CHINA : Real or Not, Crime Tales Hold Beijing in Thrall : Is a rags-to-riches restaurateur dead or alive?

Just to set the record straight: Ah Jing said she is not dead. Nor was she kidnaped. Nor--as one popular version of the story goes--was her lover snatched by underworld thugs and murdered.

Still, the news of the celebrated Beijing restaurateur’s well-being might surprise and even disappoint many people in the Chinese capital these days.

Beijing, like much of China, is preoccupied with fantastic crime tales. Cab drivers point to popular restaurants and whisper knowingly: “Owner was kidnaped by the mob. Family paid big ransom.”

Picking up on a centuries-old detective story tradition in popular literature, daily newspapers carry serialized “true crime” tales of modern lawbreakers and sleuths.

With crime rates soaring, Beijing police reporters have plenty of material to satisfy readers’ appetite for the lurid. But the talk of the town is the tale of Ah Jing, the 27-year-old restaurateur.

The eldest of three children born to a Cantonese-speaking family in the southern city of Guangzhou, a penniless Ah Jing came to Beijing in 1987 to seek her fortune.

It was a time when privately owned stores and restaurants were just beginning to flourish in the Chinese capital.

Ah Jing, borrowing money from friends and a business license from a Beijing associate, opened a small Cantonese restaurant on a Beijing alley.

The restaurant, complete with a traditional shrine to Gen. Guan Yu, the patron saint of businesses, was an instant success, and eventually expanded to three stories in the same narrow alley.

Ah Jing became one of the most celebrated heroines of the new entrepreneurial China.

But the young restaurateur soon split with her partners and founded a new, even fancier, restaurant on the other side of Beijing.

The former partners went to court, and a nasty feud ensued.

Several months ago, stories began circulating wildly that Ah Jing, the rags-to-riches heroine, had been murdered when she refused to pay protection money to a local mafia.

The rumor swelled, and the owners of several other glitzy Beijing restaurants were also said to be enveloped in the protection racket.

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The stories gained momentum because at the same time the press was reporting several confirmed cases of business-related kidnapings.

“Once nearly extinct, existing only in the sketchy memories of old folks,” wrote Zhang Ya in the official Justice Ministry newspaper, “kidnaping has risen from the dead and is slowly making a comeback.”

As for the fate of Ah Jing, employees at her new restaurant insist she is alive but is keeping a low profile on the advice of one of her favorite fortunetellers.

And a woman identifying herself as Ah Jing said in a telephone call from Guangzhou that the stories of her demise are quite understandable.

“I have been spending very little time at the restaurant,” she said.

“When my regular customers found I was not there, naturally they assumed that something had happened to me.”