Crown Melbourne and was regulated by Australia, but its operation rights, client lists, credit limits, and settlement accounts were all entirely controlled by Suncity in Macau. In other words, the rules of a VIP room in an Australian casino were actually dictated by Macau; it merely borrowed a legal jurisdiction as a shell to house its own operating system, allowing money to cross China's national borders without directly touching China's foreign exchange controls or the parts of overseas anti-money laundering procedures most prone to triggering alarms.
Starting in February 2016, Suncity and Huang Youlong reconciled accounts in batches, and eventually by 2019, Huang Youlong had cumulatively repaid HK$300,000,000 to Suncity, meaning the principal of $60,000,000 had been fully settled. Suncity also officially issued a letter confirming the debt. Liu Qing. In addition, Huang Youlong also attached a hk$5,000,000 "Spring and Autumn Dream" (Cai Huang Liang Yi Meng) to Cai under the guise of a wedding gift. Up to this point, neither the borrowing nor lending parties had written a contract, not a single receipt, nor signed any written agreement, which was said to be the standard operating procedure of the casino system.
However, 3 years later, in 2019, Cai Yifeng suddenly filed a lawsuit with the High Court of Hong Kong, seeking to recover about HK$100,000,000. Her claim was that back then, both parties had a verbal agreement for a 24% annual interest rate. Calculated at this interest rate, Huang Youlong still owed her intermediary service fees and interest, totaling HK$100,000,000. The case dragged on for nearly 5 years without ever going to trial. As for the reason why it never went to trial, Cai Yifeng later publicly stated that Huang Youlong had threatened her, saying that if she did not drop the lawsuit, he would make it impossible for her to go to the mainland. Why did Huang Youlong have such almighty power? We will see this more clearly as we look further down.
The case dragged on until June 2020 for the final judgment. By this time, Huang Youlong was already hiding in France, claiming that he had heart disease and could not fly to Hong Kong to appear in court. Cai Yifeng, on the other hand, produced WeChat chat history as evidence, while Huang Youlong's legal team directly rebutted that the WeChat records were suspected of being tampered with. Moreover, Huang Youlong's lawyer made a crucial point: the funds involved in the case were all circulated through corporate public accounts and did not belong to personal loans.
In other words, these $60,000,000 were not borrowed personally by Huang Youlong from Cai Yifeng; this was money flowing from business-to-business transactions. For personal loans, since the borrower has to bear high risks, high interest rates of 24% can be charged. However, Cai Yifeng was merely an intermediary today, not the borrower, and therefore had no right to charge high interest rates. The judge's final reasoning followed roughly the same logic: Cai Yifeng did not dare to produce a complete chain of evidence to prove that the two parties agreed on a 24% annual interest rate used for borrowing money as gambling capital. Once she produced such evidence, it would be equivalent to admitting in her own words that she participated in an illegal cross-border gambling loan, and the more complete the evidence was, the greater the legal risk for herself.
Consequently, she could only retreat to an entirely different narrative: verbal agreements, industry conventions, and underworld trust. While these things could function within underground financial pipelines, they possessed almost no legal validity. As a veteran player in this pipeline, Huang Youlong naturally understood this better than anyone else. Using the casino to transfer money to overseas accounts, once the reconciliation was completed, that sum of money in the overseas account possessed chip exchange records, casino settlement flows, and accounting vouchers issued by gaming companies. Coupled with the fact that Macau's Suncity and Melbourne's Crown Casino were legally recognized licensed gaming companies, the financial records they issued provided a set of fund source explanations with a commercial appearance.
This explanation made a source-unknown sum of money much easier to pass bank fund source audits during bank fund review procedures than money directly transferred from underground banks. Huang Youlong's trip was not about losing money to the casino, but rather transforming the money into another form and keeping it in the overseas account he designated. So, how could a sum of money already lost to the casino turn into a manageable overseas asset in the hands of a certain client?
Setting up this system was Alvin Chau (Sancai). To build that brand value and corporate responsibility, Alvin Chau, whose real name was Zhou Zhuohua, was born in Macau in 1974. He started from the bottom of Macau casinos as a junket agent, meaning an intermediary who solicited clients for casinos. How did the money in this system move? Every single transaction passing through the water hands, how much commission was collected, and what accounts were they hidden in—these were things he had been doing since he was twenty years old.
