For two decades, starting in the mid-1990s, this approach was enormously lucrative as Chinese home prices soared. It transformed Hui, a former steel industry employee from a rural village, into China's richest man. And it turned his company, China Evergrande Group, into a vast real-estate empire. But as Evergrande grew increasingly laden with debt, the company resorted to ever-more unorthodox strategies to generate funds.