Desmond Shum

This book is an exercise in self-hagiography and self-excuplation that nevertheless fails to disguise what a repulsive human being its author is.

Having starting to read this book, I was highly suspicious that anyone was in a position to write about the intimate, person to person, inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party and its governance of that great country. Also, I took for granted that there would be corruption and vengeance but was left surprised how massive and thorough this problem is. That virtually every high ranking party member was touched by this made him or her vulnerable to a rival who would bring him/her down show more because he/she was corrupt. This led me to think of all those university students I taught on the mainland and whether they were ready or had the slightest chance to survive this toxic mix of Xi Jinping's rule. It should be pointed out how easy for these corrupt venal Chinese officials to find alliances,especially financial, in the West. Having noted all of this I am not sure we can trust this writer on many fronts because he often was immediately involved in this and would have the strongest of motivations to remove or position himself from the worst he has depicted. There is a chance that this will be the best we can get.

Quotes: (page 191) “In retrospect, the disappearance of airport manager Le Peiying in 2006 and his subsequent arrest on corruption charges should have raised alarm bells that broader changes were afoot. I ignored them, partially because I was so busy dealing with the fallout of his arrest and trying to keep the airport project afloat.
But with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that Li's downfall came about not simply because he was addicted to gambling and lost millions at the baccarat table. Startled at the liberal tendencies of my fellow capitalists, the Chines Communist Party, starting in the mid 2000s, moved to weaken the moneyed class, uproot the sprouts of civil society that we'd planted, and reassert te Party's ideological and economic control of Chinese society. As part of the effort, the Party sought to bolster state-owned enterprises to the detriment of private firms.”

(page 192) “The new GM sent senior members of his staff to our company to exert more control over the joint venture. Five people used to participate in our joint-venture board meetings. Now two dozen officials from the airport alone showed up. And they all had different opinions. It complicated the management structure. Before, I'd made most of the decisions. Now, I had all these people coming in and their loyalty wasn't to the joint venture---it was to the airport.
People began to question why we, as private entrepreneurs, had won the right to develop the logistics hub. No matter that no one but us would have been able to arrange the shotgun marriage between Shunyi and the airport. All that history was forgotten. Now it was: Who are these capitalists trying to privatize part of what should have been a state-owned facility? This type of attitude wasn't confined to our project; it infected the entire economy. 'State-owned enterprises march forward, private firms retreat/ became the new buzzwords, signaling a shift at the top of the Party. State-owned firms began to carry out forced mergers with successful private companies. Entrepreneurs had been the engine of China's growth, but we were never trusted.”

(page 237) “For the Wen family and, more broadly, the upper ranks of the Chines Communist Party, the story struck like an earthquake. The piece marked the second time that year that a Western news agency had detailed the wealth of a leading Communist family. Several months earlier, n June 2012,The Bloomberg news agency had run a similar story about the fortune held by relatives of Vice President---and soon to be Part chief---Xi Jinping. Interestingly, no one fell on his or her sword for that piece, like Whitney would for Auntie Zhang.
The Party reacted to the Wen story by blocking the New York Times website.”

(page 251) “On July 31, 2013, a few months before Whitney anf I separated, I addressed the Aspen Institute at a Leadership in Action program in Aspen, Colorado.....I argued that although China was nominally a Communist state, 'how it's being run is completely different.' Each successive administration, I observed, had to be more responsive to public opinion. 'Mao was one man. When Deng Xiaoping came in, he had to consult with two or three elders. Jiang Zemin had to listen to even more. Power is more dispersed---just looking at China as a single state never changing is not correct.' Dressed in my casually hip style---a sunset-colored T, dark jacket, and designer sneakers with no-show socks---I embodied the idea that China would dovetail with the West. But privately, the concerns I harbored about China's system were growing with the rise of the Party's new leader, Xi Jinping.” show less

Fascinating tale , quite moving and revealing of the way China operates internally. A touch of naïveté or ingenuousness from a man who has been something like a billionaire among billionaires. it's personal narrative, with little analysis, but the China game goes like this:

The party has total power and is designed to keep wealth and power in the hands of its own "red aristocracy". It is totally corrupt.
Succession to power is handled mainly by accusations of corruption. Such accusations show more normally lead to loss of position, imprisonment or death. Most people are corrupt so it's easy enough to find targets. There are laws but they are vague and flexible. If the accused is not really corrupt, the required story can be invented.
Private business is permitted because it's needed. State operations are inherently inefficient, and the party knows that (without being able to admit it). Opportunities to do business (permits, contracts) are sold, not officially but through a back door of schmoozing , bribery, and other forms of corruption.
So non-Party wealth and influence is periodically clipped like roses in a garden
When a business leader begins to threaten the Party's power in any way, they are removed.
Mao ground the country, its people, its resources, beneath his heel. Deng opened the door to the system as described above. show less

Red Roulette-Desmond Shum, author; Tim Chiou, narrator
When I chose this book, I believed it was a mystery about a successful Chinese woman who had been made to disappear by malignant Chinese government officials. It was not until the end, when she was finally mentioned, that I realized that it was about so much more than that. Desmond Shum was born in Shanghai. At an early age he was moved to Hong Kong by his family in order to escape the abuse of the Chinese government. Later on, he studied show more in America and was offered a green card. He refused it because he felt a strong feeling of nationalism for his own country. Today, he is safely out of China, and he has exposed the massive dishonesty and corruption there, with its crooked way of doing business and the way it manipulates people to achieve unquestioned control.
Carefully, and sometimes tediously, Shum outlines how he met his wife Whitney Duan, how their relationship grew slowly, than deepened, and then soured, how they climbed the ladder of success achieving a fortune most people cannot even imagine, rubbed hands with the rich and famous in business in the West and in China, played by the rules, but in the end, still fell victim to the power hungry and the corruption. Power and money often changed hands in China, and only those in the upper echelons of the government were able to amass any kind of fortune or to achieve success.
Whitney would not recognize the debauchery for what it was and maintained her own belief that she was safe and in control there. However, she was participating in a system that would take her down, as it has taken down so many others, simply because someone decided that she was the enemy. In order to remove a person, an influential person in power would simply engineer a situation to shame, humiliate and charge that person falsely, or security would simply show up and take the accused away. There was no way to refute the claims or fight the system. Often, they were imprisoned and/or executed. Whitney was kidnapped, and no one knows where she was taken or if she is alive today. No one has been notified of her whereabouts. She simply fell out of favor and suffered the consequences.
The author explains how Xi Jinping engineered his own rise to power, his own behind the scenes arrangements to bring himself to the pinnacle of success. He simply removed all those that were in his way, all those that opposed him. He found and supported those that would defend his cause, and they gave him the control he desired. He engineered a policy of no term limits so he could be leader for life. For those who helped him there are rewards, but there will be no guarantee that they will always be in favor. The system is run by self-serving, heartless megalomaniacs propelled by their desire to maintain their power. They are all brainwashed by the system in China and know of little else.
All the deals made have some form of graft, some sort of bribery or payoff. Huge sums exchanged hands to make bargains that were sometimes unfair, but were necessary and agreed upon by all the parties. In this way, fortunes were amassed and deals were finalized. The ladder of success, however high, will teeter unless someone is there to hold it in place. The complete and widespread corruption captures the helpless, and they fall victim to its demands. Citizens and businesses fall in and out of favor because of changing rules and the demands made by those currently in control. Desmond lived through it, played the game and then realized he had better make his exit. He saved his son and himself. They live in England now, and they are safe, but Whitney has disappeared and there are only rumors to explain her absence.
Although it is sometimes repetitive, the timeline meanders, the details, like descriptions of menus and wines become distracting, and the names are often confusing, the complete decay of the government and leaders of China is displayed across the pages. I suggest a print copy since the foreign names are difficult to imagine in the audio. The reader, however, does an excellent job and does not take over the narrative or distract the listener from the book with too much emotion or too much emphasis. He reads it pitch perfectly. show less