In 2007, Macau liberalized its gambling franchise, and Alvin Chau founded the Suncity Group. It was in this year that this pipeline began to take shape. By 2013, Macau's gambling industry reached its peak, with VIP room operations generating 238.5 billion Macau patacas in annual revenue, accounting for 66% of Macau's total gambling revenue. Alvin Chau's Suncity was the largest gambling intermediary in this market.
Let us return to Huang Youlong's $60 million. The moment Huang Youlong sat down in the VIP room, he was not facing just a casino, but an entire underground cross-border financial system. The list of credit settlement clients for this VIP room was entirely determined by Suncity in Macau; the Crown casino only collected rent and taxes. The clients operated through the accounts of Alvin Chau's Suncity; the casino did not look into it, and Australian financial regulators could not reach it either.
When Huang Youlong proposed borrowing $60 million, the first thing Suncity did was to slide this amount from its own offshore accounts into Huang Youlong's account. Immediately after, Huang Youlong began his so-called gambling. On the surface, he lost it all within a few days, but in reality, this money simply changed names, lying in a client settlement account at the Suncity VIP room in the Australian casino, becoming legally recognized offshore funds.
As we mentioned earlier, after paying off his gambling debts, Huang Youlong paid an additional 5 million, likely to thank the intermediary for completing this operation, allowing the 60 million yuan to become legitimate assets left behind in an offshore account under the guise of gambling business dealings. Of course, not everyone who walks into a VIP room is doing this; the vast majority of people there are wealthy individuals who are truly gambling, and Suncity's gambling business itself is legal—with licenses issued by Macau and Australia. However, the process for his account-supplementing system—from offshore account verbal agreements to mortgage settlements and legal gambling records—is the same. It works for both real gambling and money laundering; Suncity does not need to distinguish between them, as it earns money from both types of clients.
As for the fate of Alvin Chau himself, we will explain it all here at once. In October 2019, Alvin Chau was banned from entering Australia. On November 26, 2021, he was arrested in Macau. On July 3, 2024, the Macau Court of Final Appeal sentenced him to 18 years in prison, and his illegal proceeds of 24.865 billion Hong Kong dollars were all confiscated by the Macau SAR government. The core charges in the verdict were organized crime and cross-border money laundering; the goal was to use money laundering to cover up capital flight.
So a question arises: for whom was Huang Youlong laundering money? Moving one step upstream along this money trail, the person sitting at the desk packaging the funds was Xiao Jianhua. What Xiao Jianhua did was package the assets of the powerful and wealthy within the country, hiding the names of the true owners. We do not need to unfold all of the more than one hundred offshore companies of the Tomorrow Group; we can illustrate the point with three public samples.
The first sample: In 2013, Qi Qiaoqiao sold equity to Xiao Jianhua. In March 2013, Xi Jinping took office as President. In the same year, his relatives profited hundreds of millions of dollars through insider trading—this is the phrasing from The New York Times, based on an investigation of confidential documents. Also in 2013, a spokesperson for Xiao Jianhua confirmed a transaction to The New York Times: Xi Jinping's sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, and brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui, sold 50% of the shares they held in a Beijing investment company to a company founded by Xiao Jianhua. Of course, Xiao Jianhua's move was originally intended to prove the integrity and strict family upbringing of the Xi family; it was out of a desire to praise the leader that the secret was leaked.
Before this transaction, those 50% of shares were registered under the names of Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui. Their names were on the shareholder register, and their political identities were tied to these assets. After this transaction, the same 50% of shares were registered under the name of Xiao Jianhua's company, and the names of Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui disappeared from these assets. The assets remained, but the holder had changed.
The second example: During the same period, Huang Youlong and Zhao Wei appeared in Xiao Jianhua's nominee holding system. In 2011, a shell company in the British Virgin Islands named Financial Giant appeared on the investor list of Alibaba Group. By 2014, when Alibaba went public, the portion of shares held by Financial Giant had appreciated from $25 million to $160 million.
