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Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China Hardcover – September 7, 2021
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SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by THE ECONOMIST and FINANCIAL TIMES
This “powerful and disturbing” (Bill Browder, author of Red Notice) New York Times bestseller is narrated by a man who, with his wife, Whitney Duan, rose to the top levels of power and wealth—and then fell out of favor. Whitney had been disappeared four years before, but this book led to her dramatic reemergence.
As Desmond Shum was growing up impoverished in China, he vowed his life would be different. Through hard work and sheer tenacity he earned an American college degree and returned to his native country to establish himself in business. There, he met his future wife, the highly intelligent and equally ambitious Whitney Duan who was determined to make her mark within China’s male-dominated society. Whitney and Desmond formed an effective team and, aided by relationships they formed with top members of China’s Communist Party, the so-called red aristocracy, he vaulted into China’s billionaire class. Soon they were developing the massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, and they followed that feat with the creation of one of Beijing’s premier hotels. They were dazzlingly successful, traveling in private jets, funding multi-million-dollar buildings and endowments, and purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art.
But in 2017, their fates diverged irrevocably when Desmond, while residing overseas with his son, learned that his now ex-wife Whitney had vanished along with three coworkers.
This vivid, explosive memoir shows “how the Chinese government keeps business in line—and what happens when businesspeople overstep” (The New York Times) and is a “singular, highly readable insider account of the most secretive of global powers” (The Spectator).
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateSeptember 7, 2021
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101982156155
- ISBN-13978-1982156152
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
A Financial Times Best Book of 2021
“Shum knew he was picking a fight with the CCP the minute he decided to write Red Roulette and is aware he is now a marked man — he has reviewed his will and made sure his affairs are in order. ‘This is my David and Goliath fight,” he says. ‘Except it’s Goliath times a million.’”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
"A memoir that shows how the Chinese government keeps business in line -- and what happens when businesspeople overstep...Red Roulette shows how government officials keep the rules fuzzy and the threat of a crackdown ever present."
--The New York Times
“Offers a rare peek into the luxe lifestyles of China’s elites…a vivid portrait.”
—The Washington Post
“Full of fabulous titbits….It’s [the] level of detail on Beijing’s inner workings—published in English for the world to read—that has clearly spooked the communist high command….A singular, highly readable insider account of the most secretive of global powers.”
—The Spectator
“The machine was right to be worried. Large scandals of the recent past are revisited in Red Roulette… [The book] details an elite China built on secrets and fear, in which family ties are one of the only reliable bonds of trust.”
—David Rennie, The Economist
“Red Roulette was already shaping up as a must-read account of corruption at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. But the sudden reemergence last week of Whitney Duan, Shum’s former wife, four years after disappearing into apparent arbitrary detention in Beijing, has made the book a news story.”
—POLITICO, China Watcher
“Red Roulette is quickly shaping up to be the new must-read among observers of Chinese elite politics…..A vivid portrait of the splashy lifestyles of China’s business and political elites…Shum deploys his piquant sense of detail and offers a rare glimpse into the webs and knots of China’s political and business royalty.”
—The Diplomat
“[A] thrilling debut… This well-written account is imbued with an aura of inevitable tragedy, and Shum’s searing indictment of ‘a political system that mouthed Communist slogans while officials gorged themselves at the trough of economic reforms’ is enthralling. Those interested in Xi Jinping’s China will be riveted.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A deliberative, slow-building, suspenseful narrative that reveals numerous insights about the mechanics of power and greed… Observers of contemporary Chinese affairs, consistently intriguing and murky territory, will find much to interest them here. A riveting look inside ‘the roulette-like political environment of the New China.’”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Gripping…sensational…rich, nuanced, and helped change my mind about much that I thought I understood about China."
—David Barboza, The Wire
“Students of Chinese politics and business will appreciate Shum’s personal narrative of China’s turbulent economic rise; this book deserves a wide audience.”
