How Chinese underground banks became the world’s biggest money-launderers

CHINESE FIRMS have dominated almost every legal industry they have entered, from steel to ships, batteries to electric vehicles. They drive down costs and prices and cause no end of consternation in rich countries that are seeing their own manufacturing shrink. Now Chinese underground organisations are taking over one of the world’s biggest illicit industries—the international money-laundering networks that facilitate crimes from drug smuggling to cryptocurrency theft by North Korean hackers.