Mao Daqing

Mao Daqing graduated from the Department of Architecture at Southeast University in 1991 and received a doctorate in management from Tongji University in 1995. He served as senior vice president of China Vanke Co., Ltd. and general manager of Beijing Vanke, and later founded UrWork and Gongxiangji. He enjoys writing and frequently publishes articles in international and domestic academic journals; his research areas include the theory of evaluating the quality of urban living.

During his time at Vanke, Mao Daqing took part in the company’s exploration of a transformation around the positioning of “urban supporting-services provider”. On June 27, 2013, Vanke announced for the first time its transformation into an “urban supporting-services provider”. In March 2014, Mao Daqing told the media that this transformation had three aspects, “city”, “supporting facilities” and “services”: Vanke judged that China’s urbanisation was still far from its peak, its business over the next ten years would revolve entirely around urbanisation, providing different types of buildings for urban industrial development, and more than 50% of its future business would still be residential; supporting facilities were divided into small-scale facilities for communities and large-scale facilities for cities, with small-scale facilities including basic community amenities such as street markets, banks, supermarkets, laundries, pharmacies and the Fifth Canteen, as well as the Wanwu Cang service, which provides residents with centralised storage and secure delivery of infrequently used items, and large-scale facilities including museums, shopping centres and the like; on services, Vanke Property had accumulated 500,000 customers, and the company was trying to tap business opportunities through more value-added services, though the specific model was still being explored.

In the elderly care business, Vanke tried different senior-living community solutions in cities such as Hangzhou, Qingdao and Beijing. Among them, for the Hangzhou senior housing project “Suiyuan Jiashu”, a portion of the units was set aside as an elderly care cluster when the project went on sale, but according to Caixin, sales of the product fell short of expectations; Beijing Vanke applied to the relevant authorities for an elderly care operating licence, with the first pilot being the Beijing Changyang project, which was expected to begin recruiting elderly residents in August or September 2014. Mao Daqing said that “operations” were the top priority, that Vanke had no experience, and that it hoped to accumulate experience gradually. Facing the impact of the internet, Mao Daqing said that as for what today’s customers are doing and playing, “we should at least know what it is all about”. In 2014, Vanke president Yu Liang led a team to visit internet companies such as Tencent and Xiaomi, and invited internet entrepreneurs to give lectures at the company, hoping to find a path of transformation for Vanke that would suit at least ten years of development.

On June 28, 2014, Mao Daqing said at the “Tsinghua University Forum on China and the World Economy” that no matter how many homes were built in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it would never be enough, because the concentration of urban resources was very high and difficult to disperse in a short time through administrative orders and subjective will. He pointed out that China’s property market had become highly differentiated over the past two years: one type of city suffered from indigestion, with land oversold and demand unable to keep up; the other type, such as first-tier cities like Beijing, had extremely scarce land resources, but high home prices driven up by high land prices made homes hard to sell as well. He considered both kinds of overdraft abnormal and in need of time to adjust, and said that the various chaotic phenomena in real estate were the result of strong policy controls over the past ten-odd years masking a great deal of the real market situation. Among the cities suffering from indigestion, some second-tier provincial capitals were the most serious, because land had been sold too fast and too much and the inflow of population was insufficient; these cities had absorbed large amounts of real estate investment in recent years, and their economic structures were dominated by traditional industries such as coal, steel and building materials, so with overcapacity they were having a rather hard time, and the fundamental problem lay in adjusting their industrial structure. For large cities such as Beijing, he believed the problem was that urban management capacity and overall planning lagged far behind the demands of population inflow, land use efficiency was poor, and the population was overly concentrated within the Fifth Ring Road.

Around Vanke’s 30th-anniversary media meeting in October 2014, Vanke president Yu Liang likened the company’s three future businesses to the big tree, forest and lawn of an ecosystem, with residential property as the big tree and consumer-experience property and industrial property as the forest and lawn; Mao Daqing, for his part, said that today’s Vanke was a “big tree”, but “the tallest tree in the forest is the first to be felled by the wind”, and Vanke’s ultimate goal was to evolve into a “forest”.

After leaving Vanke, Mao Daqing founded UCommune in April 2015, which received joint investment from dozens of well-known domestic institutions, including investment funds such as Sequoia Capital China, ZhenFund and Sinovation Ventures, as well as financial and real estate companies such as Noah Wealth, Zhongrong Trust, Yintai Land and Beijing Capital Land. With the mission of “innovation drives development, services boost innovation”, UCommune operates co-working spaces on an internet model. According to Caixin, UCommune’s spaces were seen as a Chinese version of the WeWork co-working model, and as long as suitable partners were available, the cost of replicating and expanding it nationwide was not high. He is also the founder of Gongxiangji. On 13 December 2016, he received the “2016 Chinese Economic Figure of the Year” award, jointly selected by ifeng.com, Phoenix TV and National Business Daily.