—Library Journal
“Powerful and disturbing…The Chinese government will not be happy with this book. Desmond Shum lifts the curtain behind the supposed Chinese economic miracle, portraying government leaders driven by corruption, conflict of interest, and greed. Rarely has anyone in modern China been brave enough to violate its oppressive code of silence and give an honest firsthand account of what really goes on in the corridors of power. Shum breaks all the rules so we can see it for ourselves and it’s not pretty.”
—Bill Browder, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Red Notice
“Red Roulette is everything those who follow China have been waiting for: a deeply personal epic that reveals the idealism, ecstasy, and avarice of post-Deng Xiaoping China…There simply isn't another inside history of today's Chinese leadership like this one. If it spawns a new genre of Chinese personal histories—as I hope it will—Red Roulette will remain the classic of its category. Desmond Shum’s book is riveting, moving, and dangerous.”
—Matt Pottinger, former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor
“Desmond Shum’s Red Roulette gives us a rare inside peek at the cossetted Chinese elite who parlay their connections with Politburo members into billions. This is a world of Chateau Lafite, Rolls Royces, and $100 million yachts, where friendships are strictly transactional. Although the book can be fun and gossipy, it's also poignant, and, ultimately, we come away with rich insights into the workings of the Chinese Communist Party and the billionaires it has spawned.”
—Barbara Demick, author of National Book Award Finalist Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, and former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FROM MY BACKGROUND, THERE WAS little reason to believe that I’d find myself at the nexus of economic and political power in China at the turn of the twenty-first century. I wasn’t born into the red aristocracy—the offspring of the leaders of the elite group of Communists who seized power in China in 1949. Far from it. My personality also didn’t seem suited for the role.
I was born in Shanghai in November 1968 into a family split between those who’d been persecuted after China’s Communists came to power and those who hadn’t. According to Communist doctrine, my father’s side belonged to one of the “five black categories”: landlord, rich peasant, counterrevolutionary, bad element, and rightist. Before the Communist revolution of 1949, my ancestors were landlords. They were doubly damned if you factor in the additional charge of having relatives overseas. Anywhere else in the world these would be marks of distinction, but in China of the 1950s and 1960s, economic success and international connections meant you were, as the Communists said, “born rats.” The family’s lowly status prevented my dad from attending better schools and saddled him with a grudge against the world that he’d carry all his life.
My father’s people were landowning gentry from Suzhou, a small city in the Yangtze River delta known as the Venice of China thanks to its luxurious gardens and picturesque canals. Family legend has it that as Communist forces advanced in 1949 in their civil war against the Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai-shek, the Shum clan dumped its valuables down a well on the family compound. That land was subsequently expropriated by the Communist government and today is the site of a state-owned hospital. At a reunion years ago, an elderly relative gave me a very specific location and tried to convince me to dig up the family treasure. Seeing as China’s government considers everything under the earth to be state property, I demurred.
My grandfather on my father’s side was a prominent lawyer in Shanghai before the revolution. As the Communists tightened their grip on the nation, he, like many of the well-off, had a chance to flee. But my grandfather balked at the prospect of becoming a lowly refugee. To him, Hong Kong, a favored destination for migrants from Shanghai, could never compare with his home city, then known as the Paris of the East. Buying into Communist propaganda that the Party would partner with members of the capitalist class to build the “New China,” he decided to stay.
My father never forgave his dad for that fateful decision, holding that his naive belief in the Party cost my dad his youth. In 1952, Party authorities shut down my grandfather’s law firm and drove the whole family, including my father’s two brothers and a sister, out of its three-story row house in Shanghai, which Grandpa had purchased with gold bars before the revolution. My grandfather took everyone back to Suzhou. Everyone, that is, except my dad, who, at ten years old, was directed to stay in Shanghai to finish grade school.
The next few years were difficult. My father bounced between a series of relatives, scrounging meals and a place to sleep. He often went to bed hungry. One uncle was particularly kind to my dad, even though the revolution hadn’t been kind to him. Before the Communist takeover he’d been a successful businessman. The Communists took over his company and assigned him a job as a rickshaw driver at one of the factories he’d owned. The Communists were masters at that kind of treatment, designed to destroy a man’s most prized possessions—his dignity and self-respect.
