A decade-old “turnkey” highway connection in Ziyang, Sichuan, intended to be a three‑year build, has become a protracted legal and financial saga that threatens the collapse of the private developer and highlights growing anxieties about how local government platform companies settle infrastructure debts.
Sichuan Bobang Real Estate (博邦公司), the private investor and contractor on the project, says it has been unable to recover its capital or returns after the project’s completion. The company has received multiple overdue collection notices from banks, faces roughly 52 related lawsuits and describes a “chain” of unpaid obligations stretching through subcontractors and migrant workers. The local platform company, Ziyang Kaili Construction Investment (凯利公司), tells the court it is cooperating with asset enforcement and claims that seized assets can cover the judgment amount, but negotiations with Bobang remain unresolved on several disputed points.
The technical dispute at the heart of the row centers on competing geotechnical reports. Ten years ago, survey work by the Chengdu Metallurgical Survey Institute produced a geotechnical assessment that was later judged by a court to contain major inaccuracies; two of its engineers were convicted for issuing materially false documents in a second‑instance judgment. KaiLi subsequently commissioned a re‑survey from the China Railway Eryuan (Second) Institute (中铁二院), which concluded that one rock type (普坚石) had a zero proportion — a finding used by KaiLi to seek retrial at the Sichuan High Court. That retrial application was rejected, but the re‑survey became a central plank in the dispute.
After media scrutiny, China Railway Eryuan recharacterised its products as “technical consultation” rather than formal engineering survey reports, and said they were not intended for submission in approvals, construction or formal review. Chengdu surveyors have complained that the re‑survey depended on false test reports from a third‑party laboratory and filed counter‑allegations. The Ziyang court record acknowledges data misalignment in the re‑survey laboratory results but concluded the flaws did not rise to the level of materially altering the final conclusion.
Legal practitioners and industry observers say the reclassification raises serious legal and professional questions. Lawyers who examined the case say re‑labelling a re‑survey as “consultation” after the fact could be an attempt to sidestep statutory auditing and review requirements; China Railway Eryuan has not publicly produced the original raw data or notarised records of the re‑survey process. Critics warn that if re‑surveys can be commissioned and used to overturn decade‑old, vetted reports, the surveying profession will confront profound uncertainty and the market will be open to manipulation by parties with strong financial incentives.
Public reaction has been fierce. Netizens and commentators describe the episode as an example of “creative” debt‑making—where local platform companies, under fiscal strain, appear to seek alternative legal or criminal routes to shrink liabilities. Observers link the case to a wider pattern of disputes over local platform debt resolution that have produced high‑profile controversies across China, including accusations of criminalisation of commercial disputes in other jurisdictions.
The episode also intersects with national policy priorities. Beijing has repeatedly ordered tougher action to clear overdue payments to small and medium enterprises, and officials at the recent central economic work meeting renewed calls to accelerate the cleanup of chronic late payments. Experts say platform companies should lead by example on settlements: improve budgetary discipline, create faster payment channels and proactively negotiate early clearing of “long‑tail” outstanding accounts to restore trust and unfreeze supply‑chain cashflows.
Beyond the immediate stakes for Bobang and KaiLi, the case matters because it shows how technical expertise, judicial adjudication and local fiscal pressures can combine to produce opaque outcomes that harm private firms and undermine the credibility of professional certifiers. If allowed to stand as precedent, ad‑hoc re‑surveying and post‑hoc reclassification risk eroding the professional standards that underpin infrastructure financing and public procurement.
This outlet will continue to track the litigation, regulatory responses and any clarifications from surveying institutes and courts. For companies operating in China’s local infrastructure space, the Ziyang case underlines the importance of securing not only technical documentation and notarisation, but also clear, enforceable settlement mechanisms for post‑completion payments and dispute resolution.