This is another use of the same nominee holding system. This time, it started with an offshore shell company, which entered a tech giant about to go public through a specific structure. After the IPO, the assets were financialized in the offshore capital market, and thus, equity in a company with almost zero registered capital became a listed stock asset that could be traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 2014, Zhao Wei and Huang Youlong bought 9.18% of Alibaba Pictures shares for HK$3.1 billion. According to investigations by The New York Times and Wired China based on more than 2,000 confidential documents, this money, approximately $400 million, was not Zhao Wei and Huang Youlong's own money, but money provided to them by a company belonging to Xiao Jianhua's Tomorrow Group. Zhao Wei and Huang Youlong were the nominees for this transaction.
In the same year, Xiao Jianhua controlled about one-third of the shares of Jack Ma's securities firm, Yunfeng Financial, through four offshore companies plus a fifth company held by Huang Youlong as a nominee. These operations all did the same thing: taking funds of unclear origin and, through the names of nominees, entering the equity of a company that could be publicly traded in offshore capital markets, thereby turning money of unknown origin into public equity with business registrations, shareholder records, and exchange quotes. According to documents provided to The New York Times by former Tomorrow Group employees, it was explicitly stated that the names of Xiao Jianhua and the Tomorrow Group would never appear.
The third sample: In December 2016, Longwei Media acquired Wanjia Culture. The proxy-holding system had already been running for many years, but this time, she did something she had never done before—attempting to directly turn a public figure into the legal representative of the controlling stake of an A-share listed company.
According to the administrative penalty decision issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) in April 2018, Longwei Media was established on November 2, 2016, with a registered capital of RMB 2 million, which had not yet been actually paid in. Its total assets, net assets, operating revenue, and net profit were all zero, making it a shell company in the true sense of the word. On December 23, Longwei Media and Wanjia Group signed a share transfer agreement to acquire a 29.135% equity stake in Wanjia Culture. The total acquisition price was RMB 3.0599 billion, with RMB 60 million coming from self-owned funds and a loan of RMB 1.5 billion from Tibet Yiping Asset Management Co., Ltd. What about the collateral measures? It was merely the personal credit guarantee of Zhao Wei. The remaining RMB 1.4999 billion was financed through stock pledge financing from financial institutions, with a leverage ratio as high as 51 times.
This Tibet Yiping Asset Management was actually an affiliate of Xiao Jianhua's Tomorrow Holding Group. The collateral for the RMB 1.5 billion Tomorrow Holding loan was not any physical asset, but simply the personal credit of Zhao Wei as a public figure. If this acquisition had succeeded, the actual control of an A-share listed company would have fallen into the hands of Tomorrow Holding through a shell company where Zhao Wei served as the legal representative.
The targets of the proxy-holding systems of the first two forces were both in overseas markets; this time, she reached into the domestic A-share public market for the first time, but the move was not seen through to the end. On January 27, 2017, Xiao Jianhua was cross-border abducted back to the mainland by state security (MSS) personnel from a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong. Afterward, CITIC Bank refused to provide a financing of RMB 3 billion to Longwei Media, shrinking the acquisition to 5%, which was completely terminated on March 31.
In April 2018, the CSRC imposed maximum penalties on Zhao Wei and her husband, issuing warnings and a fine of RMB 300,000 to each, alongside a 5-year securities market ban. At the time, this penalty was widely interpreted as a signal of striking against Tomorrow Holding. The three samples occurred in different years, involved different figures, different transactions, and independent public evidence, yet what they did was startlingly consistent: step by step, stripping assets away from the names of their true owners, and step by step turning them into assets whose true owners were legally invisible.