As the scion of a capitalist lawyer’s family in a Communist country, my father learned to keep his head down. Living on his own made him resilient and taught him to survive. Still, his troubles only strengthened his anger at his father for keeping the family in China.
Growing up hungry and alone in Shanghai instilled in my dad a fear of forming deep connections with those around him. He hated owing anyone anything and just wanted to rely on himself. That same outlook was instilled in me, and, even today, I’m still uncomfortable feeling indebted. Only later, after I met the woman who’d become my wife, would I learn how isolating this can be. In the ebb and flow of life, if you’re never beholden to anyone, Whitney would say, no one will ever be beholden to you and you’ll never build deeper relationships. Although I spent years fearing my father, I now see him as a lonely figure who battled the world alone.
My father’s disapproved-of class background made it impossible for him to attend one of China’s better colleges. Instead, he was assigned to a teachers’ training school in Shanghai where he majored in Chinese. Tall for his generation, over six feet, my dad starred on the school’s volleyball team. His dogged industriousness and his athleticism must have caught my mother’s eye. The two met at the teachers’ college in 1962. My mother was also attractive, tall for a Chinese woman—five-eight—and also an athlete; she ran track. Outfitted in drab Mao suits and captured without an iota of expression in the postage-stamp-size black-and-white snapshots of the day, they still made a handsome couple.
My mother’s family had overseas connections, but she and her relatives in China dodged persecution. My maternal grandfather hailed from Guangdong Province near Hong Kong. Like many southern Chinese clans, his family had spread across the world. Seven brothers and sisters had immigrated to Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Before the Communist revolution of 1949, my mother’s father had shuttled between Hong Kong and Shanghai, managing businesses in both cities. At one point in the late 1940s, he represented the ownership in negotiations with a workers’ representative from the Shanghai Toothpaste Factory named Jiang Zemin. Jiang would ultimately rise to become the head of the Communist Party in 1989 and China’s president in 1993. When the Communists took over Shanghai in 1949, my mother’s family moved to Hong Kong, but after a falling-out with my grandfather, my grandmother returned to Shanghai with the three children, including my mom. The couple never divorced, however, and my grandfather supported my grandmother by wiring money back to China until the day he died.
My mother’s family didn’t suffer under Communist rule. After the 1949 revolution, the Chinese Communist Party used families like my mother’s as a source for foreign currency and to break the Cold War trade embargo that the United States had slapped on China. The Party called these families “patriotic overseas Chinese,” a signal to authorities inside China to go easy on those relatives who’d stayed behind. At one point, the Communists asked my grandfather to run the Hong Kong subsidiary of China’s state-owned oil company, the China National Petroleum Corporation.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was a character. A beauty in her youth, she came from a wealthy family from the coastal city of Tianjin, which before the Communist revolution had been the commercial and trading hub of northern China. Ensconced in a Shanghai row house, which that side of the family never lost, she rose each morning at 4:00 for calisthenics at a nearby park, bought a cup of soybean milk and a youtiao, a cruller-shaped piece of fried dough, for breakfast, and retired to her home to smoke—rare for a woman in those days—and play solitaire. Supported by my grandfather’s remittances from Hong Kong, she never worked a day in her life and had servants even during the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution, when people who’d been educated in the West were murdered by the thousands for the crime of favoring Western ideas like science, democracy, and freedom. My grandmother escaped unscathed, shielded by the aura of her association with “patriotic overseas Chinese.”
My grandmother remained outgoing and popular into old age. I loved going to her place on weekends. She’d grind her own sesame seeds into a tasty paste and serve up platters of steamed baozi, softball-size dumplings stuffed with meat and vegetables, a specialty of her hometown, Tianjin.
My mother had a far happier childhood than my father. Like my grandmother, my mother was a gregarious sort. She was popular among her schoolmates and possessed a sunny view on life. Her personality was almost the polar opposite of my dad’s, especially when it came to risk. My mother embraced it; my dad shunned it. My mother later developed uncannily good investment instincts that allowed my parents to ride real estate booms in both Hong Kong and Shanghai.
