‘She looked in her thirties’: 59-year-old uses plastic surgery to avoid $3.7 million debt

A Chinese woman drastically altered her appearance through plastic surgery and fled across the country on a high speed train to avoid paying off her $3.7 million debt, according to state agency Xinhua.

Police officers were reportedly “astonished” when they found Zhu Najuan, 59, who hid in the southeastern city of Shenzen after a court in Wuhan ordered her to pay off her credit card debt.

"We were very surprised at the scene," a policeman said, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. "She looked in her thirties and was different from the photos we had."

Najuan admitted to using borrowed bank cards to finance her plastic surgery, according to Reuters, as well as using other people’s identity cards to travel across the country by train.

The story is emblematic of financial issues sweeping through China as it attempts to become a “credit society.”

Representatives from over 300 cities released a declaration earlier in July, promising to make credit more readily available to help boost consumer spending. The aim is to reduce the nation’s reliance on state-driven infrastructure development and heavy industry while also finding new sources of economic growth.

But that has led to some problems, as China is struggling to come up with a method to enforce payments on debt. The nation’s household debt is estimated to have reached around 50 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product last year, meaning it has more than doubled in the last ten years. And so far in 2017, Wuhan’s judiciary has detained 186 people for reneging on their debts, according to RT.

One province in the nation created a blacklist of those who have not paid their debts. Anyone who calls someone on the list must first listen to a pre-recorded message that says, “please urge this person to fulfill their legal obligations.”

This story was originally published August 1, 2017 at 9:56 AM with the headline "‘She looked in her thirties’: 59-year-old uses plastic surgery to avoid $3.7 million debt."