A Dongguan Tycoon Left 600 Million Yuan to His Second Wife; His First Family Is Suing to Void the Will

An eighty-one-year-old tycoon named Wu Moli spent nearly forty years building a fortune in Dongguan, and on April 18, 2024 he walked into a notary office and signed all of it away to his second wife, Deng Mouqun. When he died last July, the will surfaced only weeks before his hundred-day memorial — which is how three children from his first marriage learned it existed.

They have now sued to void it at the Dongguan No.1 People's Court, resting their case on two claims. The dispute has arrived in a Chinese news environment already primed by inheritance rulings — a Shanghai court split an only daughter's 200-million-yuan estate between her and her husband of one year last month — but this one is bigger and stranger. The first attacks capacity. His eldest daughter told Red Star News that hospital tests flagged brain atrophy 'progressing' in May 2023; doctors formally diagnosed Alzheimer's disease by October 2024. The notarization happened in between.

footage of the session reviewed by her side of the signing session itself: they say Wu could not name his own parents or recall they had already passed decades earlier, misdated his remarriage as 1991 rather than 1989, answered 'none' when asked what property he held until the notary prompted him toward company shares.

The second claim goes to ownership: part of the fortune may never have been Wu's alone to give. His first wife died in 1988, leaving three children from a marriage whose common property was never divided among her heirs. Under Chinese inheritance law, some portion belonged to those descendants — the ones suing now. Their father signed a will with no itemized inventory, which blurs exactly where one estate ends and another began. They seek roughly 57 million yuan against holdings said to total around 600 million.

The will's language is deliberate. It reads, translated: "This will was made by me personally while I remained entirely sober and mentally clear; nobody coerced or tricked me into it — this expresses my real wishes." A notarized document carries weight precisely because China certifies competence at signing time, and the Dongguan notary office has already reviewed the complaint and upheld its own work. The court challenge attacks the notarization's premise rather than its paperwork.

Public opinion is split less cleanly than the parties' lawyers. One commentary post drew more than 90 likes arguing a man who cannot remember his own remarriage year hardly had free will to sign away six hundred million — but other readers flipped the frame entirely: if the first wife died nearly forty years ago and her children never pressed their mother's estate claim until this money appeared, whose delay created the dispute?

The case is still before the court, and the outcome may turn on something Chinese families rarely think about until it is too late: proving what an old mind actually understood when a pen moved.