The Service Is Due in 2031. The Office Emptied in 2026.

A receipt dated 2031

Some background. In China, university admission runs on the gaokao, the national entrance exam. After scores are released, students submit a ranked list of university-and-major choices, and placement is then decided mechanically by the score, each university’s quota, and each province’s cutoff rules. A paid advisory industry has grown up around filing that list. This piece is about two companies in that industry, and about what the industry sells. Their statements and their employees’ and customers’ statements are attributed throughout. As of publication no authority has made any criminal determination about the events described, and parents who filed police reports say they were told the matter is a contract dispute for the civil courts. The people and companies named here have denied the allegations, and their statements are set out below.

A parent surnamed Cui, in Shanxi province, paid RMB 8,980 for a gaokao application-filing service.

The year of service on the order is 2031. The child, he says, is in eighth grade.

A parent surnamed Lyu, in Xi’an, Shaanxi, paid RMB 10,980 for 2028.

Several employees have told Chinese media what happened next: on August 16, 2026, most staff at Wuhan Xuecheng Siyuan Technology Co., Ltd. were locked out of their work accounts, and on August 18 the office closed. According to a September 10 follow-up report, the affiliated Beijing Qihang Xinweilai Technology Co., Ltd. ran large-scale layoffs in late August and had moved out of its Beijing office by September 8.

Between the two sites, more than 220 people were let go — over 120 in Wuhan, over 100 in Beijing. Employees say unpaid July wages for teaching staff alone exceeded RMB 3 million, and that part-time teachers were not paid either.

The parents’ numbers come from a register the aggrieved parents themselves compiled: by mid-September, more than 700 names across many provinces, and prepayments totalling close to RMB 20 million. That is the parents’ own tally. It has not been audited, and it is not the same as the two companies’ full customer base.

Two entries on that register are RMB 350,000 each, for packages named after China’s two most selective universities. A further group paid between RMB 100,000 and RMB 300,000.

Take the register at its upper bound and the average household paid just under RMB 30,000. China’s per-capita disposable income in 2025 was RMB 43,377. So the average is roughly two-thirds of what one person earns in a year — and each of those RMB 350,000 entries is about eight years of it.

The credentials check out

Both companies lead back to the same name: Li Ze.

Corporate registry records show he holds 28.4% of Beijing Qihang Xinweilai. What his relationship is to the Wuhan company is disputed — he and that company’s employees say opposite things, and I come back to it below.

His academic record is verifiable. Born 1977; bachelor’s in urban planning from Tianjin University in 2002; PhD in urban planning from the National University of Singapore in 2007.

The faculty page of Tianjin University’s School of Architecture lists him as an associate professor in the urban and rural planning department. That page was updated on August 23, and the work-history field now reads: July 2024 to present, left post to start a business. Reporters who phoned the school on September 7 were told he is on “entrepreneurial leave.” The university has not otherwise commented on his status.

One thing should be said plainly here. Entrepreneurial leave is a status Chinese universities formally permit, and the person keeps both the personnel relationship and the academic title. So when his livestreams bill him as a “985 overseas-returned professor” — 985 being the shorthand for China’s most selective universities — the billing is accurate all the way through. The doctorate is real. So is the professorship.

Only one thing doesn’t line up.

Urban planning studies how a city grows, not how a teenager files an application. Admissions testing, educational measurement and placement rules have no overlap with that doctorate.

A genuine doctorate, pointing at something it has nothing to do with.

He says he has more than 4 million followers across platforms. The company’s marketing says it has served close to 100,000 students.

In an August 17 livestream he said the company’s application-advisory business lost more than RMB 30 million in 2025 and that it was “all investors’ money,” and that he did not know who was putting these things online. He said Wuhan Xuecheng Siyuan is not his company, that he takes not one cent from it, and that Beijing Qihang Xinweilai is operating normally.

One more piece of public information runs in his favour: on August 13, 2026, three days before the Wuhan office emptied, Beijing Qihang Xinweilai announced it had closed a RMB 60 million angel round. The investor was not disclosed.

In the same stream he called the “did a runner” talk a smear: “It’s all competitors, plus a few employees spreading rumours… saying I made off with hundreds of millions — spreading that kind of rumour can get you jailed, remember that.”

He has also said that he is only a transmitter of knowledge, that the unpaid wages have nothing to do with him, that this was a routine layoff, that August is the slow season, and that he has not gone anywhere.

The company has spoken too. On August 17 Beijing Qihang Xinweilai issued a statement describing those involved as “individual personnel” who had “already left the company,” and said it had opened a dedicated service channel to handle refund requests. A notice board at the Beijing office read: “Recently, business adjustments at the company have drawn attention and questions from some parents. All company operations are running normally, course delivery and customer service are continuing, please rest assured.”

Refunds are in fact happening. One parent paid RMB 380,000 last summer for the top tier of a postgraduate-placement package, later moved down to the second tier, and was told about RMB 240,000 of the difference would come back. She has received RMB 140,000-odd. The remaining RMB 100,000-odd has not arrived.

On September 4 a further notice went up on the mini-program customers buy courses through, headed “Notice on course substitution arrangements for the autumn 2026 term.” The wording is the company’s own: because of phased operating pressure, the autumn 2026 Kunpeng courses and top-scholar classes could not be delivered on schedule, and refunds could not be processed in the short term.

The corporate registry does show that the Wuhan company’s legal representative is not him, and on paper the two are unconnected. Employees there reject that separation: they describe the two as tightly bound, say he came to their office every year, and say a banner with his name hung on the wall.

