Download Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China's Most Wanted Man AudioBook Free
Due to a mix-up, Oliver August stumbles onto the search 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 rise and fall, August sets out to get the self-made billionaire, in the hope that if he is able to understand how Lai reinvented himself, he will also better understand the tectonic forces transforming modern China. Lai embodies the storyline of China's recent success as well as its Achilles' heel: the blending of its command economy with the free market is riddled with corruption.Moving ever nearer to the elusive tycoon, August introduces us to a people amid head-spinning self-transformation. We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of "Miss Temporaries"; powerful businessmen on the debt-settling round of nocturnal golf; and a foie gras king who markets his goose liver by the ton and prefers it deep fried. That is a China seething with desire, engaged in a slapstick fight using its past, and hell bent on the future. In the Red Mansion is the first book to fully capture the giddy vibe of modern-day China and its darker vulnerabilities.
