A Man Demolished a Stranger's Vacant Ningbo Apartment to Keep Up a Rich-Boyfriend Act

Ms. Wo spent more than 10 million yuan in 2020 on an apartment she never intended to live in: 180-odd square metres, fully fitted, plus two parking bays in the Fengqi Chaoming compound in Ningbo, bought as a future dowry for her daughter. The flat was handed over finished in 2022 and stayed empty — until late September, when a system message told her someone had been approved as a tenant under her unit number. She queried it with her compound "butler," the dedicated property manager that high-end Chinese developments assign to each building; the answer wavered between "owner" and "tenant," and then turned out to be beside the point. Her apartment had been stripped to bare concrete.

The man who did it, surnamed Jiang, is a complete stranger. According to what she was told of the police-recorded statement, Jiang wanted his girlfriend to believe the apartment was his — "to make the act more convincing," as Ms. Wo put it — so he registered himself as its tenant through the compound's own rental system, got approved, and then demolished the interior of a home he had apparently taken for a stage set.

How a stranger got through the gates is the part of the story that has travelled furthest. Owners at Fengqi Chaoming cannot simply walk in: entry means the butler opening doors or issuing a temporary code, for a management fee running above 12,000 yuan a year. Yet the compound's service centre confirmed the system had approved Jiang as a "tenant" of Ms. Wo's flat, and its manager, surnamed Meng, told reporters the staffer who processed the application had joined the workforce only recently and "lacked life experience." Meng called the scheme premeditated, apologised — "we are truly sorry, and saddened" — and said the responsibilities the property company bears would not be evaded. A neighbour later forwarded Ms. Wo a screenshot suggesting Jiang had practised the route first: on June 11, he had also applied to become a tenant of a neighbouring flat.

Police in Ningbo have opened a criminal case and taken Jiang into custody under compulsory measures while the investigation continues; damages to the flat were being assessed as of the latest reports. Ms. Wo and the property company have reached an agreement. Her daughter, she told interviewers, is now frightened of the compound and calls its management chaotic.

The story reached No. 3 on Baidu's hot-search board and drew nearly 14,000 likes on the Weibo post by 1818 Golden Eye, the Zhejiang consumer-rights television franchise that broke it — and not only for its absurdity. The dowry apartment is one of the oldest institutions in Chinese family life: parents converting decades of savings into a marital home for a daughter, and a ten-million-yuan flat states how seriously these parents took the duty. The empty, sealed investment property is its modern companion — homes delivered, fitted and left dark for years, a fixture of every Chinese skyline. What made the case chilling was that every safeguard of compound living, the guarded gate, the fee-paying butler, the rental-approval platform, functioned exactly as designed, and the design admitted a stranger with a sledgehammer.

The neighbour's screenshot suggests the tenant-application route was a repeatable trick rather than a one-off. What charge it becomes in court, and who pays for the reconstruction, is what the investigation will now settle.