One Billion Customers - James McGregor [56]
Lai was the man in the middle. Mainland intelligence agencies funneled payments to a dozen spies in Taiwan through his company. He sometimes hosted Taiwan officials when they came to Hong Kong. Shortly before China resumed control of Hong Kong in 1997, Lai’s car, with its special plates allowing travel between China and Hong Kong, transported Mainland agents’ files on Hong Kong’s civil servants across the border. Through his connections with a Taiwan spy chief in Hong Kong who wanted to defect to China, Lai received and passed along to Mainland authorities a list of names of Taiwan agents in China. In all, Lai spent more than $1 million of his own money helping the various Mainland intelligence agencies in Hong Kong.
When Lai returned to China two years later as a foreign investor, he scattered his money around various businesses. He set up a trading firm, bought a factory that made car stereos, and another that assembled personal computers. But he had seen that real estate was at the core of the fortunes of the Hong Kong tycoons. He determined to make himself the property king of Xiamen. Through his company, Yuanhua International, or the Fairwell Trading Corporation, he accumulated land in key locations in Xiamen, which had been a crossroads for smugglers for centuries.
To foster tourism, Lai built a $17 million replica of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City that was used as a movie studio. He purchased the city’s soccer team and changed its name to Yuanhua. He even made a few guest appearances as goalie.
Lai didn’t neglect his home village of Shaocuo, about two hours away by car. He built a mansion there for himself with glass walls overlooking pagodas and gold-leaf Chinese characters gracing the front door. But he also paved the road to the village and donated money to build more than thirty schools in the area, including the Yuanhua Middle School with busts of the world’s great thinkers circling the schoolyard and a curriculum aimed at giving poor kids a chance to get into China’s colleges. He built a retirement home and activity center for the elderly in Shaocuo and he gave several hundred people monthly “retirement” checks of about eighty-five dollars each.
The Red Mansion
Lai ruled over his growing empire from the Red Mansion, named after a Chinese classic novel about a wealthy and dissolute Chinese family. Lai built the seven-story structure in 1996 on land obtained from the Xiamen police department. From the outside it looked like any Chinese office building with faded red tiles. But inside was a different matter. Lai’s office was on the top floor. Under that was a warren of private banquet rooms, a forty-seat movie theater, private karaoke lounges, sauna and massage facilities, and a half dozen guest rooms. The Red Mansion was Lai’s private haven where he discreetly entertained his rapidly growing network of government friends. Everything at the Red Mansion was free. A Hong Kong master chef prepared tureens of shark’s fin soup, swallow’s nest, and abalone. The imported cognac and wines were the best in China. Guests at the Red Mansion would routinely enjoy a sauna, massage, and a romp in a guest room with one of the tall, slender young ladies who graced the mansion. The officials’ bodyguards could work out in the well-appointed gym while waiting for their bosses. After one visit, most officials kept coming back for more. Often the mansion was so busy that managers had to borrow girls from Xiamen nightclubs. The half dozen bedrooms would be reserved for the highest officials, while those of lower rank were given rooms at two other guesthouses owned by Yuanhua International. Remembering well the lesson of the Shishi tax bureau, Lai wanted all aspects of government relations directly under his control, especially the all-important entertainment. He told friends that the only government officials he was afraid of were those without a “hobby”—either girls or money. Lai himself seldom partook of the pleasures the Red