In the very year Xiao Jianhua was taken away, he had already accumulated tens of thousands of assets without the names of their owners. These assets were scattered under the names of public figures like Zhao Wei and Huang Youlong, further recorded on the books of shell companies controlled by others, hidden within the equity of overseas listed companies like Alibaba Pictures and Yunfeng Financial, and parked in domestic shell companies like Longwei Media. They did not appear in any property declarations of senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), nor would they appear on the sensitive person lists of any overseas banks. They could be shipped out of the country at any time. After a privileged asset changed its name domestically, the next question was where it would land. Melbourne was an important overseas landing spot for this pipeline. We have already followed Huang Youlong's RMB 60 million through Melbourne's Crown Casino once, but that transaction was not the only one during that same period. In the same physical space and using the accounts of the same batch of casino VIP private rooms, large-scale operations by Chinese VIPs featured several names repeatedly appearing from China. Among these names was a person named Qi Ming. According to a joint six-month investigation conducted in 2019 by Australia's 60 Minutes, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age, Qi Ming is an Australian citizen. The original phrasing used by Australian media regarding his familial relationship with Xi Jinping was cousin. Qi Ming was no ordinary gambler; he was picked up and dropped off by private jets, enjoyed VIP exclusive private room services and dedicated table attendants, with gambling stakes starting from hundreds of thousands of dollars, without needing to deal with regular counters. His gambling sessions were directly connected to the casino's VIP private room account system. In 2014, Qi Ming was among the top fifty gamblers at Crown Melbourne. That year, he placed bets of approximately AUD 41 million at Crown Casino, which was equivalent to HKD 220 million at the time. In 2015, Crown Casino gave him free slot machine play as well as VIP tickets to the Australian Grand Prix, which were standard treatments provided by Crown Casino to long-term high-turnover clients. In 2016, he landed at an airport in Queensland aboard a private jet and was searched by the Australian Federal Police on suspicion of international money laundering. Due to insufficient evidence, he was not prosecuted and was eventually released.
Meanwhile, another guest during the same period was Tom Zhou, an Interpol Red Notice fugitive and a suspect accused by the Chinese government of extortion. In 2019, independent Australian MP Andrew Wilkie brought this matter up in parliament. Roman Quaedvlieg, former Commissioner of the Australian Border Force, testified on 60 Minutes that he was pressured by two Australian ministers and a member of parliament to open a fast-track visa channel for high-rolling Chinese gamblers at Crown Casino. The Australian Consulate-General in Shanghai even set up a dedicated emergency hotline to help Crown Casino clients process visas quickly. The Australian government subsequently launched an independent inquiry into Crown Casino.
Let's first look at this person Qi Ming. In 1 year, he bet 41 million at the Crown Casino, a scale that ordinary wealthy people would not make, and retail gamblers cannot get tickets to the Grand Prix. What he relied on was a complete set of backend mechanisms for credit settlement and rebates within the casino's VIP account system. The handling method of this year's HK$200 million gambling game is no different in essence from Huang Youlong's 60 million. The money he supposedly lost was settled through the casino account system in offshore accounts as well, leaving it there for backup. During the same period, international fugitives like TOM were also active in the Crown Casino, traveling across Australia on private jets, not to mention Huang Youlong's 60 million gambling funds we mentioned earlier. These three people had completely different identities: one was a cousin of Xi Jinping, one was Zhao Wei's husband, and one was an internationally wanted extortion suspect. Yet they appeared in the same casino, used the same batch of accounts, and relied on the same set of domestic and overseas docking interfaces. Green lights for visas, lenient law enforcement, VIP room services, and offshore account settlement. Looking at the political power behind this interface, Australian ministers were willing to apply pressure for it, and the Shanghai Consulate of the Border Force was willing to open an emergency visa hotline for him. The source of this power could not be mobilized by the commercial influence of the Crown Casino itself. What truly played a role was the political power behind these Chinese VIP clients. On the Australian side, there were ministers willing to cooperate, a consulate willing to cooperate, and the border force being pressured. On the Chinese side, visas, entry and exit, law enforcement coordination, and foreign-related stability maintenance—this entire set of docking interfaces had someone in the Public Security Bureau coordinating it internally.
