Singapore Fund Company Guoshou Anbang Sees Leadership Change: A Reflection on Performance and Internal Controls
Image source: Visual China
Blue Whale News, June 29 (Reporter: Qi Hezhong) The insurance-affiliated fund company Guoshou Anbang has changed its general manager.
On June 23, the company announced that General Manager E Hua stepped down due to work arrangements, and Liu Zhongjiang took over. Liu had previously served as general manager of the direct investment division and head of the fixed-income investment department at the controlling shareholder China Life.
E Hua, who left the post, had served as general manager since January 2023 for a little over three years. Before that, he was head of equity investments at China Life.
On the company’s homepage, the slogan reads: “Stay true to our original intention for 12 years, and repay every trust.” But the company’s actual performance over the past three-plus years has been underwhelming. By the end of Q1 this year, its non-money-market fund scale was RMB 181.8 billion, ranking 30th in the industry. Yet its fund mix is heavily skewed toward bond funds, with a very small equity allocation. Stock funds are about RMB 10 billion, and mixed-asset funds are about RMB 5.6 billion.
As the former head of China Life’s equity department, E Hua saw the company’s equity fund scale not rise but decline during his three-plus years as GM. Mixed-asset funds fell by as much as 50%.
During E Hua’s tenure, Guoshou Anbang’s equity funds underperformed, scale deteriorated, and internal control problems kept surfacing.
In August 2025, Tianjin regulators issued an administrative penalty against fund manager Li Dan for “rat trading.”
Earlier, in December 2023, Beijing regulators penalized Hu Wenbiao, then head of the special-account investment department, for illegal stock trading and market manipulation.
Despite these issues, E Hua returned to the controlling shareholder and was further promoted to leadership. Reports say internal meetings at Guoshou Anbang are bogged down in bureaucracy. In the company’s assessment system, making money for holders was not given the right priority, which diverges significantly from the regulator’s call for high-quality development.
Over the past three-plus years, the controlling shareholder has assigned many people to key roles, while the hard work still mainly came from market hires. That has sharply weakened the company’s market orientation and left its investment research and sales capabilities insufficient.
Before 2023, Guoshou Anbang was different. Its market orientation was much stronger, and the first GM, Zuo Jiqing, was more principled and willing to defend governance.
Guoshou Anbang was founded in October 2013 by Zuo Jiqing, then head of the fixed-income department at China Life Asset Management, and Shen Mengyu, then deputy head of risk management and compliance, among others.
After its founding, the company took 10 years to grow from scratch into a mid-sized fund house. By the end of 2022, its non-money-market fund scale was RMB 128.5 billion, ranking 31st. Stock funds were about RMB 7.6 billion and mixed funds about RMB 12.8 billion.
At that time, the company had a high bar for professionalism, and the management team was mainly market-recruited and highly competitive.
But after the company got bigger, some people at the controlling shareholder started eyeing important positions and wanted them assigned by nomination. Zuo Jiqing refused to go along and was under heavy pressure.
In January 2023, GM Zuo Jiqing, chief supervisor Shen Mengyu, and fixed-income CIO Dong Ruiqian all left for “personal reasons.” After Changning State-owned Assets took control of Chunchou Fund, in January 2026 Zuo Jiqing and Shen Mengyu became general manager and deputy general manager of Chunchou Fund.
Over the past three-plus years, the company’s “filter” has shattered, E Hua and others have lived in a butterfly dream, while the founders such as Zuo Jiqing and Shen Mengyu have gone through a phoenix-like rebirth.
In the story of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, Zhuangzi wakes up and realizes he is still Zhuangzi. The reason he became a great thinker is that after waking he knew clearly who he was, while the wings in the dream were borrowed from the butterfly.
In real life, some people cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. Some state-owned enterprise executives stay in a company for years yet still fail to become competent managers. They live too long in a butterfly dream and do not want to wake up.
We sincerely hope Guoshou Anbang will seriously learn the meaning of “development is the hard truth,” focus on operations, and let performance speak. It should avoid falling into formalism, becoming all talk and no action. The company needs to get back onto a market-oriented and internationalized track, abandon formalism, and stop backsliding in ways that mislead superiors and deceive subordinates. Its management must truly put their minds to work, preserve and increase the value of the state-owned capital invested by the shareholder, and help holders earn solid returns.
