Influencer Li Leyou holds just 1% of adoptive family's business empire
Corporate records show Li Leyou, the adopted daughter behind a hit Chinese reality-show family brand, holds a 1% stake, exposing a hidden fight over money and control.
Li Leyou, the adopted daughter made famous by the reality show X-Change, holds just 1% of the supply-chain company at the centre of her family's influencer business, corporate records show. Her adoptive mother controls 15 affiliated firms.
The gap has turned a family feud on social media into a case study in how family-run influencer operations divide the money their on-screen children help generate. A leaked WeChat Moments post, read as a barb at Li, prompted the family to insist relations remain intact. Online attention has since moved from the mother-daughter story to who actually owns the business.
15 companies versus 2, and a 1% stake
Tianyancha, a corporate records database, shows Wu Li (known online as Jin Ma) linked to 15 companies, seven of them active. They span Qidiantong (Dalian) Technology, Dalian Jin Ma Fresh and Dalian Jin Ma Youpin Supply Chain Co Ltd, and she holds director or manager roles at several.
Li Leyou is linked to just two companies. Only one is active: Dalian Jin Ma Youpin Supply Chain Co Ltd, where Wu Li holds decisive control and Li's capital contribution is a mere 1%.
The same pattern holds offline. The Jin Ma noodle shops that have opened across Dalian, trading on her name to draw visitors, list Cui Jin, Wu Li and other blood relatives as operators and investors. Li appears nowhere in their equity or management records.
On one side is a "capital parent" controlling 15 companies and the supply chain and physical stores. On the other is the "traffic face" who drew the bulk of the audience's emotional investment but holds a symbolic 1%. The registry filings cut through the warm family narrative.
When an emotional IP becomes a monetisation machine
The underlying tension is the blurring of ownership as an "emotional upbringing IP" turned into a business.
X-Change paired Li, then a poor and unattached girl from a remote mountain area, with Wu Li and Cui Jin's well-off Dalian family, and the follow-up story ran for a decade. Viewers came to see Li as part of the family. When short-video e-commerce took off, the family packaged that public goodwill and redemption story into a highly commercial persona.
Family logic and company law were on a collision course from the start. Adoption is bound by legal requirements; business cooperation needs clear equity splits, employment contracts and revenue-sharing agreements. In a family workshop built on blood ties and gratitude, the weaker party is often told that raising money questions is ingratitude.
Li's image, life milestones and private life became the core draw for the account network, driving live-commerce sales, supply-chain volume and foot traffic at the restaurants. Yet core assets, supply, account ownership and control sit with blood relatives. The 1% stake looks less like a partnership share than a façade to keep the public story consistent.
A dependent relationship breaks down
The deeper rupture is what happens as Li reaches adulthood and independence.
After graduating from university and starting her own family, Li has gone from a left-behind girl who needed a city family's shelter and school funding to an adult with full legal capacity and her own social influence. When she began to weigh the commercial value she creates against what she is paid, and sought a share or her own venture, the balance of power tilted.
To a controlling parent, her change of fortune was a gift and her fame was incubated on the family platform; any push for money or attempt to break away can be branded betrayal. To the younger generation, nearly a decade of appearing on camera for little or nothing has long since used up the goodwill.
Once private grievances spilled onto WeChat Moments, the family showed its real face: a contest over money.
The 1% stake as a warning
The filings spell out a hard commercial rule. Moral pressure and a family fable can launch a rough-and-ready influencer network at low cost, but they cannot sustain a modern business. The 1% figure measures the true commercial weight of this mother-daughter relationship, and it is a warning to the many creator teams that monetise family warmth.
Once the public滤镜 shatters, creators without clear contracts end up as fuel for a family's original capital accumulation.