The player

THE tale of Lai Changxing is emblematic of post-Maoist China. The man’s like may also be found in post-communist Russia. Here is someone who worked hard, took risks and knew whom to bribe.

Oliver August, who for seven years ran the Times of London’s Beijing bureau, did not set himself an easy assignment when he decided to research Lai’s career. Once his subject fell from favor and fled the country, people found it best for their health not to talk about him. With “Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s Most Wanted Man,” August comes across as brave, resourceful and determined. Eventually, he even gets to peek inside the notorious Red Mansion where Lai kept concubines for various officials. By then, however, the Red Mansion has been shuttered. Indeed, the subtitle of the book makes the narrative, and August’s commendable legwork, sound much more suspenseful than it actually is. I hope it is not giving away too much to reveal that the author does finally meet Lai, who has surfaced in Canada; the content of the resulting interviews is less impressive than the fact that they took place at all.

Although he deserves credit for striving to be otherwise, August is a pedestrian stylist, and his detailing of who refused to say what, and which prostitute he declined to sleep with, serves no narrative purpose other than to remind us of how hard he worked. On the other hand, dullness is often associated with honesty, and everything in this book is eminently believable.

August has a sincere interest in the many people he met -- Lili the dance hall administrator, Fangmin the not-quite-successful entrepreneur, Kim the shaved-headed lesbian -- and he introduces them to us not only as individuals but also as mass participants in, and sometimes victims of, the new China. Often, his characterizations fall short of vividness, and I wish that he had either given them a greater presence in the book, in which case the focus on Lai would have been further diluted, or else removed what comes across as mere padding.

Fortunately, a book does not have to be great literature to teach us something, and it is August’s great merit to explain simply and convincingly what role people like Lai play in post-totalitarian economies. As we learn, they are useful not only to the functionaries they pay off but also, for a time, to their own societies. An unnamed vice minister in Beijing explains: “Some people in the government thought it was too early for China to enter the World Trade Organization. The benefit to our country would be to get lower export tariffs. But we would also have to reduce our import tariffs.”

How can China have it both ways? Well, here comes convenient Mr. Lai, who smuggles in foreign automobiles at what works out to a lower tariff rate. China can use him without explicitly approving him. He takes the risk; the government reserves the right to change the rules. The vice minister continues: “[O]nce World Trade Organization entry was agreed, he certainly wasn’t useful anymore. You will remember he fled around the same time as the entry negotiations were concluded in 1999.”

“Inside the Red Mansion” begins very effectively with a scene in a certain dance hall where August must have spent a considerable amount of the Times’ money. Lili is waiting to be raided. She has hidden her girls in a locked room. When the police come, she will show them around the other rooms, then invite them upstairs where the sealed envelope of cash is waiting. August implies that this is the modus operandi of the Chinese authorities. They remain free to tolerate Lili and profit from her. She takes all the risks. If and when she, like Lai, stops being useful, they will arrest her. That unnamed vice minister in Beijing has already laid out for us the expedient calculus of the people who take her money. What about her calculus, and what about Lai’s? Quite simply, they “reveled in the pursuit of wealth. One-time workers and peasants gloried in excess, thrived on rule-breaking, and turned established morality on its head. They planted skyscrapers by the bushel and overran entire global industries.”

This central insight strikes me as more than just true; as I reflect on it, I find it critically important in making sense of present-day China, which, after all, will only increase its significance in our lives. From the cheap and reliable travel alarm clock I recently bought to the tainted medicines in the news, China achieves its effects by being both less centralized and more authoritarian than the America I grew up in. August compares it to the Gilded Age of untrammeled 19th century capitalism. He might equally consider the Bush administration, with its combination of laissez-faire environmentalism and insistence on the right to spy on us. Perhaps a Halliburton contractor or a high-level Blackwater goon could achieve in miniature the ephemeral success of Lai Changxing.

And just who is the individual referred to as “China’s most wanted man”? Once upon a time he was a rice farmer. Later he became a regular in Lili’s club, ordering $1,000 bottles of cognac and overwhelming the dancer of his choice with plastic garlands. In time, the city of Xiamen made him an honorary citizen. People remember him as an exemplar of their own greed and shout this toast: “Rich like Lai.”

“Where was Lai?” August wonders over and over, peering glumly into a hole in the ground that was meant to become one of Lai’s skyscrapers, interviewing businessmen who had seen his entourage on the same course where they played golf, dropping in on Lai’s relatives in the country village of Shaocuo. Here at last, in a home he calls “a pitiful bandit lair,” he begins to fill out details of his quarry’s history. The family justifies their fugitive member, and August succeeds in making us feel some sympathy for them and him.

It is worth interjecting that on several occasions, the police play cat-and-mouse with August, and these scenes, which he describes well, help us gain more insight into the motivations of Lai, who began his career by refusing to pay bribes; as a result, his sister was horribly beaten. “Of course, every bandit myth started with accusations of an abuse of power,” August writes acutely. “It made the bandit cause a just one. The Sheriff of Nottingham was an official in Shaocuo.”

Once Lai has outlived his usefulness, the government cracks down on his associates. The hole in the ground remains. One would expect the locals to turn against him now, for human nature abhors a vacuum, especially since some wages must have gone unpaid. But in another simple sentence, August reveals the source of their fondness for this kingpin smuggler: “With Lai in Xiamen, the local economy had grown by more than 20 percent a year. When he left, the rate dropped to zero.”

But August is not exactly a Lai apologist. He sees the man’s career, like the Red Mansion itself, as “grotesque ... a gift to a prosecutor.... A Bond villain would have felt at home.”

The ending is meant to be a cliffhanger, and I will not do the book the unkindness of revealing it. When we finally meet him, Lai comes across as a woebegone figure. My own brief experiences in China taught me that modernization can be ruthless and journalists are well-advised not to cross certain lines. August comes impressively close to crossing those lines. He strikes me as an accurate and principled reporter, not only cheerfully resistant to intimidation but also willing to give the social order its due. “Somehow the system works -- not least because Beijing still wields a bloody club. But also because Beijing has learned to be flexible. It encourages the raw energy of its subjects.”

A fondness for China shines through August’s pages. He is a careful and thoughtful observer, with an eye for emblematic contradictions: “Perched between modern and ancient, there were those who groomed dogs and those who ate them.” If his narrative is less than dramatic, that makes me all the more inclined to trust him as a teller of truth.