Still, Yan expressed confidence that business would roll on. "I've secured all these contracts and they are going to be completed," he said. "China is so big that you cannot have one rule for all places. Americans have very strict laws, but China has very flexible laws. And where American companies focus on business issues, Chinese enterprises focus on personal relationships."

Yan was born in 1960 in the coastal province of Jiangsu, the youngest of nine children. His parents were schoolteachers. They occupied a comfortable brick house near the home of the premier and diplomat Zhou Enlai. But as the chaos of the Cultural Revolution exploded in the mid-1960s, Yan's family was sent to a poor village. There, they lived without enough blankets to cut the winter chill, subsisting on rice husks normally reserved for pigs.

"After all those hardships, I wanted to live a good life," Yan said in the interview, reclining in a leather-backed chair in the library of a five-star hotel in Shanghai. Trim and casual with slicked hair, he wore a zipper down jacket, dark slacks and black leather loafers.

In his 20s, Yan was a schoolteacher on track to become an administrator at a high school in his hometown of Huaian. His wages were about $150 per month, plus health insurance and a pension. But in 1986, with China early in its economic transformation, he joined those "jumping into the sea," relinquishing the stability of the state system for the new business world.

He took a job as a clerk at a local cement factory, earning a mere $10 a month. His relatives fretted. But three months later he was appointed manager, securing $500 a month and a perch from which he would amass an empire.

Yan expanded into the construction-materials business by taking over a bankrupt state-owned collective. In 1992, he won a $1 million road-building contract in Nanjing, the provincial capital. The following year, he got the rights to build a section of a new highway linking Shanghai to Nanjing. He launched his first private business in 1995, Jiangsu Pacific Engineering Ltd., a construction company focused on projects in the province.

The business model that would make Yan rich took shape in 2002 with the launching of China Pacific. Yan took control of 17 state-owned companies with assets exceeding $750 million, according to the state press. In many instances, he bought them without putting up any cash by packaging successful operations with bankrupt factories, relieving local officials of having to pay pensions to retirees and compensate fired workers.

In China, many private businesses have been launched with assets from state-owned firms. Yan declined to detail where he got his capital.

"When one project succeeds, I invest the winnings in a bigger project," he said.

In Baotou, a broad city laid out on a grid where the grasslands yield to the desert, Yan found a willing customer. The area has substantial precious metal deposits. Officials want to develop roads to attract investment. They had in mind a concrete overpass linking the regional highway to their downtown.

"It's our grand entranceway," said an official in the city's Ministry of Transportation, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, citing rules barring unauthorized contact with foreign journalists. "The overpass gives visitors the impression that we are a civilized city."

Baotou first put the project out for bid, awarding a contract to a state-owned company. But capital controls deprived that firm of needed bank finance, opening the way for Yan.

Since setting up an office here in the spring of 2004, Yan and his representatives had feasted with local officials inside traditional Mongolian yurts, toasting with porcelain cups of horse-milk liquor and dining on such local delicacies as stewed camel's foot. In the fall of 2004, Yan's company landed a $23 million contract to build the overpass. The job was finished last July.

Next, Yan's firm renovated a boulevard known as "Corruption Street," its sidewalks lined with karaoke lounges and massage parlors. It built a 10-lane strip of concrete linking City Hall to the railway station, then added lights and a grand entrance to the government center. This year, China Pacific plans to put in a riverfront promenade.

For Yan and his company, the isolated city is now the source of contracts worth as much as $1.5 billion.

Honest money, Yan said. "All the Chinese media has been questioning whether I've gotten my contracts through closed-door dealing. But the prosecutor has never come to look for any trouble. Everything is transparent."