Heifeng Lu had barely set foot back home when his grandmother called again. He'd dodged the trip to Yanjing for days because the calendar was a thicket—phones, cars, supply, press—but he knew she'd eventually storm Piao City herself if he kept delaying. He promised he'd come soon, then turned back to the two fires he had to light: an Audi comeback ad that would sting the foreign giants, and a personal visit to Old Man Ye to back an audacious plan that only Ye could help him pull off. For now, the ad came first. Heifeng gathered every Audi Group manager and laid out the storyboard he'd already written, demanding a top agency, ten‑day turnaround, and saturation placement—TV, web, outdoor, the works. "Don't be afraid to burn money," he said. "I want it everywhere." The room wore crooked smiles. The script was wicked enough to make the Greater China heads at Volkswagen, BMW, and even Alto blow a gasket, and that was the point.
While Audi's ad machine spun up, Huaxing's second flash sale arrived at 10:00 sharp—and vanished even faster. The countdown hit zero, a few people blinked, and the button was already gray. Refresh. Two characters: sold out. The first wave had gone quickly; the second felt instantaneous. The dam burst on Weibo, swamping Huaxing's official account with abuse:
"Trash company!"
"What'd you put up, a few hundred phones?"
"I set an alarm and it ended before I clicked!"
"You're colluding with scalpers!"
Heifeng had prepped PR to let the storm blow. Anger meant heat, and heat meant demand. But one thread worried him: the accusation that Huaxing was feeding scalpers to jack prices. That stuck, and reputation mattered long after a batch sold out. Zhao Lan came in tight‑faced: the rumor was everywhere. Heifeng sat silent for a beat. Scalpers were hateful but not illegal, and brute force wouldn't work. Then he chose a different blade. "We launch a priority purchase program."
The next day, under the rolling condemnation, Huaxing finally posted. The tone was simple: we didn't expect the phones to be this hot; demand far exceeds supply; to make sure true users get a chance, we're starting a real‑name purchase campaign. Curiosity replaced some of the anger, and traffic surged to Huaxing's site to see what "real‑name" meant. The mechanism was blunt but fair: bind your Huaxing account to hard identities—ID number, QQ, Alipay—fill in as much as you can, and the system scores you. The higher your score, the earlier your purchase window. It was a scalper filter without lowering volume or raising price, and the resentment eased as people saw the intent: funnel phones to real users, not resellers. New sign‑ups spiked and existing users rushed to complete bindings to raise their score and move up the queue.
Across the river in the Alibaba Building, Old Ma read the rules and smiled a thin, appreciative smile. He saw the deeper play. This wasn't only anti‑scalper—it was user capture. Force binding now, harvest loyalty later. Phones were a user war; whoever held the account graph would own the next decade. He didn't buy for a second that Huaxing had "no inventory." This was about cadence and structure, not shortage.
Heifeng's cadence had been set weeks ago. After the price conference, he'd approved stock near ten million units, sliced into three waves to both test the product in the wild and shape the market. Three clean shocks to satisfy most demand, then steady state. The first round proved heat; the second proved frenzy; the third would convert the chorus of "can't buy" into lines that actually moved. The real‑name campaign slotted neatly into that plan: tamp scalpers, reward early community, thicken Huaxing's identity spine, and buy breathing room for factories to catch up without ceding narrative control.
Inside Huaxing, the mood stayed disciplined. PR ignored the tear‑gas of insults and kept posting logistics. Retail worked the stores. Operations hardened the scoring algorithm, weighting verified IDs over throwaway accounts, tightening time windows, and tracking abnormal purchase patterns to blacklist bulk buyers who tried to game the form. The message to genuine users was clear: fill in your details, and your turn will come. The message to scalpers was clearer: every trick you use creates another signal we can block.
What made the maneuver bite was its asymmetry. If Huaxing had simply expanded volume, scalpers would have grown with it. If Huaxing had jacked price, it would have punished the very fans making the brand roar. By tying purchase priority to verified identity, the company pushed beyond bot farms and SMS pools into the friction of real life. Each extra point of identity proofing added a gram of weight that casual arbitrage wouldn't carry, and the social expectation—"I'll finally be able to buy because I'm verified"—turned angry commenters into participants racing to complete their profiles.
That didn't mean the outside world took it kindly. Competitors read the same rules and saw not only a well‑timed PR patch but an on‑ramp to a walled garden: accounts, payments, coupons, after‑sales, community—all stitched to a single ID. Old Ma admired the precision because he understood the endgame. Phones were hardware, yes, but they were also gates. Whoever controlled the gate could choreograph traffic across commerce, content, and services. Heifeng's "priority purchase" was, in essence, an identity enrollment drive dressed as consumer protection.
Meanwhile, Heifeng didn't forget the car front. The Audi ad brief he'd dictated—sharp, brazen, designed to make noses "crooked with anger"—was his opening cannon as he prepared to knock on Ye's door for the larger gambit he'd been nursing since the States. In both industries he was pressing the same philosophy: hit first, define the frame, and force larger players to answer on your terms. Sell hot but don't let scarcity sour into scandal; raise volume but keep narrative control; punch foreign brands not with slogans but with products and pricing that make their PR sound like excuses. The second sale's chaos showed how thin the line could be. The real‑name pivot showed how quickly he intended to redraw it.
By night, the comment fields had changed timbre. The jeering was still there, but it was threaded with screenshots of completed bindings, score guesses, and speculation about thresholds. People who had cursed in the morning now swapped tips: whether a verified Alipay moved the needle more than a long‑lived QQ, whether completing after‑sales addresses mattered, whether past purchases would be recognized. The fury that threatened to crater goodwill had been converted into a game with rules Huaxing wrote. If you wanted in, you played by those rules—and the house always wins when it is also the architect.