When Liu Hong, the youngest Chinese journalist to have reported from the Arctic Pole, was bored with his day-to-day job editing propagandist new stories in Beijing, a chance meeting in 2003 with a businessman from Shanxi province changed his career and life.
Liu, then a 30 year-old sub-editor at the state-run China Radio International CRI, met Jia Yueting, an adventurous businessman of the same age, who already had a string of his...