Manhunts don't come much stranger than the one that has preoccupied journalist Oliver August for the past few years. It isn't a black-and-white tale of heroes and villains. Instead, there's a billionaire racketeer and authorities who - for a time, at least - tolerate him. August's quarry, Lai Changxing, is not a dark anti-hero of perilous charm and sophisticated habits; he's an illiterate from China's Fujian province who, when we first meet him, is lounging in a nightclub buying plastic bouquets to rain on a favourite dancer.
August arrived in Beijing as bureau chief for The Times of London in 1999 - the youngest ever, at just 27. Born and raised in Germany, he was fixed on being a foreign correspondent from an early age. He played truant from Oxford University to report the war in Bosnia in 1993, and soon after he
left college was snapped up by The Times, posted first to New York, then to Beijing.
He hadn't been there long before he heard the legend of Lai Changxing. His curiosity was piqued, but he wouldn't have been nearly so interested in Lai had he not begun to realise what a peculiarly representative life the man had led.
'He was born into what is probably the darkest time in modern China, the Great Leap Forward,' August says. 'During his first few years his family were starving, and the spectre of starvation returned again during the Cultural Revolution.
'With the death of Chairman Mao, and Lai's 18th birthday, things slowly began to improve, but then new problems presented themselves - how do you deal with an economy that is opening up when officials demand bribes? How do you suddenly go from a system where you work on a collective farm to one in which you're expected to strike out on your own? Well, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's, Lai was extremely well equipped for this. He was a natural at setting up businesses, at engaging people, drawing them to his cause, charming them, bribing them.'
Lai was born in 1958 into a peasant family of eight in Shaocuo, a village amounting to no more than a cluster of houses near the port city of Quanzhou. He got started in business in a humble way: having trained as an apprentice blacksmith, he began making car parts. He moved to Xiamen, a city August describes as a typical coastal boom town, and there he began importing televisions and then cars. Then, all of a sudden, it seems (Lai's story is full of whispers and mysteries), he's a multimillionaire property developer, playboy and smuggler. 'Smuggling was the main thing,' August says. 'Cars, oil and cigarettes, mainly. And these profits he used to fund construction projects and assorted hobbies like a football team.'