China's shopping centre tycoon Dai Yongge lists Rose Bay mansion

The Rose Bay mansion owned by Zhang Xingmei, wife of China’s shopping centre tycoon Dai Yongge, hit the market this week 12 years after she bought it for $17.68 million.

The grand three-level residence was sold by rag trader Ray Pillion amid little fanfare at the time, but Dai’s prominence in the Chinese community has soared since his shopping centre development company Renhe Commercial was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2008, and more recent revelations of his established links to the highest echelons of China’s social-political hierarchy.

Dai and his sister Dai Xiu Li, whose father was a former head of the Chinese central bank, were previously major shareholders of Renhe Commercial, which gained military approval to convert underground bomb shelters into shopping centres in southern China.

Dai stepped down as executive chairman last year and the company was renamed China Dili Group as it shifted focus to the operation of agriculture wholesale markets and Dai’s son Dai Bin, 28, was appointed chief executive.

The Rose Bay residence– the registered Sydney home of Dai Bin – with five bedrooms, an internal lift to all three levels and a swimming pool hit the market on Thursday.

In 2012 Renhe Commercial bought Beijing Renhe Football Club and two years ago the Dai siblings became majority owners of the UK’s Reading Football Club, in Berkshire.

In Australia, corporate records show Dai is an associate of Zeng Wei, the son of former Chinese vice-president Zeng Qinghong, who is widely credited with having had a hand in President Xi Jinping’s rise to power.

A few months after Dai settled into his Rose Bay mansion in early 2008, Zeng and his wife Jiang Mei bought the Point Piper mansion previously known as Craig-y-Mor for a then non-waterfront high of $32.4 million. They have since demolished the historic residence and rebuilt an architect Stephen Gergely-designed mansion that was transferred into the ownership of little-known Jennifer Chen in 2015.

Before Zeng and Mei bought Craig-y-Mor they had inspected the nearby Point Piper mansion Villa del Mare, which less than a decade later was bought by Lola Li Wang, whose sister Vicky Wang is a co-director with the Zengs and Dai of company Fruit Master International.

The Rose Bay residence was built in 1999 by Pillion following his purchase of the property in 1997 for $2.3 million. It was listed for sale in 2003 with $9 million-plus hopes and passed in at auction that year at $9.4 million.