In 1965, with the Party’s permission, my parents married. Party authorities assigned them jobs as teachers at different secondary schools. That’s what happened back then. The Party controlled everything. You couldn’t pick your own job or your wedding day. At Xiangming Secondary School in Shanghai, my dad taught Chinese and English, which he’d learned by listening to lessons on the radio. He also coached the girls’ volleyball team and they regularly contended for the Shanghai municipal championship. All those years of being careful paid off when the school’s Party committee named my father a “model teacher.”
My mother’s school was an hour’s bike ride from home. She taught math and was beloved by her students. One reason was her diligence; the other was that she was adept at looking at things from other people’s point of view. My father was a my-way-or-the-highway type of guy. My mother was more flexible. This quality came in handy when teaching math, especially in Chinese secondary school, where the curriculum becomes demanding. Her ability to see problems from a student’s perspective allowed her to better guide them to a solution. She also was a voice of moderation as political campaigns rolled through the school and students and teachers attacked one another for ideological transgressions. During mass criticism sessions when a student was singled out, my mother would step in and end the confrontation before it got too violent. No other teacher at the school dared do that. But my mother’s status as the daughter of a “patriotic overseas Chinese” gave her some cover to help. Her actions were like tossing a rope to a drowning person, a good deed her students never forgot. To this day, they still hold reunions.
My mother was the second of three children, wedged in between two boys. After my parents married, my uncles mocked my mom for choosing a man descended from one of the lowly “five black categories.” They never let my dad forget that they were of an exalted status and had more money, courtesy of the monthly stipend from Grandpa in Hong Kong. One of my uncles bought the first motorcycle in his neighborhood with that cash and made sure my dad knew about it.
I was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. The Party sent my parents to the countryside to learn from China’s peasants, a program thought up by Chairman Mao that destroyed the lives of millions of people and ended up driving China’s economy into a ditch. My parents and I were lucky that we never lost our permits to live in Shanghai, unlike hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents who were exiled to China’s version of Siberia, never to return. My parents’ schools allowed them to take turns living among China’s peasants, so I was never alone.
I was born big and grew fast. I was worthy of my Chinese given name, Dong, which means “pillar.” My size—I top out at six-five—and athleticism made me a natural leader among my peers. My parents also cultivated in me a love of reading. From my earliest days, I had the best collection of comics about Chinese mythical figures, the heroes of China’s Communist revolution, and China’s war against Japan. Raised on stories of Xiao Gazi, a kid who picked up a gun to kill Japanese invaders during World War II, I was naturally patriotic—and fond of storytelling. My gang of friends would crowd around to hear me recount those tales. I’d make others up as I went along. I still remember concocting a madcap adventure about a cave opening up to swallow the motorcade of a Chinese general.
Those comics, full of stories of people sacrificing themselves for the motherland and the Communist revolution, nurtured in me a deep love of China. They set the tone for my later life and fed a belief that I, too, should devote myself to building China. I was taught to see China as a great country, and to believe in its promise.
In Shanghai, we lived in the same house that Communist authorities had expropriated from my dad’s father in 1952. It was an English-style row house on a lane off Huaihai Middle Road, a main boulevard in the old French Concession, a leafy district that before the revolution of 1949 had been administered by civil servants from Paris as part of France’s imperial empire. The Communists often directed erstwhile property owners to live in a small corner of their old home, again a deliberate tactic to demonstrate the awesome power of the state.
We were allotted two rooms on the second floor. A doctor and his family occupied my grandfather’s old living room on the first floor. The doctor had studied in England before the revolution and his flat overflowed with foreign medical journals. A family of distant relatives lived above us on the third floor. All ten people in the house shared a bathroom and a kitchen. One of Shanghai’s premier bakeries was located around the corner and at all hours the tantalizing smell of baked bread wafted down our lane.
My parents slept on a double bed in one corner of our room. I had a single bed in another. A chest of drawers separated us. A small desk with our prized possession—a radio—was next to my bed. My father spent hours perched on a stool in front of it learning English. When my parents were downstairs cooking, I set aside my homework to tune into shows about Chinese heroes of the past, listening with equal intent to the narrator and for the footsteps of my parents ascending the stairs. They wanted me to buckle down on my studies. Like many Chinese children, I was a latchkey kid. I came home by myself at lunchtime and made myself lunch. At an early age, I threw together breakfast, too.
