Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man [Hardcover]

Oliver August (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 18, 2007

Inside the Red Mansion is a suspenseful, slyly entertaining journey into the heart of the new China. Due to a mix-up on a routine reporting assignment, Oliver August stumbles onto the hunt for China’s most wanted man, Lai Changxing, an illiterate tycoon on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in this outsized tale of Lai's rise and fall, August sets out to find the self-made billionaire, hoping that if he can understand how Lai reinvented himself, he will also better grasp the tectonic forces transforming modern China.

Lai embodies the story of China’s recent success as well as its Achilles’ heel: its command economy, blended with the free market, is riddled with corruption. Moving ever closer to the elusive tycoon, August introduces us to a people in the midst of head-spinning self-transformation. We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of “Miss Temporaries”; powerful businessmen on a debt-settling round of nocturnal golf; and a foie gras king who markets his goose liver by the ton and prefers it deep fried. This is a China seething with desire, engaged in a slapstick fight with its past, and hell-bent on the future.

Inside the Red Mansion is the first book to capture the giddy vibe of contemporary China and its darker vulnerabilities.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. August, former Beijing bureau chief for the London Times, crafts a harrowing, super-detailed story of a China exploding with runaway growth yet still trapped in the past and ruled by the ethos of tufei—the classical Mandarin word for bandit. By turns delightfully surprising and slap-across-the-face sobering, August's yarn centers on his quest to find Lai Changxing, a country boy turned self-made billionaire, thug and China's most wanted man. August takes him from a private club (where [f]locks of sequined mermaids waltzed past in merry circles, followed by operatic massifs of rouged Red Guards goose-stepping to 'The Sound of Music' ) and Xiamen, an out-of-control coastal boomtown (with [a] furious sea of cement and marble, wave upon wave of high-rises rippling out, strips of tarmac submerged at bottomless depths) to a drab government building in Vancouver, B.C., where Lai was being held on immigration charges. August finally sees Lai not as a freewheeling gangster but as a man diminished—Nothing about his physical bearing suggested the lyrical countenance of a tragic hero or a human devil... This must-read, can't-put-it down tale shows the China only hinted at on the evening news—a place of outsized egos, over-the-top commercial development and shadowy, tradition-bound authoritarian rule.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

In 1999, China’s Public Enemy No. 1 was "Fatty" Lai Changxing, an illiterate rice farmer turned real-estate and shipping mogul who fled the country, accused of heading a multibillion-dollar smuggling ring. This account, by a former Beijing bureau chief of the London Times, casts Lai’s rise and fall as a cautionary tale of boomtown China. The author tours the remains of Lai’s empire—a film studio built as a replica of the Forbidden City; a posh brothel where he bribed Party officials with the company of "Miss Temporarys"—but he reserves his most vivid prose for the "fakers and fortune seekers, oddballs and outlaws" he meets along the way: canny dance-hall girls, magnates of karaoke and foie gras, an "honesty doctor" who treats patients in a public park. His portraits are so lively that when Lai is finally arrested, at a casino in Niagara Falls, it’s almost incidental.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618714987
• ISBN-13: 978-0618714988
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,220,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Man on the Run, September 23, 2007

By 

Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

This belongs to the well-stocked genre of "young western newspaperman goes to China and then writes first book telling world of what he has seen in the Middle Kingdom." It is among the best of such books in terms of relaying information and providing insights, although it falls short of the first literary rank.

The use here of one specific corruption case is an excellent device to show the shadowy ambiguities of the striking political, social, and economic transitions that have been underway in the PRC over the past two decades.

The author gives a very good picture of the tension between the needs of modernization and the country's still highly authoritative government: it being no surprise that since Mao's death the stunning economic expansion in China has been propelled in no small part by massive official corruption.

Since it appears Mr. August is now working in the Middle East, I expect another enlightening (and even better written) book in the years ahead on that troubled area.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read about wild times, August 17, 2007

By 

Maya Alexandri - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

Tracking China's super-smuggler, Oliver August manages to capture the breadth and speed of change in modern China. August is by turns intrepid in his mission and charming in his account of his findings, as his search takes him from a foie gras farm where goose livers are grown as large as beefsteaks; to a golf course where games unfold at midnight between drunken competitors attended by girl caddies in hot pants; to an upscale holding cell (when the Chinese police interrogate him in a hotel room). The portrait of China that emerges from this informative book is lovingly-rendered in August's wry, winking prose. A fast read, this book is a must for anyone interested in China and the impact it's having on the world.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening, entertaining, and food for thought, August 18, 2007

By 

Sinophile (New Delhi, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

This book combines a portrait of China's exhilarating social and economic transformation with one of its underbelly, which in Oliver August's telling proves to be sleazy, gaudy, and often very funny. Many of the characters whom the author meets and chronicles during his time in China demonstrate the same breathtaking entrepreneurial daring and wild imaginativeness as the book's supposed antagonist, the bandit king Lai. By comparison, the American robber barons of old seem boring, their aspirations staid. But "Inside the Red Mansion" raises serious issues too, particularly in its implication that the Chinese government plays a dangerous game with those on the front lines of capitalism in that country. Just who controls whom, and how long the government can continue to pull all the strings before the puppet collapses - or breaks free and dances on its own - are real and urgent questions, and this book provides a lot of food for thought along with its colorful and constantly surprising narrative.