The second link you sent actually explains the problem quite well.
It says, “These assets will be part of the company’s equity, and profits will still be distributed each year with 50% for team bonuses and 50% for shareholders.” This shows that in fact the “reform” didn’t change anything at all; it’s only re-describing the original internal so-called “welfare system” in a document (and from the article it’s clear that since this so-called asset distribution is not actual equity distribution, it has no legal effect).
Furthermore, from this sentence we can deduce that half of the annual profits are still distributed to shareholders. Fat East (Pangdonglai)’s actual shareholders are Yu Donglai himself and their families, and only the other half can be treated as employee bonuses, i.e., the “dividends.” The exact calculations have already appeared online.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/2015463089634506604/answer/2015654943953018929
The highest-amount store managers get about 1.6 million. 718 managers average a little over 160,000. 8,633 employees, all at the same level, each getting less than 16,000.
What is this? This “bonus” is calculated based on annual profit; in reality it’s just annual performance pay, or piece-rate pay. This has long ceased to be something novel. In today’s capitalist enterprises, a consistent preference for piece-rate wage systems or a mix of time-based and performance-based wages leads workers to squeeze every bit of labor to earn more pay for themselves. Fat East and the supposed “spiritual capitalists” claim that this is a huge benefit to employees, that it allows employees to become owners of the company and to receive profits, and that it is a socialist distribution according to work—a complete pile of deceptive junk! The distribution ratio alone makes this clear. Fat East’s profit distribution among ordinary employees is 50,000 times that of a typical employee, managers 100 times, and executives 10 times; do these people have any labor at all? Moreover, this is only the declared profit; in reality, capitalists have countless ways to wrap their profits as expenditures on other projects, not counted as profit. For example, expenditures intended for surplus value or for expansion and reproduction can be recorded as corporate expenses, and daily expenses of these capitalists and their running dogs can be reimbursed by the company. None of this would be counted as profit. And in terms of scale, this bonus relative to workers’ labor is not only negligible, but its amount also changes with the company’s gains and losses. The calculation result is based on Fat East’s 2025 annual profit of 1.5 billion, though that year was already fairly good. In 2024, annual profit was around 800 million, so the workers’ dividends would be only eight or nine thousand, not sixteen thousand. But in order to realize billions of surplus value, how much more labor must workers bear? These several thousand or ten thousand in wages cannot compensate for the extra wear and tear on the labor force. This system creates an illusion, making people think that this money isn’t part of their own wage but is tied to company profits. It also forces workers to consider the capitalists’ profits to obtain a larger “dividend.” This old trick has long been played by someone; this kind of stock ownership and division system was packaged long ago by Ren Zhengfei and others as an “employee-owned enterprise.” Yu Donglai’s one sentence, however, is true: as a monopoly enterprise in Xiangyang, it has indeed been favored by the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie from the Middle Kingdom, and now being widely publicized again, promoted by those same people as another exemplary bourgeois lie, trying to persuade people that capitalism isn’t bad—only that some capitalists are problematic, and if everyone were like Yu Donglai, it would be fine. Yu Donglai is like Ren Zhengfei in that he is used to packaging himself with a set of revisionist red branding. This is what makes these people most nauseating. So of course one should mercilessly expose their actions. Of course, workers are not easily fooled, because workers themselves are the exploited party; they have known these tricks for a long time. The truly gullible are the petty bourgeoisie who estranged from the masses.