Angry with his lot and nursing his resentments, my father took his unhappiness out on me. He’d pull me into the middle of the room under a flimsy fluorescent light hanging by two wires from the ceiling to beat me mercilessly, with belts, or the back of his hand, or a rock-hard wooden ruler. Actually, I was a model child. I was one of the first in my class let into the Little Red Guard, a selective children’s organization sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. I’d been appointed a class proctor and recognized as a natural leader. But my dad didn’t care. He beat me anyway.
One day I forgot a homework assignment. Chinese teachers are very assiduous when it comes to informing parents of their children’s miscues. That evening, my father thrashed me as if there were no tomorrow. The wife of the doctor downstairs heard my yelps, walked up the stairs, knocked on our door, and quietly asked my father to knock it off. He stopped. My parents respected that family, especially because the doctor had studied in the West. His wife turned out to be my savior. Each time that my father lunged for me, I prayed that my screams would get her to climb the stairs.
My parents told me that I actually had it pretty good. Other parents punished their kids by making them kneel for hours on a ridged washboard, which split the skin on their knees. I’m not convinced. I still have nightmares about these beatings. I wake up in a cold sweat with my heart racing. My father and I have never had a reckoning about the past. He never gave a hint that, retrospectively, he was regretful about handling me so roughly.
While she protected her students at school, my mother never afforded me the same courtesy. Instead, she expressed her disapproval, not with beatings, but with words. Well into my thirties, she’d often remark that I was “dumber than a herd of livestock and denser than a bunch of vegetables.”
“Stupid birds need to start flying early,” she’d tell me, stressing that if I was going to make something of myself, I’d need to work a lot harder than other kids.
So, at home, I grew up in an environment of degradation and punishment. Compliments were as rare as eggs were at the time. My parents picked on me for my mistakes. “Don’t get cocky,” my mother said every time I tasted a little success. Eventually, most of my interactions with my parents became attempts to avoid criticism rather than win praise. It wasn’t about embracing achievement. It was about escaping failure. I constantly worried that I wasn’t good enough.
At that same time, from an early age I experienced this yawning gap between the world outside my home, where I was recognized as a leader, a raconteur, an athlete, even a nice person, and the world of our tiny flat, where my parents seemed thoroughly disappointed with me. Perhaps this is common among kids from China, where expectations are high and criticism constant, and where parents believe that children learn by failure, not through success. As I matured, the tension grew between these two worlds.
I’ll always feel grateful to my parents, however, for helping me to read early and read a lot. Both knew exactly what kind of books would enthrall me. They started me with comic books. I soon graduated to wuxia xiaoshuo, the martial arts novels of the type that would inspire director Ang Lee’s hit film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Growing up an only child in a society where at the time everyone had siblings, I spent a lot of time alone. So I read. The martial arts books, like the Harry Potter stories of today, pulled me into an imaginary universe filled with complicated relationships in the courts of kings, life-and-death struggles, love and hate, rivalry and revenge, plots and schemes. My favorite tales followed a similar trajectory. A child witnesses the murder of his parents. Misery follows as he begs for food and struggles to keep himself warm in the winter as he’s chased by his assailant, who is intent on wiping the child’s family from the face of the earth. Lost in the wilderness, he stumbles into a cave to find an itinerant monk who teaches him the secrets of wushu. After years of hardship, he returns home, exacts revenge, and unites the empire’s martial artists to bring peace to all those under heaven. I saw myself in this story, battling and beating my own demons.
My elementary school was located near the Jinjiang Hotel, one of Shanghai’s most famous pre-1949 landmarks and, at the time, one of only two hotels in the city that accommodated foreign travelers. Our proximity to the Jinjiang meant that the city’s Propaganda Department often organized groups of foreigners to tour the school. The Chinese Communist Party divided the world into enemies and allies and, to win support internationally, aggressively cultivated “foreign friends” such as left-wing intellectuals, journalists, and politicians. Each time a group of “foreign friends” showed up at my school, the best math students would be trotted out to perform calculations on the blackboard and the best athletes would be summoned for a gym class—all part of a great Communist Chinese tradition of bamboozling incredulous fellow travelers into acknowledging the brilliance of Chinese Socialism.
