Lai Changxing, China's most wanted man speaks out

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Lai Changxing built this $18 million replica of the Tiananmen Gate - complete with Mao's photo -

on a 67-hectare site outside Xiamen as a film set and tourist attraction

 

XIAMEN, CHINA–To hear China's rulers tell it, it was the biggest bust in the history of the People's Republic: a smuggling ring that operated during China's "Roaring '90s" that hauled in $US6.8 billion in goods, evaded $US3.8 billion in taxes, saw 14 people get the death penalty – eight were executed – and four commit suicide.

 

The Communist Party of China punished 200 of its officials. Another 150 faced criminal charges. But the biggest fish of all, the alleged mastermind, escaped to Canada.

 

Lai Changxing is topic No. 1 every time a Chinese official meets a Canadian official. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is likely to be no exception when he arrives Wednesday on a four-day visit aimed at healing Canada-China relations.

 

Lai has been aggravating the relationship since he landed in Canada after being tipped off that he was about to be arrested in this south coast city in August 1999. Today, the 51-year-old businessman lives in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, and has resisted every effort to deport him.

 

Former premier Zhu Rongji once vowed he'd go to his grave trying to get Lai back. He might well.

 

A decade on, Lai remains China's most wanted man. He earned the title, the government claims, by managing a massive smuggling operation out of Xiamen in the late 1990s, illegally importing crude oil, cars, cigarettes and other commodities and – infuriatingly, from the government's point of view – buying off members of the Communist Party, police and customs and banking officials to ensure success.

 

At the time, the scandal underlined just how badly Beijing's authority had broken down.

 

State media alleged officials were bought off with money, houses, payments for children's school fees and special services in Lai's seven-storey Yuanhua International headquarters, known as The Red Mansion.

 

The name describes more than just the building's brick. It was borrowed from an 18th-century Chinese novel, A Dream of Red Mansions, depicting the decadent and dissolute lifestyle of an aristocratic family.

 

According to state media, Lai's Red Mansion was a warren of decadence, dripping with $US20 million worth of decoration, a movie theatre, karaoke lounge, banquet hall and half-dozen guest bedrooms. They also claim it featured dozens of tall, willowy young women whose talents included "singing, dancing and massage."

 

But what angered Beijing authorities most was how humbled they were when they sent 400 of their top investigators to Xiamen to gather evidence and shut the smuggling operation down.

 

So comprehensive was Lai's control, according to state media, that Beijing was rebuffed. The investigators' phones were tapped and the investigation blocked.

 

"How embarrassing was that for the central government," says James McGregor, former head of the American Chamber of Commerce, now a Beijing-based consultant. "The investigators went down to Xiamen and got shut out. They had to go back with incredible force, take over a hotel and lock down the whole place."

 

That force totalled 1,000. "The party lost a lot of face," McGregor observes.

 

And that is why Lai matters to this day: No one embarrasses Beijing and gets away with it.

 

"They made such an example of him at the time, they can't back down now," says McGregor. "How do you say, `Let's just let this guy go'?"

 

In fact, the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party – which controls all broadcast and print media in the country – has done such a pervasive job of demonizing Lai that most urbanized Chinese know Lai's name and the fact that he's still in Canada.

 

Rare is the Canadian tourist in China today who doesn't hear from a tour guide, travel agent or taxi driver that Lai is a "bad man" and Canada should hand him back immediately.

 

But few understand the concept of an independent judiciary – the fact that judges in Canada, who have decided Lai's fate, can make decisions independent of government.

 

"Even the (Chinese) government doesn't get it," one Canadian official told the Star last year, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They honestly don't understand how we can't just hand him over."

 

In China, judges are beholden to the ruling Communist Party, and only secondarily to Chinese law.

 

But while Chinese citizens remember Lai, few remember the names of officials who were sentenced to death and later had their sentences commuted to time: people like Yang Qianxian, head of Xiamen's customs; Zhuang Rushun, a powerful figure in the provincial police; Lan Fu, Xiamen's deputy mayor; or Li Jizhou, deputy head of public security for the country.

 

There is no denying Lai is unique. Even in a country of 1.3 billion, his story was one of a kind: a poor, illiterate boy who grew up to become a billionaire developer with tentacles that reached right into the mighty Communist Party.

 

The man didn't just dare to dream, he dared to act on his dreams. And his timing was fortuitous: He brought his ambitions to the fore just as China was opening up to the world and raw capitalism.

 

At the time he fled China, he was in the early stages of building an 88-storey skyscraper, had plans for a 30-storey luxury hotel and owned a professional football team.

 

He was big. And he was connected.

