A Beloved Singer's Charity Bought Ambulances From a Supplier No One Can Find
A 60-million-yuan ambulance purchase by Han Hong's charity is under official investigation because the supplier has just 100,000 yuan in registered capital, two employees and an office that was locked when reporters knocked.
The question driving the Han Hong Foundation story is not whether the beloved singer's charity meant well. It is whether a 60-million-yuan ambulance program, roughly eight million US dollars, was routed through a company that appears to exist mostly on paper.
The supplier at the center of the dispute is Shanghai Junyi Automotive Technology, a firm registered in Jinshan district with paid-in capital of just 100,000 yuan and two listed employees. A member of the public traveled to its registered address to file a complaint, alleging the company had no actual operations there and no license for ambulance retrofitting or sales. The market regulator's reply confirmed the complaint had become a case: Jinshan market regulators told The Paper on Saturday that the company has been "officially placed under investigation," a fact the complainant had already shared in a text message.
When The Paper's reporter tried to see the company for real, the visit produced the image now circulating on Weibo: a locked door in a Hongkou office tower where the building directory lists Junyi in room 1207, but the doorway has no sign, the room has a few plain desks visible through the glass, and a neighbor said the place is "basically empty on weekdays, just the occasional person on weekends." The building's security guard said he had no idea what room 1207 does. Cover News captured the foundation's response: the charity said it will not evade any problem and will fully cooperate.
The foundation's own explanation is the part worth reading closely. It says the vehicles it purchased are SAIC Maxus ambulances, and that it signed with Junyi only because SAIC Maxus designated the firm as its authorized dealer for handling the follow-up commercial paperwork, with SAIC Maxus personnel present throughout the negotiation. It also says the eventual purchase price was "far below market." In other words, the foundation is arguing the middleman was SAIC Maxus's choice, not a shell it invented. The math of that arrangement is what investigators will look at: whether the charity's contract price matched what an authorized dealer should have charged, or whether a nominally tiny company with a famous client somehow collected a margin on tens of millions of yuan in public goodwill.
What makes the episode land differently from an ordinary procurement scandal is that Han Hong is one of the few Chinese celebrities whose public reputation is built on charity. Her foundation is where fans go to donate during every disaster, and the image of the locked door works against that trust. The Zhihu thread that carried this story beyond Weibo framed the question as one about the foundation's duty: how should the public judge a charity that delegates a sixty-million-yuan deal to a firm with two employees? The regulator has opened a case but reached no conclusions. The foundation says it is cooperating. The only thing confirmed so far is that the supplier's office, when someone finally got there, had no one home.