Reborn in 2008: I Buy Up Real Estate at a State-Owned Enterprise

On September 26, 2008, Lehman Brothers had collapsed a week earlier. In the minutes of a meeting at the Urban Construction Investment Department, Chen Yanqiu wrote down a prediction no one believed. The whole company laughed at him for twenty-six days. Twenty-six days later, the central bank issued a statement that matched his words exactly.

No one knew he had been reborn. In his previous life, he had worked his way up to investment director, only to be laid off in 2026. He carried his own cardboard box out.

In this life, he was still a junior officer. Feasibility studies, Party committee meetings, board meetings: he had no problem working his way through the state-owned enterprise's layers of approval. In his previous life, he had seen what happened to people who chased quick money: they mortgaged their land, left buildings half-finished, and spent the year-end surrounded by creditors in the hallways.

He would take it slow. There was money to be made slowly, too.

This book won't teach you how to trade stocks. It's about how to acquire land, obtain permits, raise money, and balance the books. From 2008 to 2018, it follows the golden decade of real estate: how people lived and how the numbers added up.