On January 13, 2020, the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing held a special meeting on the deployment of cracking down on cross-border online gambling. The host was Sun Lijun, Vice Minister of the Public Security Bureau in charge of the First Bureau, the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Affairs Office, and foreign-related stability maintenance. Three months later, he himself was also placed under investigation by a special case team of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. These three months were the last three months that this pipeline operated normally. The pipeline was built in 2007 and dismantled in 2021, lasting 14 years. However, starting in April 2020, it broke continuously for the first time. Over a period of 1.5 years, the last batch of assets under Xiao Jianhua's name was sealed off, Alvin Chau was arrested in Macau, Huang Youlong fled from Iceland to France and was arrested, and Zhao Wei was banned across the entire internet. By 2022, it was Sun Lijun's turn. During the 14 years from 2007 to 2021, Sun Lijun's official authority could escort this entire set of cross-border money laundering, but why did this line suddenly collapse in 2020? The first-layer reason was the money itself. By 2020, foreign exchange controls were getting tighter and tighter, and anti-corruption entered deep waters. A channel that could allow the assets of the powerful and elite to go overseas in batches, bypassing even property declarations and sensitive personnel lists, could no longer be allowed to continue to get out of control. Capital flight through gambling was the ostensible reason. The second reason, which was even more fatal: this pipeline had been operating for 14 years, and what precipitated was not just money, but also lists and account books. Xiao Jianhua, Alvin Chau, Huang Youlong, and Sun Lijun—these four people were not just business nodes, but information nodes. Xiao Jianhua knew whose assets domestic assets were registered under among tens of thousands of proxy holders. Alvin Chau knew how accounts for Junkets in Macau were settled, matching gambling debts to capital flight. Huang Youlong knew how these networks converged onto him alone. And Sun Lijun knew how these windows for cross-border gambling and cross-border law enforcement in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan coordinated at the very top, and whom this channel had served. For the powerful families in Zhongnanhai, this information was more dangerous than money. Funds can be transferred and assets can be renamed, but once the lists and account books fall into the hands of the external judicial system, media, or Western intelligence agencies, they are political nuclear bombs. Therefore, dismantling and cleaning up this pipeline was never as simple as just stopping capital outflow; it was also about bringing back the people who knew the secrets one by one into one's own hands, making them controllable and forcing them to shut up.
On April 19, 2020, the CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced the investigation of Sun Lijun with unusually stern wording: extreme inflation of political ambitions, extremely vicious political qualities, and an extremely distorted view of power and political achievements. Such language is generally not used in ordinary corruption cases, but rather in cases characterized as political issues. Taking down the thief by capturing the king first, Sun Lijun, every node along the party's pipeline began to receive summons. In March 2021, the procuratorate in Dongguan, Guangdong issued a Red Notice through Interpol for Huang Youlong on charges related to his participation in the 2019 Tuandaiwang case. On March 22, Huang Youlong boarded a private jet from Iceland and landed in Bordeaux, France, where he was arrested immediately upon landing. That night, he received a call from Jack Ma, which was later revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The original quote was that they said only I can persuade you to come back, and you have no other way. They are giving you this policy now, and if you don't come back now, they will definitely screw you to death. Who is he? Jack Ma said it was a high-ranking official of the CCP's anti-corruption agency. The Chinese Embassy in Paris submitted an extradition request on May 14. In July 2021, the Bordeaux Court of Appeal in France rejected the request. The judge wrote very bluntly in the ruling that the basis of the extradition request was not the criminal offenses accused of Huang himself, but rather the Chinese government's desire to obtain testimony accusing Sun Lijun. A French judgment spelled out half of the truth for us: what the CCP wanted was not Huang Youlong of the Tuandaiwang case, but Huang Youlong of the Sun Lijun case. The other half of the judgment left unsaid is that what Huang Youlong could provide went far beyond how much bribe Sun Lijun took; he alone simultaneously connected Xiao Jianhua's proxy-holding system, Suncity's casino money laundering pipeline and setup, and the Southeast Asian telecom fraud parks at the other end. How were these three networks connected? Who coordinated at the very top? And whose assets were those upstream after all? This was what the CCP truly wanted to get hold of and seal off. What the CCP wanted was not a confession testimony, but the internal structural diagram of the entire network, especially that list of high-ranking elites upstream.