 

"Lai's is an unusual case because he penetrated so deeply into the higher party circles," says McGregor, author of One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Line of Doing Business in China.

 

"He could drive into the enclave of Zhongnanhai (China's White House-like compound) and the guards just waved him in."

 

It probably helped that Lai owned a bulletproof limo, said to have been used by former Chinese president Jiang Zemin at ceremonies to mark the handover of Hong Kong to China, a fact Lai doesn't deny.

 

He was, by all accounts, shrewd and bold. Who in China but Lai, with his connections, could have won approval to build a $US18 million replica of the imperial Tiananmen Gate, complete with Mao's photo and the banner of the Communist Party of China?

 

Lai built it on 67 hectares outside Xiamen to make money as a film set and tourist attraction.

 

With only three years of elementary school education, Lai fashioned his success on instinct, daring and personability.

 

He's also known to be generous. In the hardscrabble village of Shaocuo, about 100 kilometres northeast of Xiamen, where Lai and seven siblings were born and raised, and where he still owns a house, locals miss him. Small wonder. Here his name is carved in marble: at the middle school he constructed, on the village gate he erected and in the senior citizens' centre he built, where local seniors gather to play cards and where, in better times, Lai had monthly pension cheques distributed to the neediest.

 

"Mr. Lai Changxing is a very good human being," says Lai Changmai (no relation), 55, a friendly local. "Wherever he goes, people befriend him. He's not the sort of person who's only kind to his town fellows. He extends kindness to everyone he meets."

 

But what about all the accusations against Lai? "He never did a bad deed in his life," Changmai says.

 

Local cab drivers loved him. His trade in crude oil, reputed to have accounted for as much as one-sixth of Chinese oil imports at one time, was believed to have helped keep gas prices down.

 

As other neighbours gather to examine a recent photo of Lai, Changmai says he hopes Lai will return to China some day – but not yet.

 

"He's safer in Canada for now," Changmai says. "The time isn't right to return, not until his personal matters are resolved."

 

A neighbour takes a look at the photo and smiles.

 

"He's a lot slimmer now," he says. "It's not like before. We used to call him Fatty Xing!"

 

The ancestral home itself is a vast and shining 2,000-square-metre spread that stands out amid Shaocuo's littered laneways. Lai's only living brother, Changtu, recently released after spending eight years in prison for his role in the family enterprise, rents all the space here to migrant workers and their families.

 

The neighbours are happy to show a visitor the family's ancestral altar. Photographs of Lai's father, Wongdeng, and mother, Wang Zhu, grace the walls. Purple banners pronounce love for motherland and hometown. In the middle of the altar, above figures of Buddha and burning incense, is a calendar. The year of the calendar is 1999 – the year Lai slipped away – as if time has stood still here.

 

Time hasn't stood still at the Red Mansion. The manse at No. 2 Huaguang St. in Xiamen's Huli district has been transformed into commercial and office space, dominated by a government-run centre for migrant workers.

 

Still, steady streams of tourists gaze up and wonder whether what they've read in state media actually happened here.

 

"We heard about Lai Changxing long before the actual case," says Wu Wen, a teacher on tour from the faraway province of Xinjiang. "We heard he was a local hero. They say the decorations in there were lavish. A single tap sold for (about $US3,000) when they auctioned everything off."

 

Not far away, a smiling 31-year-old chef stands enjoying a cigarette and gazing upward.

 

"They say the women there were very beautiful and trained in Thailand," he says. "I was told they were as numerous as the clouds."

 

Do you think Lai will come home, he's asked?

 

"No," he says. "They'd kill him."

 

LAI SPEAKS OUT

 

Perhaps the best way to get an interview with Lai Changxing, China's most wanted man, is to arrive unannounced at his ancestral home in the village of Shaocuo, 500 kilometres northeast of Hong Kong.

 

Thirty minutes after leaving the property, the phone rings.

 

It's Lai, calling from Canada.

 

He says he believes Chinese authorities when they say he won't be sentenced to death if he returns to China. But that's as far as it goes, he says.

 

"For the rest," he emphasizes – in this case that means torture – "I don't believe them."

 

Lai's tenuous grip on Canadian soil, a battle he has waged for nearly a decade, hinges on whether he's likely to face torture if he's deported to China. A 2007 Canadian court decision said assurances that he won't be tortured cannot be relied upon.

 

Torture, it seems, remains all too common in China.

 

"I'm very pleased with the Canadian justice system," says Lai, describing it as very different from the Chinese system and "why I came to Canada."

 

Lai, 51, has no problem admitting he committed a crime in China. But that crime is "tax evasion," he says, and nothing else.

 

SOURCE: By Bill Schiller (www.thestar.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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