IT IS LATE May 2011, and a team of 10 agents fans out across China’s Guangxi and Fujian provinces, taking photographs, asking questions, making notes. The pictures show a series of unprepossessing locations: a grey high-rise apartment block with laundry hanging from every available inch of balcony space; a scuffed "Welcome" mat beneath a security door leading in to a dimly lit fifth floor apartment room; the overgrown exterior of a three-storey office block.
These anonymous agents work tirelessly for two months for a 35-year-old American, Carson Block, whose tiny research agency is unknown outside the world of Chinese stock investing, and whose previous business ventures include a failed self-storage company in Shanghai called Love Box. The photographs, of the offices of two private Chinese forestry companies, will be used in a 39-page report that targets a Canada-listed, China-based company that could not be more...