So why was this list so fatal? Looking back at these two samples makes it clear. Qi Qiaoqiao, the sister of Xi Jinping, sold her equity to Xiao Jianhua; Qi Ming, a cousin of Xi Jinping, bet hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars a year at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. These two people are not isolated gossip; they represent the most sensitive political implications of this pipeline. Xi and other top-tier families care about the asset security and information security of their overseas holdings. And the overseas destination for these people is highly concentrated in one country: Australia. Xi Jinping's second sister, Qi An'an, and her husband have long resided in Melbourne and are Australian permanent residents; his younger brother, Xi Yuanxing, also holds Australian permanent residency. Zeng Weisheng, the son of Zeng Qinghong, bought a sky-high luxury mansion in Sydney in 2008. Combined with Qi Ming's long-term high-stakes gambling at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia is an important landing spot that repeatedly appears in public records. The equity transaction between Qi Qiaoqiao and Xiao Jianhua, Qi Ming's high-stakes gambling in Melbourne, and the Australian gambling debt channel used by Huang Youlong—when these three things are stacked together, they point not to ordinary tycoons laundering money, but to how the assets of the highest elite families land and remain anonymously protected in the West. Once the list in Huang Youlong's hands is leaked, it involves this exact layer. Therefore, the next move was not to continue pursuing Huang Youlong himself, but to target his wife. Huang Youlong received calls from more than just Jack Ma; Wei Pujie, the deputy head of the CCDI special investigation team responsible for the Sun Lijun case, also said something to Huang Youlong on the phone: I have chatted with your wife! Not a single word in this sentence was a threat, but the meaning was entirely underneath: if you don't come back and hand over what you should hand over, your wife Zhao Wei is going to be in trouble. This was forcing Huang Youlong to return to China and hand over what he controlled. Zhao Wei was the most vulnerable weakness to manipulate in this forced confession.
In July 2021, the French court rejected the extradition, and on the 23rd of the same month, Huang Youlong and Zhao Wei secretly divorced. On August 26, Zhao Wei was completely banned across the entire mainland internet. Weibo super-topics were blocked, and My Fair Princess and Romance in the Rain were taken offline across the whole network. Elle removed her cover, and her studio dissolved contracts. The official reason given was Zhang Zhehan's old photos posing with a Japanese military flag bringing up the past. That entertainment industry narrative had mismatched timelines and was far too lightweight. The only thing that matched the timeline was July 2021: Huang Youlong, her husband, did not come back. Therefore, the reason for the cleanup of this money laundering pipeline—which had been operating for 14 years and was reined in between 2020 and 2021—was that by this time, if it were allowed to continue operating, the risks would have exceeded the rewards. This was because even Thailand, the United States, and the United Kingdom had inadvertently stumbled into it, beginning to detect this secret channel belonging to the top elites of the CCP. And the crucial figure who cracked open this end was the never-before-seen thread attached to Huang Youlong, who was fleeing in France and represented another part of this pipeline. With a trillion-level scale of overseas settlement per year, if it relied entirely on the money fed in by clients and fell short, Suncity's overseas accounts needed a massive amount of US dollars and Euros over the long term, requiring yet another continuous supply channel. And the other end of this channel had a direct connection to Huang Youlong: his cousin She Zhijiang. According to reports from mainland outlets like China Business Journal, She Zhijiang and Huang Youlong are both from Shaodong, Hunan. The straight-line distance between their ancestral homes was no more than 500 meters, and they had known each other since childhood. She Zhijiang dropped out of school at age 14 and followed his older cousin Huang Youlong out of the county, marking the first step of his venture into the world. Yet the path he took differed from Huang Youlong's: while Huang Youlong dealt with Xiao Jianhua's proxy-holding system to turn domestic assets into overseas ones, She Zhijiang approached through a different line—physical telecom fraud parks sheltered by Myanmar warlords.
