If you want the sentimental version, Chongqing Machinery & Electric is a sprawling state-rooted conglomerate that makes engines, wind components and industrial kit. It’s a company that dresses like respectability and smells faintly of government imprimatur and big contracts. We’ve given them a place in customer corner, but truth be told they’re partners. Brothers-in-arms, so to speak. If you want the real version – and why wouldn’t you – it’s a business built on the usual Chinese cocktail of SOE heft, cosy connected deals, legal dust-ups that leak into public filings, and the occasional political carcass that gets dragged across the yard to make a point.

This is not a scandal-sheet hatchet job. It’s a look at how squeaky-clean corporate language and the grim machinery of litigation and connected transactions reveal a different, grubbier truth – one of commercial fights, shaky governance and the kind of bureaucratic theatre that keeps investors awake at night.

Litigation That Reads Like A Courtroom Brawl – Mingyang And The Wind-Blade Wars

The loudest, most publicised scrapes in recent years involved the wind-supply chain. Chongqing Machinery’s Chengfei subsidiaries sued and were sued by Mingyang – the name sounds quaint until you read the numbers. Court freezes, multi-million-yuan claims for unpaid processing fees, counterclaims for product-quality losses – the sort of grinding commercial warfare that chews up cash and patience.

The company’s public KPIs aren’t the problem. The problem is the choreography: property preservation orders, filings on the Stock Exchange, then a settlement – all spelled out in the company’s own HKEX announcements. The whole thing smells like a supply-chain relationship gone rotten – a mix of delayed payments, quality disputes and hard-nosed bargaining that escalated to litigation. They settled in 2024 – which is fine. But the scars are in the filings and in the cash flow numbers. Investors should read those PDFs like an autopsy report.

This is the kind of dispute that leaves people asking whether the group was out-negotiated, out-supplied or just plain unlucky with partners. Or, more cynically, whether the arm’s-length line on paperwork has ever actually been arm’s length.

Related-Party Transactions – The Velvet Glove Over The Iron Fist

If you have one eye for drama and the other for governance, the 2025 connected-transaction circulars are your textbook chapter. Chongqing Machinery has been rolling out acquisitions, master sales agreements and parent-group financing frameworks with the usual cast – controlling shareholder vehicles, asset companies and abstaining directors.

On paper, it’s all kosher – independent advisers, AGM votes, annual caps. In practice, related-party transactions at SOE-heavy groups are where the air gets thin. Yes, government-related groups routinely shuffle assets between parent and listed entity – but they are also the places where valuations, timing and “commercial justifications” get politely wedged into the fine print. If you are an investor who likes clean lines and independence, this is where you lean forward and start asking proper questions. Who benefits? How were valuations calculated? Which directors were deemed conflicted and why?

The Political Stain – The 2013 Chongqing “Sex-Video” Affair And Leadership Fumblings

This is where things get almost comical and utterly Serious with a capital S. In 2013 the Chongqing political scene imploded – sex-video revelations, arrests, and a cascade of removals across municipal and SOE leadership. Chongqing Machinery’s own leadership was not exempt – Xie Huajun and a clutch of officials were removed from posts in the fallout. There is no suggestion (at this point) that anybody at Cummins partakes in the filming of any sex tapes.

Ridiculous? Yes. Ugly? Also yes. The spectacle of state-boxing meets tabloid fodder left many organisations in Chongqing with leadership gaps, rearranged boards and the brittle aftertaste of reputation damage. Laugh at the ridiculousness if you like – and fuck, I am – secretly filmed sleaze is human, tawdry and always entertaining in a grim way – but do not underestimate how swiftly political heat translates into corporate risk. When senior figures are shown the door, contracts get re-examined, approvals slow down and the people left in charge inherit a mess.

Internal Controls And The Company’s Own Confessions

Read any page of a modern annual report and you’ll find the glamorous paragraph about management strengthening controls and improving risk management. Chongqing Machinery has one of those paragraphs – repeated. Frequent restatements about beefing up internal control tend to mean two things – either the company is responsibly improving things, or the company has been burned enough times to know that it must say the right things in public. Probably both.

Which leads to the boring-but-important bit: the company’s filings regularly disclose litigation, enforcement and remediation steps. That is transparency, but it is also a road map to the parts of the business that are, or were, fragile.

Cummins – Are They A Customer, A Partner, Or An Enabler?

Here’s the bit I touched on. Chongqing Machinery isn’t simply a customer of Cummins – the two are linked as partners. Chongqing Machinery has long been a 50% shareholder in Chongqing Cummins Engine Company – a bona fide joint venture with Cummins to make engines in China. That is a partnership of scale – not the casual supplier-customer relationship the word “customer” implies. Again, no suggestion that Cummins contributed to their fair 50% share of the tapes, as much as I want that to be true.

Now, am I going to say Cummins is crooked because it has a JV with a company that has messy litigation and connected transactions? No, that would be lazy. But it’s fair to ask: when multinational firms partner with local groups in China, do they inherit the local group’s governance blind spots? Does the global company’s compliance culture always bleed through the joint venture? Or does the JV become a diplomatic pony that both sides ride into political and commercial complexity?

Ask the question aloud. It’s not a smear – it’s a provocation investors and compliance officers should love.

The Verdict – Not A Smoking Gun, But A Pattern

There’s no one headline-making accounting fraud or a single criminal indictment that reads like a Hollywood thriller. Instead, you get a pattern: a company with state roots that participates in the kind of corporate manoeuvres and commercial fights you’d expect from that pedigree – litigation with material sums, related-party transactions that demand scrutiny, board turnover and post-political scandals that ripple into corporate life.

That pattern is not proof of moral rot – it’s proof of risk. It’s an instruction manual for an investor or journalist who wants to poke the soft bits. It’s noisy, unsavoury, and occasionally laughable – but it also matters in cold, cash terms.

Final, Blunt Advice For Anyone Who Owns The Stock Or Follows The Sector

Read the filings – the HKEX PDFs are the ground truth. If you’re investing – require the circulars and ask for independent valuations.
Treat the Mingyang litigation and settlement as an indicator – not the whole story. Follow-up: who paid whom, and was cash actually recovered?
Question connected transactions like you’d question a politician at PMQs – insist on independent advisers and clear valuation methodology.
And to the multinationals that build JVs here – if you don’t have compliance and governance standards leaching into the joint venture down to the factory floor, then you don’t have a JV – you have a label and a supply risk.

In short – Chongqing Machinery is messy, political, litigiously engaged and properly large. It’s not broken beyond repair. But it is exactly the sort of company where “trust but verify” becomes a religion. And those tapes? Maybe we should review them for research purposes. You know, just in case.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Customer Corner : Chongqing Machinery & Electric – A Good Old-Fashioned Chinese Soap Opera