Taizi Milk Founder Li Tuchun Dies, Reopening the Case That Took His Milk Empire
Li Tuchun, who turned an 88.88-million-yuan CCTV advertising gamble into one of China's biggest dairy brands and then lost everything to a criminal case he survived and was acquitted in, died on September 8 — and Weibo is putting the officials who dismantled his company back on trial.
Li Tuchun died on September 8, his son Li Shuai confirmed to Cover News, and within days the hashtags mourning him had merged into a colder one: accountability for the Taizi Milk case. For younger readers his name needed an introduction; for anyone who followed Chinese business in the 2000s, it needed none. Li was the founder of Taizi Milk, the Hunan fermented-milk empire whose jingle — "before and after every meal, Taizi Milk" (饭前饭后太子奶) — was among the most heard phrases on Chinese television.
The company was his own wager, made twice over. In 1996 Li left a state-job career and started a dairy factory in Zhuzhou, Hunan with 1 million yuan. The next year he bid 88.88 million yuan for CCTV's prime-time advertising crown — a sum larger than his company's assets, for a slot whose 200,000-yuan entry fee he had to borrow. Cover News's retrospective recounts what happened: 800 million yuan in orders arrived that year, sales doubled annually for six years running, and by its peak Taizi Milk held more than 70 percent of China's fermented-milk market.
The unraveling began with a bet of a different kind. To fund a listing push, Li took outside investment on revenue targets — a wager the 2008 financial crisis turned fatal, leaving the cash chain broken. What followed was less bankruptcy than capture. In 2010 the Zhuzhou public security bureau, in a case led by its then deputy head Ling Ya, arrested Li and, by the account of one widely reposted summary, nineteen relatives and employees on charges of illegally absorbing public deposits. During the investigation his uncle killed himself; a brother was left paralyzed; his chief engineer died after being forced to drink through interrogations. While Li was held, the reposted accounts say, the company's equity was pressed out of him at a token price and landed with a firm controlled by Ling Ya's husband.
In 2012 the charges collapsed and Li walked free — acquitted after fifteen months, his family broken and his brand in receivership, never to recover. The reckoning took longer: Ling Ya, the posts note, eventually turned herself in, and she stands accused of far more than the case — drug use in her own offices, intercepting seized narcotics, taking brokerage fees on public projects. The demands running under the accountability hashtag this week are for the full record: who ordered what, and who pays for a company still never returned.
That is why the death resonated. One post put the cultural logic plainly: "Why did 'The Knockout' become the biggest drama in China? Because that was reality" — invoking the hit anti-corruption drama whose villain squashes a private entrepreneur with the police on his side. Li's biography is the real-world text that drama echoed, and Weibo users this week were reading it that way: proof that a founder could outbid the state broadcaster, and still lose his company to the officials beneath it.
Li spent his last years on retries — new ventures, new claims, self-published testimony in 2023 about the official he accused of destroying him. The brand he built survives mostly as nostalgia and a cautionary tale in China's business schools. His son confirmed the death; the accountability hashtag confirms the case never closed in the public's mind.