Author: Oliver August

If you want to write a China book, you have to find an angle. It's no longer acceptable to surmise “I was there and this is what I saw” will be enough. August, who was the China correspondent for the London Times from 1999-2005, has wrapped his China book around a guy whom almost every Chinese person knows and knows well, Lai Changxing. Lai Changxing was a billionaire, trader, philanthropist and entrepreneur for a good decade before falling foul of the authorities and fleeing the country in 1999. His disappearance, which set off a worldwide manhunt, ended two years later in a casino on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The result was one of the most compelling courtroom dramas the Canadian Immigration Board has ever known. August returns to this moment when human rights, big business and the smug sacrosanctity of Western governments got caught in the crosshairs.

August's narrative doesn't waddle back and forth between modern metropolis and backward countryside. For the most part, it confines itself to Xiamen, returning over and over again to places frequented by Fujian's most notorious robber-baron since Koxinga. Places like the Shaoshan Nightclub, Gulangyu Island and of course, the infamous Red Mansion of the title. August's quixotic quest is also a healthy bildungsroman. August is honest. He enlists the help of a shaven-pated Chinese lesbian and a Taiwanese student to help him make sense of things. It's well-observed without the triteness of travelogues. In a book that turns on a trial, it's studiously unjudgmental. Of course, August offers up the expected sampler plate of platitudes. Underground Christians make an appearance as do pencil-pushing officials, poor farmers and sad prostitutes with big dreams-all cast against the backdrop of a country in the grip of pell-mell development. Most depressing is the decision to hang the entire thing on the sex hook. Lai Changxing's so-called Red Mansion (where he used to bribe officials with women) takes on a fetishistic quality which is neither consummated, nor ultimately that important.

But, whatever, we meet lots of new characters. The local official who becomes an effective (if colorless) Chinese Deep Throat. The madam who plays the cops and her clients like a Stradivarius. The frustrated little shot whose big shot dreams never seem to happen. And, of course, Lai Changxing himself-not quite as demonic as the Chinese government would have us believe, a dupe of the pre-WTO days. A guy you end up silently rooting for.

Lee Mack