19yo writes will to leave his $3M estate to childhood friend instead of stepparents

A 19-year-old university student in Shanghai has willed his entire 20 million yuan (US$2.95 million) estate to a childhood friend, preventing the law from handing it to his divorced parents and their new spouses when he dies. The student, a first-year undergraduate identified only by the surname Li, registered the will at the Shanghai Jing'an branch of the China Will Registration Center, the South China Morning Post reported this month. His estate is one apartment and several million yuan in cash."Because I often take part in outdoor extreme sports, I worry about a personal accident," Li told the Shanghai Morning Post, saying he wanted an heir of his own choosing to handle the estate.His parents divorced and each remarried. Both are busy with work and rarely spent time with him, he said, and he knows little about either of their new households.China's Civil Code puts a person's spouse, children and parents first in line when there is no will. Li has neither spouse nor children, so his parents would take everything.Property inherited during a marriage then becomes joint marital property, unless a will says otherwise. That would hand each parent's current husband or wife an immediate claim to half of whatever they received.Huang Haibo, who runs the center's Shanghai Jing'an branch, told the Shanghai Morning Post that a will in the legal sense directs property to statutory heirs. Directing it to someone with no blood relation is a bequest, he said, a separate instrument the Civil Code permits.A person named in a bequest has 60 days from learning of its contents to declare acceptance, Huang said, and silence counts as refusal. Missing that window would send Li's estate straight back to the people he wrote out of it.The center was launched in 2013 by the China Ageing Development Foundation. It had registered and stored 404,981 wills as of the end of 2025, Beijing Youth Daily reported, with registrations up 13.4% year on year.The average age of the people making them has fallen for 13 straight years, from 77.43 to 67.64, Beijing Daily reported from the center's white paper, released on March 21.Huang said residents born in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s now arrive at his branch treating a will as ordinary planning rather than something unlucky.Will-makers under 30 rose 42.3% in 2025 from a year earlier. In Shanghai, The Paper reported, under-60s now account for 23.68% of everyone registering a will, with the 30 to 39 bracket growing fastest.A notary surnamed Chen at the Tianyi Notary Public Office in Ningbo, in eastern Zhejiang Province, told Ningbo Evening News in March that young Chinese typically write wills around marriage to ring-fence property their parents handed down beforehand. Single and childless people leaving property to friends make up a second group.The case divided Chinese social media. Some called Li cold toward the people who raised him. Others said blood is inherited and closeness is earned, and a legal adult may do as he likes with his own money.