Money Machine

Chapter 5Dancing with the Wolves

The architecture of Shenzhen's Wu Zhou Guest House was modern and grandiose. Even the name suggested immensity: Wu Zhou is Chinese for five continents, and guest house is a misnomer leading you to imagine a quaint and quiet setting. But five continents fit, as the name for this ambitious, sprawling structure. From a distance, Wu Zhou looked like the upper body of a giant robot, with a pair of wings spread wide. The body of the robot was a 10‐story building, and the ground floor an enormous lobby that led to several banquet halls, including a ballroom that could host 2,000 guests. Branching from the center were two wings, which held several hundred guestrooms each. Its reddish frame was studded with large glass windows, and the entire building was surrounded by gardens, flowerbeds, and trees. The hotel complex had been built by the city government in 1997, and it remained in government hands. Today, almost every international five‐star hotel brand has a property in Shenzhen, including Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton, St. Regis, and Shangri‐La. But when we arrived, in 2002, Wu Zhou was one of only a few high‐end places to stay.

We came to know the sprawling complex well in those first few months we were navigating the SBD deal. I rarely spent the night—Shenzhen was only an hour's drive from either my home or office in Hong Kong—but we visited often. Under the framework of “one country, two systems,” a visitor from Hong Kong to Shenzhen still had to ...