Zhang Zhengping

Zhang Xinghai mortgaged 70% of his personal stockholdings to fund an EV pivot that everyone — his board, his industry, his competitors — told him would fail. His neighbor Lifan Auto went bankrupt trying the same thing. His son, thirty-one years old, inherited the chairman’s seat at the company’s lowest point.

Seres wants to be a low-key, pragmatic car company — not an internet celebrity, and not a PPT car-maker.

Two Generations, One Impossible Bet #

The father-son transfer at Seres in October 2020 was not a planned succession. It was a crisis handoff — a patriarch exhausting his options and entrusting his life’s work to a son who had spent the previous four years eleven thousand kilometers away in Silicon Valley, running an EV venture that had just spectacularly failed. Zhang Xinghai (张兴海) was fifty-seven, the son of rural Chongqing (重庆), and had spent thirty-four years building a manufacturing empire from a ¥8,000 spring factory. Zhang Zhengping (张正萍) was thirty-one, educated in the United States, and had presided over the burning of more than $500 million of his father’s capital. The company they shared had accumulated ¥9.84 billion in losses over four years. One man had the experience. The other had the mandate. Neither could succeed alone.

From Springs to the EV Question #

Xinghai’s story begins in a Chongqing village in 1986, when he pooled ¥8,000 — roughly two years’ factory wages — to open Baxian Fenghuang Spring Factory (巴县凤凰弹簧厂). He was twenty-three. The factory made clutch springs for washing machines, breaking what had been a foreign monopoly on domestic appliance components. By the 1990s, he had pivoted to motorcycle shock absorbers, building China’s largest producer in the category with 1.5 million units of annual capacity. In 2003, he negotiated a joint venture with state-owned Dongfeng Motor to produce microvans — a deal remarkable as the first private-SOE automobile partnership in Chinese history.

Each reinvention followed the same pattern: master a component, scale it, then move up the value chain. Springs led to shock absorbers. Shock absorbers led to vehicles. Vehicles led to the question that consumed Xinghai’s final entrepreneurial decade: could a minivan maker become an electric car company?

The answer, he later explained, was driven by a specific humiliation. “The same car — ours sells for ¥100,000,” he told Fenghuang Auto. “Swap the badge, it could sell for ¥200,000.” After twenty years as a permanent third-place manufacturer behind Wuling and Chang’an, Xinghai saw the EV transition as the only escape from what he called being “technology-poor” (技术穷) — a commodity manufacturer with no pricing power and no brand premium.

The Darkest Year #

The EV pivot consumed everything. Xinghai sent his son to California in 2016 to lead SF Motors, investing more than $500 million in Silicon Valley R&D, a Tesla co-founder’s battery startup, and a former Hummer factory in Indiana. By 2019, the American venture was dead. The SF5, their first Chinese-market EV, sold 732 units in all of 2020. Monthly sales in early 2021 hit single digits — 13 units in February. Across Chongqing, Lifan Auto (力帆) — facing identical pressures — was filing for bankruptcy.

Xinghai’s response was not to double down on his own leadership but to step aside. In October 2020, he resigned as chairman and installed Zhengping at the helm. He had mortgaged 70% of his personal stockholdings. The neighbors were going bankrupt. And he chose that moment to hand his life’s work to his thirty-one-year-old son.

Xinghai had mortgaged 70% of his shares. His son was thirty-one. The decision to let go — of control, of ego, of the conviction that the man who built the company must be the man who saves it — was the most counterintuitive act of a career built on self-reliance.

Huawei’s Richard Yu (余承东) — who reportedly called Xinghai “the sweeping monk” (扫地僧), a martial arts term for the hidden master everyone underestimates — offered a lifeline in early 2021. The partnership required Seres to surrender its brand identity entirely: vehicles would carry the new AITO (问界) name, sell through Huawei stores, and run Huawei software. The man who had built three businesses from zero had to accept that the fourth could only survive by becoming invisible.

The Son’s Execution #

Zhengping’s operating philosophy offered a quiet counterpoint to the startup bombast that defined China’s EV industry. “Seres wants to be a low-key, pragmatic car company,” he told Liaowang Weekly in 2022, “not an internet celebrity, and not a PPT car-maker.” In an industry where founders livestreamed product launches to millions and publicly feuded with competitors, he preferred to let products speak.

The AITO brand launched December 2021. The M7 refresh in September 2023 generated 130,000 orders in four months — more than the SF5 had sold in its entire existence. By 2024, AITO delivered 427,000 vehicles and Seres recorded ¥145.2 billion in revenue with its first profit in five years at ¥5.95 billion. When consumers removed Seres badges from their AITO vehicles and replaced them with Huawei logos, Zhengping offered no complaint: “The market decides if a product is good. No one buys it for the badge alone.”

The Dynasty Continues #

Xinghai called himself “the kind of person who likes doing things from 0 to 1.” He built three businesses from nothing — springs, shock absorbers, automobiles — before staking everything on a fourth. His greatest entrepreneurial act was not creating something new but letting go: of his company’s leadership, his brand’s identity, and his conviction that self-reliance was the only path for a Chinese manufacturer.

Three Zhang family members now occupy senior positions at Seres: Zhengping as Chairman and President, cousin Zhang Zhengyuan (张正元) as Chief Marketing Officer, and cousin Zhang Zhengcheng (张正成) on the Supervisory Board. The family retains 30.98% control through Chongqing Xiaokang Holdings, with Xinghai remaining the designated “actual controller” (实际控制人) in regulatory filings. The spring factory patriarch built a company. His children inherited an institution — one that survived only because the father knew when to step aside and the son knew when to surrender the family name.

Last updated: March 15, 2026