Zhang arrived alone every morning, usually before 7 o’clock, went up to his office and locked the door. The building manager didn’t know what Zhang’s business was or what he did all day behind the locked door. He only remembered Zhang because he was one of the few people who would say hello when he passed by. He was polite and unremarkable, the manager remembered. He seemed kind.

I managed to meet with one person linked to Zaron: the company’s new titular owner, He Wenxiang. He is a small, bubbly middle-aged man with a fleshy face, short limbs, and deeply-etched laugh lines. When my Chinese colleague, Susie Wu, and I arrived at He Wenxiang’s three-room office in Science City, a government-sponsored business complex in Guangzhou, he greeted us warmly, invited us into a small meeting room and prepared tea on an elaborate hot plate built into the table. We discussed the United States-China trade war and its impact on his freight-forwarding business. Almost everything he said started or ended with a laugh, and as we spoke, he pressed his hands into the black leather couch where he sat, swaying backward and forward and swinging his knees together like an energetic child. We didn’t initially mention Zaron.

The story he told of his life was the story of modern China. He Wenxiang was born in an impoverished village in southern China in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death. He went to middle school, followed by technical school, and then took a job at a supply-and-marketing company in his home province. On May 18, 2001 — he remembers the date precisely — he moved to Guangzhou. The city was booming thanks to China’s economic reform, and migrants like him were flooding in, eager for work and wealth. In his hometown he had made 400 RMB (about $58 today) per month. As soon as he arrived in Guangzhou, he was making double that. In May 2005, four years after leaving his village, He opened his own company, Guangzhou Changda International Freight Co., Limited. Today his company has a staff of 10, annual returns above 10 million RMB (nearly $1.5 million) and business relationships all around the world, shipping anything and everything. He tried expanding his business portfolio several times over the years, but every time he did, he told me, he seemed to end up in trouble. In 2015 a trade company in Beijing defrauded him, and he ended up in a lawsuit; in 2016 he invested 50,000 RMB in a company selling car speakers, but the company took his money and disappeared; that same year, he invested in a medicine company that said it had found a cure for burns, and after investing 100,000 RMB, He Wenxiang was ripped off again, and ended up in another lawsuit.

I brought the documents detailing He Wenxiang’s directorship of Zaron and three other Hong Kong-registered companies. When I handed him the forms and asked about the companies, he looked shocked — he grabbed the papers and began flipping wildly, searching out his signature on every page. I examined his expression closely, hoping to pick up on whether his dismay was genuine.

He ran into another room and returned with a thick folder of papers and documents relating to his real company. He said that he had registered a shell company in Hong Kong in 2012, solely for the purpose of moving money more easily into and out of the mainland. In 2017, he had seen an advertisement in a QQ group — a Chinese messaging and social media service — asking if anyone had a company in Hong Kong that they were willing to sell. He Wenxiang’s shell company was no longer of use to him, so he sold it for 10,000 RMB. He never asked why the person wanted a company, or couldn’t just open one themselves.

Maybe, he suggested, someone had used his information and signature from that transaction to steal his identity and make him as a scapegoat for Zaron and the three other firms he now controlled. He took out his phone, called his accounting firm, and asked if they knew that he was director of so many companies.

“I cannot help you,” the woman on the phone said. “You don’t even know how many companies you own? Take care of it yourself.”