Xi Upends the Secretive World of $10,000-an-Hour China Experts

Private conversations with corporate insiders and ex-government officials that cost upwards of $10,000 an hour. Coded language and blurred regulatory lines.

For hedge funds and other global investors, China’s vast web of “expert networks” has become a key tool for navigating an opaque but potentially lucrative economic powerhouse. For Xi Jinping’s Communist Party, the secretive industry represents something far more ominous: a threat to national security that must be reined in.

That contradiction is now sending shockwaves through the financial world as China’s government cracks down on the expert networks it had showered in praise less than a decade ...