When Xu Yang, former brand chief executive of Chinese sportswear giant Anta Sports, posted his farewell message on WeChat on August 18, he was already airborne — his Hong Kong-to-Los Angeles flight had been in the air for roughly an hour before the post appeared, with his phone pinned to Hong Kong International Airport.
The deliberate timing became the story. In China, where an executive's freedom to leave the country can carry profound legal and political weight, posting only after the plane had cleared Chinese airspace struck many observers as a carefully staged signal — one that captures, with unusual clarity, the growing wariness inside the country's private business community.
Anta's Brand Builder Slips Away Quietly
Xu spent roughly two decades inside the Anta system. His most celebrated chapter was leading Arc'teryx's Greater China expansion: in four years, he pushed the Canadian outdoor brand's China revenue from approximately 800 million yuan to nearly 3 billion yuan, lifting average annual store revenue from 2 million yuan to 100 million yuan. The feat made him one of the most closely watched retail executives in China.
In 2023, he moved back to head Anta's flagship brand, pledging compound annual revenue growth of 10% to 15% and, in a headline-grabbing moment, vowing to surpass Nike within three years. In 2025, the main Anta brand grew only 3.7% — well below the 10.6% logged the prior year. Premium store formats he championed, including "Super Anta" and "SV" concepts, reportedly ran at a loss. In July, Anta announced his resignation, citing "family reasons" and noting he would be redeployed. On August 18, Xu gave his own account: his family was relocating to Los Angeles for his children's education, and he was going with them.
The timing carried added weight. His departure came within days of a Chinese court sentencing Xu Jiayin — the fallen founder of property developer Evergrande — to life imprisonment. It also fell weeks before the Provisions of the State Council on Exit and Entry Administration are set to take effect on September 15, tightening Beijing's framework governing who may leave the country. On Chinese social media, many users read the in-flight post as flight, regardless of his stated reasons. The episode illustrates something executives themselves increasingly acknowledge: the cost of trust is rising, and how one exits has become a matter of risk management in its own right.
China's Robot IPO Soars and Stumbles Within Days
An almost simultaneous drama unfolded on the Shanghai STAR Market. Unitree Robotics — widely described as China's first publicly listed humanoid robot company — debuted on August 19 with an IPO price of 150.80 yuan per share. It opened at 1,100 yuan, a gain of more than 629%, briefly pushing its total market capitalization to 444.9 billion yuan. Founder Wang Xingxing, a member of China's post-1990s generation, was briefly declared one of the country's youngest billionaires.
The euphoria evaporated quickly. By August 24, the stock had fallen to 603.08 yuan, shedding more than 10% in a single session and leaving the company's market cap below 250 billion yuan — a loss of nearly 100 billion yuan from its first-day closing value, and roughly 200 billion yuan from its intraday peak. Investors who received IPO lottery allocations and sold on the opening day could have netted approximately 475,000 yuan; those who held were sitting on gains cut nearly in half.
The IPO had been priced at roughly 219 times earnings. Unitree's first-half 2026 revenue reached 1.152 billion yuan, up 48.54% year-on-year — solid growth, but a sharp deceleration from the 332% recorded across all of 2025. The company flagged rising research and sales costs, growing competition, and what it described as a cooling of sector enthusiasm. Wang has said publicly that insufficient generalization capability remains a global bottleneck for humanoid robotics. Observers on Chinese social media noted that Unitree's revenues remain heavily concentrated in research and academic settings, with large-scale industrial and commercial deployment still unproven.
Executives Fear Unpredictable Rules, Not Strict Ones
The two stories converge on a single theme. China's private sector is not short of opportunity — the market remains vast, state support for strategic industries is substantial, and entrepreneurs like Wang Xingxing can still become billionaires virtually overnight. What has changed is the confidence with which business leaders can plan around that opportunity.
For two decades, the governing belief among Chinese entrepreneurs was simple: in a market large enough, with sufficient capability and capital, sustained growth was achievable. That belief has not disappeared. But a new condition has been added — the rules must be stable enough to build around. Platforms were encouraged and then abruptly redefined. Property developers were told to expand and then ordered to deleverage. The issue is not strictness; it is predictability. （Related： Beijing Watch | China's Humanoid Robots Beat Bolt, Then Crash at Finish ｜ Latest ）
When a company's valuation can climb by hundreds of billions of yuan in a single morning and recede almost as quickly, it reflects more than retail sentiment — it signals that some Chinese technology companies are being priced not on present fundamentals, but on national industrial narratives and a future that may be years from materializing. For executives like Xu Yang, who spent two decades building value inside the system, the calculus of when and how to step away has become, in itself, a form of careful risk management.
