Who Cancels Lunch With Warren Buffett? A Chinese Tycoon Did, but Why?

BEIJING — Everybody knew where Justin Sun, a brash Chinese millionaire and cryptocurrency celebrity, was going to be this week. He had paid a record $4.6 million to have a charity lunch with Warren Buffett, the investing guru, in San Francisco, and he was counting down the days on social media.

Then Mr. Sun, citing ill health, postponed the lunch three days before it was to happen, sending the Chinese media and internet into overdrive. One outlet reported that he would be held in China once he returned while the authorities investigated his financial dealings. Another asserted that he had never left China in the first place.

Mr. Sun denied it all on social media, posting photos and a video of himself with San Francisco landmarks in the background. But the reports, while sounding as though they had been ripped from the pages of an overwrought thriller, were not without precedent.

As the Chinese authorities take an increasingly heavy-handed approach to policing the business and financial worlds, executives have been known to disappear for months and even years.

The chairman of a conglomerate that bought the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York was taken away, emerging a year later at a televised court hearing where he pleaded guilty to financial fraud. One of China’s wealthiest financiers was wheeled out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong two years ago and is now widely believed to be on the mainland. An oil tycoon has not been seen since early last year, and his company is being taken apart by officials.

The gone-in-the-night style of policing has sometimes turned China’s business community upside down. Speculation that the billionaire chairman of one of China’s biggest private conglomerates, Fosun Group, had been detained finally led him to do a video stream to assure investors that he was fine.