On the evening of January 14, Chinese actor‑turned‑philanthropist Li Yapeng posted an unedited, 31‑minute video from the gate of the Yanran Angel Children’s Hospital. The hospital’s sign had been taken down after a landlord move to enforce unpaid rent; Li stood before cameras and, without theatricality or deflection, acknowledged the debt and outlined the hospital’s cash‑flow problems while pledging to keep caring for inpatients.
The video produced an immediate reversal in public sentiment. Viewers flooded Douyin with requests for donation channels and offers of support; Li’s account gained more than 1.3 million followers in a week and more than 7.6 million followers overall. Streaming sales tied to Li’s livestreams surged into the millions of yuan, a tea set brand he was promoting temporarily halted sales to catch up with demand, and as of January 20 some 340,000 people had donated more than RMB 23 million to the hospital’s official channels.
The episode reads like a case study in modern reputation management: a celebrity facing entrenched financial trouble instead of litigating or playing the victim chose radical transparency. He admitted legal liability, recounted the hospital’s institutional and cash‑management failings, and centred a single, simple promise — to complete surgeries already under way — rather than invoking a broader narrative of victimhood. That bluntness appears to have converted scepticism into trust capital almost overnight.
Li’s turn from star to philanthropist has been long and fractious. A leading actor in the 1990s and early 2000s, he withdrew from show business in 2014 after his daughter’s congenital cleft condition and devoted himself to building enterprises that would generate funds for charitable work. The Yanran Angel Foundation reports it has completed some 16,000 free cleft surgeries and the hospital more than 11,000 procedures, yet Li’s commercial ventures have repeatedly stumbled: costly hospitality projects, real‑estate bets and education ventures have left him publicly entangled with creditors and labelled an “old defaulter.”
That backstory helps explain why the public’s reaction was so ambivalent — and then why it flipped. Many Chinese netizens are weary of performative charity and suspicious when high‑profile benefactors run into financial trouble. Li’s candid approach bypassed those reflexes by acknowledging missteps, offering granular explanation and foregrounding patient welfare rather than personal grievance. The result was a civic outpouring that fused small individual donations with spectacular e‑commerce purchases, a combination that solved immediate shortfalls and produced a media narrative of “good deeds rewarded.”
Beneath the drama lie systemic questions about the governance and financing of philanthropic medical care in China. Why should a hospital providing free surgery to children be vulnerable to eviction for unpaid rent? How resilient are charity hospitals when their backers have mixed business fortunes? The episode spotlights a fragile model that leans on celebrity capital and episodic public sympathy rather than predictable funding streams and professionalised financial management.
Li’s moment is both a public‑relations triumph and a cautionary tale. A forthright confession bought time and resources, and ordinary donors asserted a moral economy in which small acts aggregate into meaningful support. Yet the longer term requires stronger fiscal safeguards, clearer charity governance and less reliance on the charisma of one individual. For now, the story has become less about one celebrity’s failures than about what citizens expect from charity, accountability and social solidarity in contemporary China.