“You look like you won the lottery,” I said, registering the suit, the car, the man himself. This was a guy who a few years before had trouble picking up the tab when we got drunk with some of his Japanese clients at a nightclub in Hong Kong. I’d had to lend him three hundred dollars to pay the bill.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I put a big bet on China, and my number came up. I got rich.”

As the chauffeur navigated the crowded streets of Beijing, Michael explained how this miracle had happened. It had started with the fact that he was a smart lawyer who spoke Chinese and English with equal fluency. Those attributes made him a valuable adviser for Western companies that were considering launching joint ventures in China. His white male partners had continued to take him for granted, but as the Chinese economy began to explode in the late 1980s they realized that he was a profit center for the firm, and made him a partner. At that point, Michael said, he began taking revenge for the years he had been treated as a doormat. He demanded an ever-larger share of the pie, and in 1991, when his partners finally balked, he walked away and started his own firm, taking most of his old clients with him. His business had continued to expand in step with the Chinese economy.

“I’m a conglomerate, Eric,” he said. “I’ve opened law offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taipei. I have so much business, I’ve had to refer some of it to my old firm.”

Michael had booked a table at a restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, a vast Stalinist edifice next to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The chauffeur once again scrambled to open the door. Leaving the car, I remarked on the unusual Hong Kong license plate: “8222.”

“The numbers mean ‘Prosperity-Easy-Easy-Easy’ to the Chinese,” he said. “That license plate is worth a thousand referrals.”

“How did you get it?”

He pressed his thumb and forefinger together. “The same way you get everything in China, Eric. I paid someone some money.”

The restaurant was on the seventh floor. The maître d’ welcomed Michael deferentially and escorted us to a table by the window overlooking Raise the People’s Consciousness Cultural Palace and, beyond that, Tiananmen Square. The food began arriving almost immediately. Michael had ordered a banquet: bears paws, hot Szechuan shrimp, a whole fish fried in spicy oil, Beijing duck. I felt as if I were in the company of a visiting mandarin. As we ate, Chinese politicians and businessmen stopped by the table and jabbered away at Michael in Chinese. He would listen to each of them and then offer a few words of advice. He was evidently the Chinese superlawyer—the man to see in Beijing.