Unable to Pay the Mortgage, a Woman Asks Her Ex-Boyfriend to Reclaim the Flat He Bought Her
A viral video from Huizhou shows a woman asking her ex-boyfriend to take back the flat he down-paid for her: the home is worth 700,000-800,000 yuan against a 1.3 million yuan mortgage. The plea failed to win sympathy, but it captures what China's property downturn means for the households caught inside it.
A young woman in Huizhou, Guangdong province, has become the face of China's negative-equity generation — not through a policy story or a market statistic, but through a direct plea to the camera: "I can't keep up the mortgage payments. Is it wrong of me to ask my ex-boyfriend to take the flat back?"
The story, laid out in a viral video and recapped by the aggregator account 台湾那点事儿 — Taiwan Trivia, begins in 2021, when the couple were planning to marry. They bought an apartment for 1.57 million yuan, with the man paying the entire down payment; the deed was registered in the woman's name alone, and the two signed an agreement confirming the flat was hers. They broke up in 2023. The man moved abroad and never asked for the down payment back, and the woman took over the mortgage.
Then the market turned. Huizhou home prices have fallen sharply, and the flat is now worth roughly 700,000 to 800,000 yuan — against a remaining mortgage of about 1.3 million. The arithmetic is brutal: the woman earns a little over 3,000 yuan a month, her monthly payment is more than 6,000, and selling the home would not even clear the loan. So she posted a video asking her former boyfriend, then overseas, to come back and reclaim the property and its debt, and asked viewers to help push the clip beyond the Great Firewall so he would see it.
The video did spread, and the reaction was overwhelmingly unsympathetic. Commenters seized on the sequence of choices — she signed the purchase, she kept the flat, she enjoyed years of appreciation before the downturn — and argued that a gift freely given does not become a rescue package on request. "The money given willingly was affection, not a lifetime obligation," one critic wrote. "When it came to signing, deciding, and enjoying the property rights she was decisive; now that she can't carry the consequences, the first move is to blackmail an old flame. An adult's bottom line is living with the cost of your own choices — not treating old feelings as a bottomless purse."
The plea's legal prospects are close to nil — the flat is contractually hers, and no court can compel an ex-boyfriend to accept a gift back. But the case has drawn attention less as a romance dispute than as a snapshot of what a falling market does to ordinary households. When prices only rose, a 1.57 million yuan flat registered to one partner looked like generosity or luck; with values down by half, it is a trapdoor, and the same deed that once conferred an asset now confers the entire loss. As we reported this month, even China's strongest second-tier cities have seen prices halve from their peak — Huizhou, a dormitory city for Shenzhen commuters, has been among the hardest hit.
The debate also touches a nerve about gender and money in modern Chinese dating, where a man providing the home remains a widespread expectation and, increasingly, a litigation risk when relationships end. In this case the man's generosity was documented — yet the crowd's verdict has been that kindness, once given, cannot be repossessed any more easily than a flat worth half its mortgage.