The China Hustle Movie Script

But this time, the lies at the center of the scam were 100 percent legal.

This time, the crime was based in China.

Dan's part of the story begins here, far from Wall Street.

The small investment shop he ran with his partner Maj had just been crushed by the stock market crash.

Three o'clock. What's goin' on?

People who had hedge funds in 2008 closed their funds and started a new fund.

- Chris, you got anything?

- Finishing working on what I'm working on now.

I'm just gonna... We decided right away we weren't gonna do that.

We were gonna make everybody their money back.

They needed big gains, quickly.

But with the whole Western world on the brink of another depression, prospects seemed bleak.

It wasn't hopeless everywhere, though.

The people in the know steered Dan to China.

It was this exploding market.

It was the only market that people actually were confident would go up, was China.

This is gonna be the largest economy in the world.

Let's invest in it now.

It blew my mind 'cause it was so completely different from what I thought it would be it was booming.

There were certain cities, you'd go one time, and you'd go a year later again, and suddenly there'd be a whole new shopping district that didn't exist last time.

Very dynamic.

Gold rush.

There was almost no company that you could invest in in 2009 that was China-based that you would lose money on.

For an American set of eyes looking at this, you were just like, "Well, my gosh, "China really is this golden land of rapid economic growth." I really thought, "Well, jeez, you know, "the American century is over now.

This is it." Everyone wanted a piece of China.