Photo provided to China Daily

Meng remains a household name among insiders, who hail him as the industry's founder. Newbies still study precedents set by his early cases. And his agency's rules remain the gold standard.

The Rhino razor-blade case put him on the cutting edge a year after his agency's founding. Meng helped police bust a counterfeiting operation, enabling northeastern China's first joint venture to recover huge losses and brand trust.

His detectives initially identified a well-guarded suburban factory as a suspected production site. Plan A called for two detectives to access the factory by becoming the boyfriends of two women workers. They got in but didn't find anything solid.

Plan B worked. A detective determined the fake razors were coming from Zhejiang province's Yiwu and contacted the local procuratorate. "I pretended to be a big buyer and placed an order," Meng recalls.

"My detectives and procuratorate staffers set up an ambush. They rushed out and arrested the counterfeiters after they loaded 15 boxes into vans. We seized another 120 boxes of fake goods."

Meng was an award-winning district police station chief in Shenyang who set a record by cracking 150 cases in 40 days before he quit to become the county's first PI, he says.

The central government was then encouraging officials to become entrepreneurs. But it was a friend's business dispute that pushed him to swap jobs.