A spectacle of stacked bundles of 100‑yuan notes, arranged into a multi‑metre “cash wall,” has become a ritual at the headquarters of Liaoning’s Fangda Group. Over the past decade the privately held conglomerate’s chairman, Fang Wei, has handed out nearly ¥4 billion in cash bonuses to employees — roughly 130,000 people — earning him the local sobriquet of the “red‑envelope boss.” The public scenes are as carefully staged as they are generous: queues of workers collecting envelopes form an image of paternal largesse and corporate showmanship.
Fang’s largesse sits alongside a steadily rising personal fortune. In the 2025 Hurun Rich List his net worth jumped to ¥52.5 billion from ¥40.5 billion the year before, a gain of ¥12 billion even as he funnels significant cash to staff. More revealing than the headline giveaways is the extensive welfare architecture Fang has built: a nine‑element “security network” that extends medical subsidies, catastrophic‑illness aid, scholarships, pensions and other family‑focused benefits to employees and their households.
The arrangement speaks to a familiar problem for many Chinese firms: an uneven public safety net and fierce competition for labour have encouraged employers to take on quasi‑state welfare roles. Fangda’s model — combining eye‑catching one‑off rewards with institutionalised benefits — aims to bind a large, dispersed workforce to the company while burnishing the chairman’s social and political capital in China’s rust‑belt northeast.
The phenomenon is not confined to heavy industry. Shanghai’s camera and imaging start‑up Insta360 (known in Chinese as YingShi) staged its own headline‑grabbing annual meeting, awarding five Bay Area flats, luxury cars including Porsche and Tesla models, gold bars and hundreds of consumer prizes. The winners were predominantly post‑90s employees, some with less than two years’ tenure, underscoring the role of extravagant year‑end gifts as a talent‑attraction strategy in high‑growth tech firms. Insta360’s founder, Liu Jingkang, used the event to trumpet a record revenue year and a sharp rise in R&D spending, framing generosity as part of a long‑term value strategy.
Taken together, these episodes highlight two complementary incentives driving corporate behaviour in China today: retain scarce talent by converting compensation into conspicuous rewards, and shore up worker loyalty with durable social protections that the state does not fully supply. For regional employers, especially in the northeast, such practices can also be read as a response to demographic decline, industrial restructuring and the political premium on social stability.
But these public displays carry risks. Lavish giveaways invite questions about inequality, corporate governance and tax treatment, and they can attract unwanted attention from regulators sensitive to ostentation in the age of "common prosperity." Firms must balance the morale and recruitment benefits of headline prizes with the danger that they will be characterised as flaunting private wealth or evading broader responsibilities, such as paying better base wages or contributing to communal social insurance schemes.
For international observers and investors, the takeaway is twofold. On one level, these stories are evidence of resilience in parts of China’s private sector: entrepreneurs are willing and able to reward employees even as macro growth cools. On another level, they underscore a structural shift in employer‑employee relations in China, where large private firms increasingly act as providers of bespoke social protection — a development that will shape labour costs, regional competitiveness and corporate reputations for years to come.