One day a representative from China’s vast Soviet-style sports bureaucracy came to our school. A group of the more athletic among us was told to strip to our undershorts. The bureaucrat studied my hands and feet and pronounced that I should be a swimmer. My father began taking me to a municipal pool near my primary school. He taught me to swim in typical Chinese fashion: he tossed me into the pool. I struggled to the surface and gulped down a lot of water. Within weeks, however, I was ready for a tryout with a local team. At the age of six, I won a spot.
Swimming practice was held seven days a week at a pool forty minutes’ walking distance from my house. Each morning I got up at 5:30, made myself breakfast, and headed out through Shanghai’s serpentine alleys to the pool. I used to challenge myself to find shortcuts. Entering a new alley, I’d never know where I was going to come out. I learned fast that there were many routes to get to the same place. We swam from 7:00 to 8:00, after which I walked to school. We often had a second workout in the afternoon. Meets were held on weekends. I soon became number one at the backstroke and number two at the crawl in my age group. A neighbor’s kid was my chief competition; he ultimately made China’s national team. We used to walk to the pool together. In the changing room, on the mornings after my dad had whipped me, I tried to hide the welts on my arms, back, and legs. But he noticed them. I told him he was lucky that his father didn’t beat him. He gave me a sad smile.
Our trainer, Coach Shi, was a typical Chinese coach: short, squat, with a bad temper. Shanghai’s winters were cold, but because the city is situated south of the Yangtze River, under rules set by the central government none of the buildings were heated. Coach Shi would kick off workouts on winter mornings by having us do the butterfly to break up a thin layer of ice that had hardened overnight on the pool’s surface. Coaches would sometimes pour hot water from big thermoses into the pool just to watch us, like fish wriggling after food, thrash around in the warm spots in a vain attempt to avoid the chill. They thought this was hilarious.
There were benefits to being on the team. Following afternoon workouts, we got a decent meal. Rice and meat were still rationed in China, but in the team’s canteen we were treated to lean meat, not just fat, good-quality vegetables, and, something we all treasured: the occasional egg. Once a year we were given a chicken to take home. I became adept at pocketing extra food, which I’d dole out to my fellow team members in exchange for their loyalty. Food was precious in those days; it was one way to become leader of the pack.
Swimming contributed enormously to who I am today. It taught me self-confidence, perseverance, and the joy of a purposeful endeavor. Through swimming, I met people far outside my normal social circle. I still feel its imprint.
I had only the haziest sense of politics as a boy. I remember walking past political posters calling for class enemies to be mercilessly punished as the Cultural Revolution sowed countrywide chaos. I heard soldiers in an army barracks near my school chanting slogans against ideological deviation and in praise of Communist China’s founder, Chairman Mao Zedong. I saw political prisoners wearing dunce caps being driven through the streets in open trucks, heading toward execution.
Then on September 9, 1976, Mao died. My eight-year-old classmates and I had little understanding of what it meant. When the school announced it, our teachers began crying, so we started crying, too. The rule came down that we weren’t allowed to play or smile. Several of us were reprimanded for making too much noise.
About a year later, a senior Chinese leader named Deng Xiaoping returned to power after years in internal exile. Deng masterminded the arrest of the Gang of Four, a group of ultra-leftists who’d gathered around Mao. And in 1979 he launched historic reforms that would transform China into the economic power it is today. But my family wasn’t going to live through those epochal changes. My parents had other plans.
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner (September 7, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1982156155
- ISBN-13 : 978-1982156152
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #373,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #422 in Censorship & Politics
- #548 in Chinese History (Books)
- #1,132 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals
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Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They appreciate the insightful and informative content that provides useful context for understanding business and politics in China. The story is described as captivating, gripping, and suspenseful. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, honest, and reflective. They find the political context relevant and valuable, describing the dealings between business elites and high-power political families. Overall, customers consider the book worth reading.
