Beijing Court Orders Sisters to Return ¥4 Million From a Flat Their Elder Sister Paid For in 2000
Beijing's courts have ruled that a one-page 2000 family agreement — eldest daughter pays the housing-reform price, parents live out their lives, flat passes to her — was a binding contract, not a will, and ordered two sisters to return the 4.02 million yuan their father left them after selling the home. A retrial is now pending, and China is arguing about what it means.
Twenty-six years ago, a Beijing woman paid 58,000 yuan — her father's life savings discount included — to buy her parents' public-housing flat under the city's housing-reform scheme. The family signed a one-page proof: the parents would live there for life, and after both died, the flat would pass to the eldest daughter, Liu Yun. In 2024 the father sold the flat for nearly 4 million yuan and left every fen of the proceeds to the two younger daughters. This summer, a Beijing court ordered them to hand it all back — 4.02 million yuan in total — and the case has set off a furious argument about what Chinese families actually owe each other.
The details read like a contract-law parable. In May 2000, Liu Rong, the tenant of a three-bedroom flat in Fengtai district, signed a "proof" (证明) agreeing that his eldest daughter Liu Yun would fund the purchase under the housing-reform policy, which let sitting tenants buy their flats cheaply using a worker's seniority discount. Both younger daughters signed as witnesses. Title was registered to the father in 2001; the parents stayed on. The family split in 2016: according to the father's later will, Liu Yun asked for 600,000 yuan, calling her original payment an investment, urged her parents to sell and move into a nursing home, and cut off contact when they refused — "we will die in this home, we are not going to any nursing home," they wrote. The wills her sisters produced include one notarized in 2022; the eldest daughter disputes the authenticity of the handwritten one.
When the father died in 2024, having sold the flat for 3.9 million yuan net, he left 2.4 million to one younger daughter and 1.5 million to the other. Liu Yun sued — not for inheritance, but on the contract. In December 2025 the Xicheng District People's Court ruled that the 2000 proof was a bilaterally binding contract, not a will: her payment bought her the flat's ownership, her parents' lifetime residence was a use right that never included the right to sell, and the word "inherit" in the proof merely fixed when the title would transfer. Selling the flat made the father a breaching party, and the proceeds belonged to the actual owner. The Beijing Second Intermediate People's Court upheld that verdict on June 29, 2026.
The younger sisters have now applied to the Beijing High People's Court for a retrial, with a technical argument that could undo everything: housing-reform flats could only be bought by eligible employees with Beijing household registration, and Liu Yun was not eligible — so the contract was void from the start. "If it weren't for the expectation that she would care for them," Liu Fang said this week, "we would never have agreed to let her pay so little and inherit the flat. The old lady wanted to see her right up to the end. She wouldn't come."
The Weibo argument tracks the two eras the case bridges. One camp holds that whoever pays owns — "whoever pays, owns." The other says the deal only ever made sense as a care-for-inheritance swap, and that a daughter who neither visited nor phoned for a decade should not profit from a rising market her parents rode to their deaths. Underneath both is the arithmetic of Chinese family wealth: flats bought for 58,000 yuan in 2000 are four-million-yuan estates today, and courts are being asked, case by case, to say whether those windfalls belong to the child who paid, the child who cared, or whoever holds the paperwork.