Justin Sun Sues Actress Jing Tian Over a 30-Million-Yuan 'Bride Price'
The TRON founder has taken actress Jing Tian to court over the return of what his lawyer calls a bride price, reigniting a public argument about money, romance and gender in China.
Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun is suing actress Jing Tian, in a dispute that has pulled one of China's best-known actresses and one of its most flamboyant billionaires into an unusually public fight over money and romance.
On August 27, Sun's lawyer Zhang Qizhun said he had filed a civil suit against the actress and her parents over more than 30 million yuan, which the lawyer described as a bride price (彩礼). The case had been formally accepted, Zhang wrote, and Jing Tian's side had asked the court to dispose of it on jurisdiction grounds.
Sun, the founder of the blockchain network TRON, kept his own account of the relationship for social media. He posted a long essay on X titled "My Girlfriend Jing Tian," a confessional that began with a photo saved in 2007 and ended with the words "purely fictional."
Jing Tian's studio responded the same evening. "Reputation is an artist's life, and an artist's soft spot," it said. "But we have the courage to say no to those who would blackmail us in the name of reputation." Everything, it added, would be left to the court.
The online reaction was lopsided. The dominant reading, carried by a post tens of thousands of times endorsed, was not that the actress owed money back, but that a very rich man had chosen to relitigate a failed romance in public. He played the generous boyfriend, handed over 30 million yuan, pressed toward egg retrieval and surrogacy talk, balked when a far larger figure was named — and then sued to recover the earlier sums. "He bought a girl a bubble tea and, three days later, was still asking whether it had tasted sweet," the post concluded. "Even at net worths in the hundreds of billions, some things don't change."
That the plaintiff is a crypto mogul sharpened the mockery. Forbes' live ranking puts Sun's net worth at around $8.5 billion, a number commenters noted exists mostly on paper, tied to the price of his tokens. Set against the 30 million yuan he now wants back, the figure fed a familiar refrain about wealth and stinginess, with users comparing Sun unfavorably to the romance-drama "dominant CEO" who hands out uncapped black cards without a thought.
Underneath the mockery sits a real legal and cultural question. Bride price — 彩礼 — remains common across much of China even as officials discourage it, and courts regularly weigh in when an engagement collapses over how much of it must be returned. By calling the 30 million yuan a 彩礼, Zhang placed the dispute in that contested frame, where the answer depends less on romance than on the ledger.
What started as a property claim has become a national argument over what, exactly, people owe one another when a relationship ends — and whether a fortune entitles its holder to litigate a love affair in public.