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Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They say it portrays the rise and fall of modern entrepreneurs in Communist China in an honest and engaging way. The book reads less like an autobiography and more like a fantasy novel.
"...unique in the detail it provides that I found it a quick and very interesting read." Read more
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"...It is excellent book however I’m afraid it might be a bit hard to understand for average western reader." Read more
"...This book reads familiar and authentic and to a certain even darker and more nihilistic than I have expected...." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and well-written. They appreciate the author's insider perspective on how businesses and politics work together in China. The personal lives of the author and his ex-wife are also interesting. Overall, readers find the book informative and eye-opening, providing useful background information for the story.
"...Very well written. 3)Fascinating look at the personal lives of the author, his ex-wife, and various movers & shakers of China...." Read more
"...It just gives me additional view to what I already know...." Read more
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"The author starts off with his background. This is somewhat useful for context, but I felt he rambled a bit and made this part longer than it was..." Read more
Customers find the story captivating, gripping, and suspenseful. They describe it as a morality tale for our times and a real inside story about how the Party operates. Readers praise the book as monumental and an honor to share in a person's life story.
"...The author has tremendous courage to write this book and we benefit from it. Cons: 1)I wish the book was even longer...." Read more
"...making the same points about favor-giving over and over, but the story is so unique in the detail it provides that I found it a quick and very..." Read more
"...sympathize with the author's ex-wife's plight, and his rags to riches story is fascinating...." Read more
"...The story is filled with intrigue and you learn about the way business was all relationship driven and in particular how his wife Whitney nurtured..." Read more
Customers find the writing quality good and easy to read. They appreciate the honest, reflective writing style and detailed portrayal of China's emerging history. The book is described as a must-read for Chinese readers. The author's character is described as impressive.
"...Very well written. 3)Fascinating look at the personal lives of the author, his ex-wife, and various movers & shakers of China...." Read more
"...the author is attesting to facts as they happened, he writes a detailed portrayal of how China's emerging economy exploded upward with the Party and..." Read more
"...This well written book is fascinating to read...." Read more
"...I guess that’s why I can read and understand this book easily. It just gives me additional view to what I already know...." Read more
Customers find the book provides an insightful look into China's political and economic systems. They appreciate its insights into the dealings between business elites and high-powered political families, as well as the rises and falls of individuals and policymakers. The book also provides a detailed account from an insider perspective of the Chinese political and economic environment.
"...read if you like to read about frauds, corruption, or political backstabbing." Read more
"...book detailing the workings of the Chinese political and economic systems from an insider. The disappearance of his ex wife is a side story...." Read more
"...’s political fractions and purges, the dealings between business elites and high power political families, and the rises and falls of business..." Read more
"...Useful for business-interested people and policymakers alike. Also satisfies the curiosity of anyone interested in what goes on behind the red doors." Read more
Customers find the book compelling and worth the money. They appreciate the story about wealth, connections, and real estate in China.
"...He claimed the site of the Genesis to be prime real estate, the development to be best in Beijing and Bulgari to be the best hotel in town...." Read more
"...It gives a perspective of the opportunities in China and how investments were made and how connections were maintained...." Read more
"...Dealing with all of the Chinese names was a bit difficult, but worth the effort." Read more
"...into the business world of China, how it works, the corruption, wealth, and the importance of being connected." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's pacing. Some find it fast-paced and engaging, while others find it slow and repetitive.
"...but the story is so unique in the detail it provides that I found it a quick and very interesting read." Read more
"...Unfortunately the second half was the opposite. Slow and repetitious." Read more
"...Nonetheless, the book makes a fast and interesting read if you like to read about frauds, corruption, or political backstabbing." Read more
"Slow during the first 1/3, exciting for the second 2/3..." Read more
Customers are unhappy with the corruption and bribery in the book. They mention a crooked government that gets crueler as you get higher up.
