It has now been four years since the Henan village bank scandal broke, and after repeated attempts to seek redress have gone nowhere, several thousand depositors still cannot withdraw their savings.
According to a May 21 report by Phoenix Weekly, depositors holding so-called "Type I cards" at Henan's village banks recently reported that, ever since the scandal broke in 2022, they have been unable to withdraw their deposits, with their accounts effectively locked to allow deposits in but no withdrawals. Several thousand other customers are in the same situation. Four years after the scandal broke, the bank cards issued by Henan's village banks have become effectively worthless.
As a result, many depositors' lives have been thrown into crisis. Retired worker Wang Hui has still not been able to withdraw the 2 million yuan (RMB, same below) she received from selling her old home, forcing her to repeatedly postpone her son's wedding, and leaving the whole family trapped in ongoing anxiety and helplessness. Wang Xingguo, a textile merchant with years in the industry, had 30 million yuan in working capital for his factory forcibly frozen, leaving him unable to purchase raw materials, fulfill orders, or pay wages — his years-long business now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Zhou Mingju, a businesswoman based in Shanghai, has spent years fighting to recover her 10 million yuan in savings, and has even been imprisoned in the process. Some depositors have seen their families torn apart entirely.
Over the past four years, depositors across the country have filed one civil lawsuit after another, but have run into only two possible outcomes: in the first, no matter where the case is filed, it is ultimately transferred to the court in Yuzhou City, Henan Province, which either refuses to accept the case or simply stalls indefinitely. In the second outcome, the court dismisses the case outright on the grounds that it involves criminal matters. Although some depositors have filed complaints with the CCP's Supreme People's Court through their lawyers, they have yet to receive any response.
According to the report, the root of this scandal was not poor management, but organized, systemic financial crime. Henan Xincaifu Group, the company at the center of the scandal, had long secretly controlled the core management of multiple village banks, and through a series of illegal means — forging loan contracts, falsifying bank accounting data, and taking in public deposits off the books — continuously siphoned off and misappropriated enormous sums of depositors' money, hollowing out the assets of several village banks. This ultimately triggered a payment crisis in April 2022 — the incident that became widely known as the "Henan Village Bank Scandal."
Starting on April 18, 2022, four village banks in Henan Province — Yuzhou Xinminsheng Village Bank, Shangcai Huimin Village Bank, Zhecheng Huanghuai Village Bank, and Kaifeng New Oriental Village Bank — almost simultaneously and without warning shut down their online withdrawal and transfer services, leaving depositors unable to access their savings and triggering widespread panic. Depositors have since staged repeated protests and rights-defense actions. According to earlier reports, the scandal involved at least tens of billions of yuan and affected roughly 400,000 depositors.
Among these depositors are civil servants, bank employees, senior accountants, as well as teachers, doctors, lawyers — and even staff members from the public security and procuratorate systems.