Wan Jianjun, once a celebrated fund manager at China’s HuaAn Fund, now finds himself at the centre of a growing trust crisis after a string of poor returns and a steep fall in assets under management. By February 2026 five of the seven funds he runs were in the red, some suffering maximum drawdowns approaching 50%, and his total AUM has contracted from a peak of ¥17.2 billion to about ¥6.8 billion — a decline of roughly 60%.
His trajectory is striking because it was not always downward. Wan built his profile on the back of strong equity calls between 2019 and 2021, when concentrated bets on liquor, pharmaceuticals and new energy delivered annual returns as high as 75% and 92% in individual years. The flagship fund he launched in 2018 posted a cumulative gain of 157.9% over more than seven years, an annualised return of 12.7%, performance that helped elevate him into the firm’s “core” stable of managers.
The performance picture has deteriorated markedly since 2022. Wan’s flagship trailed the CSI 300 by 12 percentage points in 2024 and by roughly 3 points in 2025. That year the fund’s net asset value swung wildly, losing money in three quarters and only producing a strong Q3 after a concentrated AI bet, yet still lagging peers. Heavy redemptions followed: a 2021-launched vehicle that initially collected 7.37 billion units had shrunk to 3.38 billion units by end-2025, and registered holders fell from nearly 70,000 to about 40,800.
Three structural drivers explain the slump. First, HuaAn aggressively marketed and launched multiple Wan-managed funds at market highs in 2021, and the firm later asked him to take over two problematic mandates in 2022 — one following a sudden manager departure and another tainted by a front-running scandal. The result was a rapid, disorderly expansion of the scale he had to manage: assets under his control jumped from ¥1.21 billion in Q3 2022 to over ¥10.9 billion by year-end, and then to ¥17.2 billion by mid-2022, amplifying the difficulty of both concentration bets and nimble trading.
Second, Wan’s operational record since 2022 reads as a catalogue of late-cycle positioning and reactive rotation. He materially increased exposure to photovoltaic and lithium names in 2022 and failed to exit before sector corrections; he chased AI and compute-related stocks in 2023 at elevated prices; he rotated into high-dividend cyclicals in early 2024 only to re-chase momentum names in Q4; and in 2025 he repeatedly shifted between large-cap tech, banks, AI concepts and commodities. Frequent sector hopping raised turnover and trading costs, and turned a previously coherent ‘four-good’ selection framework — good industry, stage, company and price — into episodic headline-driven following.
Third, the combination of high-profile issuance at peaks, forced takeovers, and an apparent drift from a consistent process has dented investor confidence and spilled over onto HuaAn’s brand. For an asset manager, fee income is a function of scale; for Wan, performance erosion has proved self-reinforcing: lagging returns triggered redemptions, which made concentrated recovery bets harder to execute and further depressed relative returns.
The implications extend beyond one manager. China’s mutual fund market is still heavily retail-driven and reputation-sensitive; high-turnover, star-manager strategies can attract rapid money in bullish stretches but are vulnerable to equally rapid withdrawals. Wan’s case underscores the governance challenges fund houses face when they over-accelerate product launches around star talent and later expand that talent’s remit to absorb troubled products. Expect investors to press for clearer role definitions, firmer oversight of style drift, and perhaps renewed regulatory attention to fund marketing, manager rotation and the packaging of star managers’ track records.