Today, Miao’s roughly 30 percent stake in the solar company is valued at about $17.7 million. Yingli’s American Depository Receipts traded in the U.S. have declined 25 percent since the beginning of the year after plunging 81 percent in 2015.

Personal Touch

It’s a dramatic fall for a man who, employees say, can be found standing outside the company’s headquarters each day at 7 a.m., when he isn’t traveling, so that he can offer a morning welcome to his workers. It’s also a breakdown that has ensnared more than Miao and Yingli.

The past decade has been marked by booms, busts and failures in clean energy -- and solar in particular. The list of once-leading companies that went bankrupt include Q-Cells SE, SunEdison Inc. and Suntech. Shi, who led Suntech until three years ago when eight Chinese banks pushed it into insolvency, was once China’s richest man until his company was brought down. Shi built his empire from scratch, like Miao.

Miao started in 1998 with Baoding Tianwei Yingli New Energy Resources Co. In 2006, Yingli Green Energy was incorporated in the Cayman Islands as part of a restructuring of the equity interests in Tianwei Yingli. It was a way to smooth investments by foreign financial investors in Tianwei Yingli and list shares of the venture on an overseas stock market, according to its 2014 annual report.

Yingli’s Start

Solar module production began at Yingli Green in 2003 with 3 megawatts of capacity, which grew in the next three years to 100 megawatts. Over the next 10 years, production rose 40-fold to 4,000 megawatts. Listings followed in New York and Berlin in 2007, giving Yingli international scope.

Yingli’s debt burden is a result of “errors in decision-making including large-scale expansion along the whole value chain and spending on marketing and branding,” said Wang Xiaoting, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Hong Kong. Between 2013 and the first quarter of 2015, more than half of Yingli’s net losses were from interest expenses on debt raised for expansion, according to Bloomberg data.

Chinese firms are struggling with record debt redemption this year as Premier Li Keqiang seeks to wipe out zombie corporations amid the country’s weakest economic expansion in a quarter-century. At least nine firms, including Yingli, have missed local note payments so far this year, exceeding the tally for the whole of 2015.

Chinese solar manufacturers such as Yingli sold about $5 billion of shares from 2005 to 2010, wresting control of the market from companies in the U.S., Germany and Japan. The added capacity led to a global oversupply and pummeled panel prices, tipping at least 30 companies into bankruptcy.