Employees are pursuing the ordinary remedies too: some of the Wuhan staff have filed for labour arbitration.

No authority has made any criminal determination about any of this. What is on the public record is layoffs, unpaid wages, a parents’ register, partial refunds, a notice the company posted itself, and the contradictory accounts above.

One more thing worth separating out. Whether the credentials are real and whether the business holds up are two different questions. What parents were buying was not his degree. It was the feeling a degree produces — that he must know something you don’t.

The thing being sold does not exist yet

Sell an application-filing service for 2031 and there is nothing there to sell.

That year’s scores don’t exist. The quotas don’t exist. No province has published a cutoff. What the rules will even look like in five years, nobody today knows.

So what is the service?

Filing an application takes three inputs: the child’s score, that year’s admission quotas, and the placement rules. All three are public.

The Ministry of Education’s own Yangguang Zhiyuan information service provides application guidance free, as do the exam authorities of all 31 provincial-level regions.

On June 24 the ministry issued a warning with one very direct line in it: no authority has ever issued a professional qualification certificate for a “gaokao application planner.” The same notice records that services of this kind charge anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of yuan.

So where do the planner certificates come from? Reporters tested the market in June 2025: RMB 300 to RMB 1,300, issued in as little as three to five days, in hand in about a week, or up to a month at the slower end. No classes. One theory paper, taken online, open book, with a question bank supplied beforehand, and a pass guaranteed.

One research association’s certificate cost RMB 300, another’s RMB 400. A body whose name contains that of an education-ministry affiliate offered two tiers, RMB 700 and RMB 1,300 — the sales pitch for the dearer one being that it carried the most credibility and came with a guaranteed pass.

A credential you can get for RMB 300, attached to a service costing the better part of RMB 10,000.

To be clear about what that is and isn’t: no published report indicates that anyone working at the two companies above used a certificate of this kind. The RMB 300 and the RMB 10,000 are not from the same business. This is the price range of one industry, top to bottom.

And there is the inverted causation. The story the industry tells is that the child got into a good university because the planning was good. The actual order of events is that the score landed in a range first, and the planner then located it in public data. What gets predicted correctly is the score, not the skill.

Parents are buying certainty. Certainty was never the seller’s to sell.

96 choices, all missed

There is a colder way to see this. Read the contracts.

In June the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court published a final judgment. A parent surnamed Guo had paid RMB 3,980 under an agreement titled “2024 Gaokao Application Consulting Service Agreement.” The judgment records that before signing she asked about refunds, and that the salesperson’s exact words were: “No conflict — if there’s a rejection or a miss, a refund is automatic, and anyway it won’t happen.”

Her child listed 96 parallel choices. Every one of them missed in the regular undergraduate round.

The company refused to refund. Its reasons were in the contract:

“Once the final application form is received and entered into the filing system, the service is deemed concluded and the full consulting fee is retained.”

“If the candidate does not file according to the one-to-one plan provided by Party A, no refund may be claimed.”

The court found these to be standard-form terms that stripped the consumer of her principal rights and relieved the company of its principal obligations, and therefore void under Article 497 of the Civil Code; it also held that a specific promise made by a salesperson to close a deal binds the company. It ordered RMB 3,681 refunded — the RMB 3,980 less a RMB 299 planning card.

A second case, at the Changping District People’s Court. A parent surnamed Wang paid RMB 6,999 for three plans: one before the exam, one after, one after scores came out. The first arrived on May 28, 2024. The second, on June 10, was identical to the first. A new version on June 24 did not satisfy him and he chose his son’s universities himself. The court held that delivering a plan identical to the previous one amounted to not delivering the post-exam plan at all, and was a breach. RMB 4,000 refunded, upheld on appeal.

Neither case was brought against the two companies described above, and neither judgment has anything to do with them.

They are worth putting side by side because of what they show about the contract structure of this business: results are promised during the sale and disclaimed in the agreement. The gap between the two is the margin.

When you want your money back, what you are facing is a standard-form contract you signed. And in the worse case, the defendant’s office is already empty.

The child is in eighth grade

The ministry’s June notice put the going rate for services of this kind at “anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of yuan.” Meanwhile there are fewer candidates: 12.9 million registered for the 2026 gaokao against 13.35 million in 2025, a drop of 450,000 and the second annual decline in a row.

The parent in Shanxi later described the rhythm of those livestreams this way: “He appeared as a university professor for more than two years, announced a price rise nearly every day in the livestream, manufactured anxiety and pushed people to buy. I was taken in.”

The plain fact about prepayment is this. The moment the money leaves, it stops being your asset and becomes theirs, and what you hold is a promise.

The later the promise falls due, the longer the window in which something can go wrong. Between RMB 8,980 and the year 2031 there are five years.

And here is the part worth keeping. That company closed a RMB 60 million funding round on August 13. Three days later the Wuhan office emptied. On September 4 it told its own customers, in writing, that it could not deliver and could not refund in the short term. Whether there is money in the company’s account and whether you can get yours back are two separate questions — because the money you handed over never sat in escrow from the moment it left you.

So this is not really a question of whether to pay someone to help file an application. You can. You just want to know that you are paying today’s money for something years out, with no escrow, no supervised account, and nothing but a contract the other side drafted.

The steadiest thing to do is also the dullest. Look at the free official system first, then decide whether it is worth paying for someone to look on your behalf. If you do pay, buy only the current year, delivered now. Put the scope and the refund terms in the contract. Keep the chat logs and the payment records.

That order in the Cui household is still there. RMB 8,980, year of service 2031.

The child is in eighth grade. The exam is five years away.