Chapter 70: Rising
At Anlixin Investment Group in Shanghai's CBD Tower, a middle-aged man with a short crew cut, his hair standing up like needles, sat in an executive chair facing a window with an expansive view, toying with a cigar box. Directly before him were the skyscrapers rising in a crescent around the city center, and the commercial tower he occupied was one of those aircraft carriers that seemed to thrust into the sky.
Anlixin Investment Group was well known in Shanghai's capital circles because its boss was on the Forbes China list, one of its twenty richest men. Zhan Hua, a leading expert in domestic capital operations, was known as "Zhan in the south, Liu in the north." In these circles, he was the equivalent of a celebrity.
Any shift in direction at Zhan Hua's Anlixin Investment could trigger a series of changes by influencing the stock and investment markets. Some people would profit, while others would lose everything. The brutality of market competition secretly filled this dark-brown sea with bloodshed and savagery.
Thus, opinions of Zhan Hua had always been sharply divided. In his early years, some said he had used special client channels to raise funds illegally and make usurious loans, that he had powerful backing, and that he had driven people to their deaths. Some whispered accounts even claimed that he had driven a Land Rover off-road vehicle from the Rongcheng-Shanghai road onto the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, crossing remote mountains and treacherous waters to find a debtor who had fled to Lhasa with the money. That man, who had once been impeccably dressed and discussed life and beautiful women with him in the same club, ended up selling little souvenirs in a Lhasa market and living in a shabby yurt. The attractive female student from a