Yuan Yizhong, who is retired, cut up his son's seven credit cards after he discovered that the 29-year-old had run up thousands of yuan in debt he could never afford to pay.
"My son got his first credit card when he had a job. But later on he was unemployed," said Mr Yuan, who lives in Beijing.
"However, he continued to apply for credit cards and overdraft credit cards on purpose, since he felt money was come by so easily."
Mr Yuan put his life savings towards paying his son's credit card debts and made only a dent in the total - 260,000 yuan (Dh139,800).
His son has not yet managed to pay off even half the total sum, while Mr Yuan has taken on extra work as a taxi driver to try to pay what he owes.
The case of the Yuan family is not unusual and is one of the reasons that there are growing calls for greater regulation of the credit card business in China.
Many Chinese people have no experience of credit cards and lose control of themselves when presented with what looks like free money.
The amount of credit card debt that was more than six months overdue rose 131 per cent in the second quarter of this year to 5.77 billion yuan, the People's Bank of China reported.
That amounts to 3.1 per cent of the total outstanding credit card debt at the end of June.
The country's banking watchdog, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), told banks in July not to offer gifts to new credit card holders, to cease issuing cards to applicants under 18, and to stop setting quotas for their sales staff.
And the regulator told the banks to more carefully appraise applicants' creditworthiness before issuing cards. Mr Yuan is strongly critical of his son's behaviour, but he also thinks the banks should bear some of the blame.
"It is true that my son is not good," he said.
"He let me down. He spent money wastefully. If he had a job, applied for credit card and had the ability to pay back, that's fine.
"But banks still gave him cards when he was unemployed.
"And even though he owed money to Bank A, Bank B still approved his application and let him draw too much money on his account."
Mr Yuan said he made numerous appeals to the banks to stop issuing credit cards to his son, but to no avail.
"I was not familiar with the credit card system. When I received calls from banks, they told me if I didn't pay back my son's loan, they would sue my son," he said.
"I got scared. I had no way out. So far, I have paid back about 90,000 yuan.
"In my house, we have got nothing valuable left."
He said he planned to complain to the CBRC and the police about what he described as threats from the banks.
"Banks just want to earn money through interest on loans and procedure fees," he said.
"They are just after money. They don't have any sense of social responsibility."
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Where to buy
Limited-edition art prints of The Sofa Series: Sultani can be acquired from Reem El Mutwalli at www.reemelmutwalli.com
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
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'The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey'
Rating: 3/5
Directors: Ramin Bahrani, Debbie Allen, Hanelle Culpepper, Guillermo Navarro
Writers: Walter Mosley
Stars: Samuel L Jackson, Dominique Fishback, Walton Goggins
Cricket World Cup League 2
UAE squad
Rahul Chopra (captain), Aayan Afzal Khan, Ali Naseer, Aryansh Sharma, Basil Hameed, Dhruv Parashar, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Farooq, Muhammad Jawadullah, Muhammad Waseem, Omid Rahman, Rahul Bhatia, Tanish Suri, Vishnu Sukumaran, Vriitya Aravind
Fixtures
Friday, November 1 – Oman v UAE
Sunday, November 3 – UAE v Netherlands
Thursday, November 7 – UAE v Oman
Saturday, November 9 – Netherlands v UAE
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COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Total funding: Self funded
Squads
India (for first three ODIs) Kohli (capt), Rohit, Rahul, Pandey, Jadhav, Rahane, Dhoni, Pandya, Axar, Kuldeep, Chahal, Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar, Umesh, Shami.
Australia Smith (capt), Warner, Agar, Cartwright, Coulter-Nile, Cummins, Faulkner, Finch, Head, Maxwell, Richardson, Stoinis, Wade, Zampa.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
Thank You for Banking with Us
Director: Laila Abbas
Starring: Yasmine Al Massri, Clara Khoury, Kamel El Basha, Ashraf Barhoum
Rating: 4/5
Moon Music
Artist: Coldplay
Label: Parlophone/Atlantic
Number of tracks: 10
Rating: 3/5
Bio
Born in Dubai in 1994
Her father is a retired Emirati police officer and her mother is originally from Kuwait
She Graduated from the American University of Sharjah in 2015 and is currently working on her Masters in Communication from the University of Sharjah.
Her favourite film is Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro
The specs
Engine: 2-litre or 3-litre 4Motion all-wheel-drive Power: 250Nm (2-litre); 340 (3-litre) Torque: 450Nm Transmission: 8-speed automatic Starting price: From Dh212,000 On sale: Now
History's medical milestones
1799 - First small pox vaccine administered
1846 - First public demonstration of anaesthesia in surgery
1861 - Louis Pasteur published his germ theory which proved that bacteria caused diseases
1895 - Discovery of x-rays
1923 - Heart valve surgery performed successfully for first time
1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
1953 - Structure of DNA discovered
1952 - First organ transplant - a kidney - takes place
1954 - Clinical trials of birth control pill
1979 - MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, scanned used to diagnose illness and injury.
1998 - The first adult live-donor liver transplant is carried out
APPLE IPAD MINI (A17 PRO)
Display: 21cm Liquid Retina Display, 2266 x 1488, 326ppi, 500 nits
Chip: Apple A17 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
Storage: 128/256/512GB
Main camera: 12MP wide, f/1.8, digital zoom up to 5x, Smart HDR 4
Front camera: 12MP ultra-wide, f/2.4, Smart HDR 4, full-HD @ 25/30/60fps
Biometrics: Touch ID, Face ID
Colours: Blue, purple, space grey, starlight
In the box: iPad mini, USB-C cable, 20W USB-C power adapter
Price: From Dh2,099
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The specs
Engine: 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6
Power: 540hp at 6,500rpm
Torque: 600Nm at 2,500rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Kerb weight: 1580kg
Price: From Dh750k
On sale: via special order