In 2012, She Zhijiang first went to the Philippines to engage in illegal online lottery targeting the Chinese mainland. In 2014, a court in Yantai, Shandong ruled him guilty of illegal business operations. However, by 2017, he had obtained Cambodian citizenship and changed his name to She Lenkai. In Myawaddy, he signed a 120-square-kilometer land project called Yatai New City, which later became the so-called KK Park. This was not an isolated scam hub; it operated under the guise of the Belt and Road Initiative. She Zhijiang, accompanied by Hui Wing Mau of the Federation of Overseas Chinese Enterprises, attended the World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention. In 2018, during Xi Jinping's visit to the Philippines, She also appeared at a business community banquet in Manila and attended a Belt and Road Chinese business summit hosted by Sichuan, with the compound enjoying protection. By the end of 2021, online gambling platforms under She Zhijiang's name numbered 239, luring in 330,000 mainland gamblers. It was a massive financial machine hooked onto local armed forces, cross-border gambling, and illegal payment networks under the banner of Belt and Road development. At the same time, in May 2021, Interpol issued a Red Notice against him at China's request on charges of illegal operation of casinos. In August 2022, he was taken away by Thai police during a dinner in Bangkok and has since been detained in prison awaiting extradition. According to Hong Kong media and exiled figures, he grew powerful and wealthy in Myawaddy, developed deep ties with local warlords, and even wanted to establish his own armed forces, falling out of the CCP's control. Action was taken against him because he refused to surrender power and knew too much. How much of this narrative can be believed is hard to say, but two things are solid: official announcements explicitly state that his group colluded with domestic and foreign illegal underground banks for payment settlements, and like Xiao Jianhua, Alvin Chau, Huang Youlong, and Sun Lijun, he is an information node feared by top elites.
In September 2024, while in a Thai prison, he was interviewed by Al Jazeera and claimed to be a former agent for the state security (MSS) department. He stated that in 2016 in the Philippines, he was responsible for acting as an agent for Belt and Road projects in Myanmar, received many confidential matters from the Ministry of Public Security (Public Security) and the Belt and Road initiative, and that everything was related to the future of the highest leadership. This is his unilateral statement, which we cannot verify. However, the fact that She Zhijiang, locked up in a Thai prison, was able to leak information via video terrified the CCP, making them eager to extradite him just like Huang Youlong. Consequently, in November 2025, Thailand extradited him back to China. So let us return to how that financial channel operated. The Office of the Attorney General of Thailand disclosed in 2025 that the liquidity flow of She Zhijiang's group exceeded 2.775 trillion RMB, whereas the domestic case amount reported by Chinese police was 2.7 billion. These two figures differ by a full thousand times. A thousand-fold difference is the key to nodes like the scam parks. We must first separate telecom scams from cross-border capital settlement. KK Park superficially engaged in telecom scams—swindling money from domestic victims—and that part of the case value was indeed 2.7 billion. But the 2.775 trillion was not from telecom scams; it was the total volume of funds moving in and out of the 239 gambling platforms. In other words, the essence of KK Park should not be simply understood as a telecom scam criminal syndicate, but rather as a massive cross-border underground financial infrastructure. Telecom scams were merely one of the business lines through which this system could monetize and generate revenue, while its more essential and larger-scale function was to provide cross-border circulation and laundering channels for all sorts of shady funds, potentially including scam money, gambling funds, laundered money, and even capital flight.
In the past, the outside world only regarded places like Myanmar's Myawaddy as scam compounds, until the United States took action in the past 2 years, allowing us to see for the first time the scale of funds behind these compounds and their other function. In October 2025, the United States and the United Kingdom jointly sanctioned Cambodia's Prince Group and its founder Chen Zhi, seizing 127,271 bitcoins associated with it. Valued at about $15 billion at the time, this was the largest cryptocurrency confiscation in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice. What this case exposed was not just how much money was swindled, but how the RMB inside the compounds became accumulated funds for global asset fraud. First channeled through underground money laundering hubs in Cambodia, it was converted into Bitcoin and stablecoins, and then passed through layers of shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, and Singapore, ultimately turning into a Picasso bought at auction in New York and real estate in London. This step could not be achieved by local warlords and compound bosses alone; they had to borrow through Hong Kong and Macau casinos, Hong Kong's offshore RMB finance, and the financial holes set up by underground money laundering networks. What the compounds were doing was essentially the same thing. At this point, the two ends connected with