With the plan finally clicking into place, Heifeng's confidence showed in the easy set of his jaw and the calm in his eyes. Huang Ming from marketing had just left his office to stir the pot, but to Heifeng, the waves still felt too small. If this was going to fix anything beyond a single grievance, it had to be big enough that regulators would have no choice but to step in and clean up the mess the car market had become.
He called his uncle, Ye Guohua, laid out the idea, and waited silently while the older man thought. When Ye finally said, "Do it," that was all the permission Heifeng needed. He hung up, opened Weibo, and drafted a long, blunt post—then tagged the official accounts his uncle had told him would make sure the right eyes saw it.
He began with the spark that started everything: hundreds of thousands of comments piling up beneath Audi's official Weibo, pleading for help for a customer who couldn't get justice. "I was surprised," he wrote. "I'm not a lawyer or an official—why should I be the one to uphold justice? Then I read what happened."
What happened, as he framed it, wasn't complicated. It was a basic quality dispute that any decent company would solve quickly. Instead, Benma Auto had spun the story, deployed PR to smother it, and treated the consumer—a female PhD student who knew her rights—as a nuisance to be worn down. If it were Audi, he said, the dealership would have replaced the car immediately and apologized. "Product defects aren't shameful if you face them," he wrote. "What's shameful is refusing to admit fault."
Worse than the defect was the conduct. Before the issue blew up, there had been evasion and finger-pointing; after it blew up, there was the sudden willingness to "replace the vehicle" under public pressure. "Where were you before?" he asked. And hovering over the whole affair was the question that turned a small spark into a fuse: who was shielding Benma so brazenly that ordinary people, seeking redress, seemed to have nowhere to go?
From there, the post widened its target. Heifeng called for a complete cleanup of the cleanupership ecosystem: arbitrary markups, so-called "financial service fees," forced add-ons—all the tricks that siphoned away a buyer's savings. He wrote that giving consumers a transparent buying environment is essential, not a maze where money vanishes into the dark. He promised, again, that Audi's stores would not play those games and invited the public to report any that did. If oversight slipped, he wanted to hear it.
He also aimed straight at the platforms. Some posts and videos about the PhD student's case were vanishing from timelines and feeds. "I don't care how much you were paid," he wrote. "As public platforms, don't help the guilty for your own gain."
He hit publish. Whether Weibo would dare delete it didn't worry him; even if they wanted to, they wouldn't. He knew he wasn't the whole matchstick—higher-ups were already inclined to rectify the market—but he could be the spark they used as a model case. That was why Ye Guohua had asked him to step forward: do the right thing and, while doing it, earn the goodwill that comes with taking a public stand.
Outside his office, the mood on the internet was a mix of hope and restraint. People had flooded Audi's official account with pleas, then second-guessed themselves. Would President Heifeng even touch this? Wouldn't this be imposing on him? If he did nothing, they told themselves, they couldn't blame him; it wasn't his problem. They knew the line between asking for help and pinning a moral obligation on someone, and they didn't want to cross it.
Even so, tens of thousands sat there refreshing, knowing that one sentence from him could change the entire tone of the fight. Eventually, the notification came from Audi's official Weibo: "I am Heifeng. I will take care of this." Ten words, nothing fancy, but it landed like a gavel.
The comments erupted. Relief first, then pride. "Knew President Heifeng wouldn't look away." "This is what a national entrepreneur should do." "If you need someone to rely on, rely on him." Another shout rose in the tide: his personal Weibo had also updated. Fans—more than ten million real ones accumulated over the years—rushed there and found the longer post. They read it to the end, then boiled over in unison.
With a heavyweight like Heifeng speaking plainly, regulators would hear it; the idea that any company could "cover the sky with one hand" suddenly felt naive. People pledged their future purchases to brands under his banner—not because they were perfect but because he took responsibility when things went wrong. "If you can't admit mistakes," one wrote, "why should consumers trust you?"
They turned right back on the platforms, too. If official accounts have been taking money to throttle visibility, get to it—delete those posts, expose the transactions, and do something. The crowd's tone sharpened: don't take the money and then freeze; don't launder censorship as moderation. And don't forget the other media platforms, they warned. If you're going to trade conscience for cash, at least be honest; that's what you're doing.
Watching the reaction roll in, Heifeng wasn't surprised. People didn't need a savior; they required proof that rules existed and would be applied fairly. Give them one straight voice with the power to cut through the noise, and they'd do the rest—organize, document, hold the line. Benma's PR might still be able to muddy a single case, but not if the case became the frame for a nationwide cleanup. Make this more than a "replace one car" story. Make it a fight about how cars are sold, who pays the hidden costs, and why the burden always seems to fall on the one person standing alone at a dealership desk.
Heifeng also boxed in the bad actors by staking his name on it. If a dealership tried its old tricks now—markups hidden as "service," add-ons jammed into contracts, threats that "everyone charges this fee"—people would film, post, and tag him. If a platform tried to bury the clips, that would also become part of the story. The more brilliant move—really the only move—was to start behaving like sunlight was already in the room.
And fine if the industry needed a "typical example," as Uncle Ye had hinted. Let Audi be the standard: replace faulty cars, own mistakes, make the process visible, and welcome scrutiny. It wasn't about being flawless but about being unafraid to be accountable. In a market where customers had learned to expect traps, that alone felt domineering—precisely the kind of domineering people were eager to rally behind.