Guys, who gets it? The melon about Zou Shiming and Ran Yingying really gets more and more intense the more you dig into it! Today I finally sorted out the whole story clearly.

How exactly did the $200 million go missing?
In 2017, Zou Shiming retired. The couple had saved almost $200 million. Ran Yingying is a Peking University Guanghua MBA graduate, and she wanted to help her husband chart a new path. As a result, in 2018, on the edge of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, they built a 18,000-square-meter “No. 1 Sports Center”—which was the largest combat sports venue in Shanghai at the time.
Annual rent was $50 million, with fixed monthly operating expenses of $2.4 million. One custom chandelier in the hall alone cost $3 million; treadmills were flown in from Germany. The moment each day started, they already owed $140,000. Annual card prices ranged from $38,000 to $88,000—more than five times the market average. But there were only 1,642 registered professional boxers in China, with just 490 active. After seven years, there was only one month that turned a profit.
The boxing gym never really stabilized, and they expanded into side businesses—registering 21 companies, branching into hot pot, esports, and milk tea. All those places went cold: hot pot stores where the per-person cost was $300+ and fried rice at $106.
By 2022, the project was shut down in stages. Over seven years, they lost more than $200 million in total. They sold all their properties in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guiyang, and even in the U.S. As of the end of March, three banks’ debts had been fully paid off, and the pressure was less than 20% of before, but they still owed money to six friends. The two split income for settlement—“You pay your friends, and I pay mine.”
What’s even more heartbreaking is that in a show, Ran Yingying said they had been living separately for three years. She had been “widow-style parenting” for a long time, and over the decade she wanted to get divorced multiple times—went to the Civil Affairs Bureau three times but couldn’t get divorced.
Zou Shiming, for his part, seemed pretty calm: “If it fails, then it fails. I don’t care. The money from the failed venture was also earned by me, drop by drop, sweat by sweat. I didn’t go scam people, I didn’t mess around, and I didn’t dodge responsibility.” The biggest reason, he said, was: “I was too focused on sentiment. I didn’t do market research at all. I spent a lot of money that I shouldn’t have.”
All you can say is—making money in hand isn’t easy, but keeping it is even harder.