the Chinese nobility. One end wanted to exchange domestic RMB for overseas US dollars, Australian dollars, and Euros, while the telecom scam compound end accumulated a massive amount of RMB that needed to be cashed out, laundered, and transferred. The demands of both ends exactly offset each other on the account books of the same batch of underground money laundering networks and illegal payment platforms. Macau casinos provided a gambling veneer, Hong Kong provided offshore RMB and financial settlement scenarios, and Southeast Asian telecom scam operations provided massive amounts of RMB and gray capital flows. Combined, they completed the closed loop of capital flight from Zhongnanhai to the scam compounds. This is the origin of the hard currency in Suncity's overseas accounts, and also the destination of the RMB in KK Park. It was not a one-to-one transfer between Suncity and KK, but rather two large accounts involved in this gray capital flow spanning several countries, acting as counterparties on the account books of the same set of underground money laundering networks. Official documents have never directly linked these two ends in a single sentence, but the clues all fall in the same place: the Macau judgment documents of Suncity mention using illegal channels such as underground money laundering networks to provide fund settlements for gamblers. Thailand disclosed that the money laundering method of Prince Group involved the collusion of domestic and foreign illegal payment platforms and underground money laundering networks. The targets of the Ministry of Public Security's 2019 "Operation Clean-up" and 2021 "Operation Stream-cutting" were simultaneously cross-border gambling and telecommunications fraud, using the exact same phrase: underground money laundering networks and online payment platforms providing fund settlements for cross-border gambling and telecommunications fraud. This box is the interface for both ends, and these two ends happened to be within the jurisdiction of the very same person. Sun Lijun was in charge of not only Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan affairs, but also cross-border gambling, foreign-related stability maintenance (weiwen), anti-fraud and anti-gambling, and cross-border law enforcement cooperation. In other words, both ends of this pipeline were held firmly in the hands of Sun Lijun alone.
Now let us look at this entire pipeline connected together. A fortune of the ruling elites started from Zhongnanhai, was first distributed domestically through Xiao Jianhua's proxy system to strip away real names, and then borrowed through Suncity's casino accounts in Macau to launder an explanation of the funds' source, eventually landing in Western countries like Melbourne to be bought into luxury homes, trusts, or equity. Meanwhile, a portion of the hard currency they needed from overseas came from the sky-high-priced sources in Myanmar—funds hedged over through underground money laundering networks. When Prince was arrested in Bangkok, Vicki Zhao's husband Huang Youlong left Southeast Asia overnight. Today, the people along this pipeline have gone their separate ways: Xiao Jianhua is in a mainland prison, Alvin Chau is in a Macau prison, Sun Lijun is serving a life sentence and Prince is about to be extradited back to the mainland, Vicki Zhao has been banned across the entire internet, and Huang Youlong remains in France. The pipeline has been dismantled, but what those who dismantled it truly took away was not just money, but the list and account books in the minds of these people. In late June 2016, around the same time the lawsuit involving Xia Yuxi and Huang Youlong was adjudicated in Hong Kong, mainland stock investors were experiencing another event: overseas brokerage accounts such as Tiger Brokers and Futu Securities were ordered to close, the threshold for mainlanders to open bank accounts in Hong Kong was continuously raised, and it became increasingly difficult for ordinary people to legally take money out of China's borders. On one side, the channels for ordinary people to legally leave the country were tightening; on the other side, the ruling elites used an entire set of illegal channels—gambling debts, proxy agents, invisible multi-jurisdictional setups, counter-trade, and overseas landing—to transport tens of billions of assets out of the country over the course of 14 years. Under the same system, two completely different sets of rules were applied to ordinary people and the ruling elites. 14 years ago, Xiao Jianhua, Alvin Chau, Sun Lijun, Chen Zhi, Vicki Zhao, and Huang Youlong were all in their respective positions. They may not have belonged to the same circle, but they fell under the same set of rules, accomplishing the same thing on the same pipeline: moving the assets of ruling elite families from the country managed by the CCP itself to places the CCP could not reach. The pipeline has been dismantled once, but this demand will not disappear; it will simply change its pipeline, change its name, and move on to the next batch of operators. This is how the system itself operates. That is all for today. Please click the little bell so you won't miss our programs. Friends who have not yet subscribed, please subscribe to our channel. Friends who are able to do so, please join as members to support the development of our small channel. Lighting the midnight oil to create content is not easy; please like, leave a comment, and share. I am Yao Jiang, who loves thinking and values logic. See you next time!