"...and fails to deal with the reasons for, and the impact of, corruption in China...." Read more
"...A horrifyingly crooked government, more cruel the closer you get to the top." Read more
"...Corruption, briberies, political calculations, and the outsized influence of the "red aristocracy" run the show." Read more
"Insights on Corruption at the highest levels in China..." Read more
Reviews with images
Most fascinating China business book (and it’s not just about business) in years
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2021This is a very well written book that is informative in ways that other books cannot.
The book provides a very rare glimpse of inner political workings of China, and it is nothing like how things work in the US.
The author and his ex-wife were formerly insiders of the highest levels of China.
They were masters of guanxi, or trusting relationship, to create business opportunities for themselves as well as for their political patrons. It is a formula that has enriched countless Chinese business people, bureaucrats, politicians, and communist elite.
The author, with high degree of credibility, asserts that the present Chinese system is not only extremely corrupt, but it is also designed to protect & prosper its communist elite. The entire Chinese system is about benefiting the Chinese communist elites and their descendants. Those who play the game brilliantly can become, like the author and his ex-wife, very wealthy.
The author is a very good observer and he sees the big picture. He believes the Chinese economic success had an awful price: China has become an win-at-all-costs society in which ethics, integrity, societal responsibilities are discarded for the losers. In China, it is almost impossible to acquire tremendous wealth & success without also benefiting (paying off) the communist elites and the bureaucrats. Now, China is descending into political authoritarianism that threatens any rights and civil liberties the Chinese had enjoyed as citizens in the last 30 years.
If you want to understand how communist China works, then you must read this book. It is highly recommended.
Pros:
1)Unique book on China with insiders information on the inner workings of its system.
2)Very well written.
3)Fascinating look at the personal lives of the author, his ex-wife, and various movers & shakers of China.
4)Deep and thoughtful analysis on the present day China and its near future.
5)The author has tremendous courage to write this book and we benefit from it.
Cons:
1)I wish the book was even longer. It was a real page-turner.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2024Red Roulette is a different kind of book.
Assuming the author is attesting to facts as they happened, he writes a detailed portrayal of how China's emerging economy exploded upward with the Party and Capitalism working hand-in-hand. As always with tyrannical regimes, the capitalists were sainted as they built the strength of China and the party got to bask in the reflection of rapidly improving living standards. Once the capitalists began to become a rival source of wealth and started having ideas that threatened the monolithic China vision held by the party, the capitalists became tools to be controlled and carefully managed by those CCP rulers they massively enriched.
The book reveals China as nothing more than a modern feudal society. Princelings vie for power and wealth with an eye on the prize of advancement. A good deal of the jockeying involves devaluating or destroying fellow contenders for power. Those imprisoned and/or executed for corruption are shown to usually be targeted for being part of the out-gang that ascending cliques want to diminish as threats. This won't be a surprise for those who have read of China's development since Deng opened the country to the West, but the level of detail and specific naming of players and their actions will be new. It is the same story as in the court of Henry the VIII, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, the Kims' North Korea, and Putin's Russia (to name a few - really the usual pattern of autocratic regimes). To paraphrase John Wilkes Booth and turn his assassination utterance on its head, "thus always with tyrants."
The author and his wife thrived in this China. Using relationships, brilliant management of petty and grandiose graft to procure official favors and hard work, they became for a time leading developers and emblemic of China's fast lane entrepreneurs. This came undone when their highest-value patron was targeted in an internecine power struggle and the author's wife (by then ex-wife, though still business partner) took the fall as the family of China's Premier (the number two or three guy after Xi) sought to divert attention from the family's massive accumulation of wealth. His wife's penalty was abduction and disappearance by the regime. Escaping China, the author says he sought to create this accounting of the rise and fall of their business empire for the benefit of their son, so he would know the truth of his mother's situation.
I'm sure the larger gist of what the author reveals is correct. He is pretty open as to his role in out-sized schmoozing, gift giving and obsessive management of the officialdom they needed for approvals and state action and his portrayal of his own actions could be accurate (I do wonder if they are complete). His wife was brilliant in the dark arts required to maneuver powerful people and add them to her stable of supporters and enablers. It must have been an exhausting life, though she seems to have been invigorated by her abilities to win favor and manipulate.
It is a fascinating book and well written in a direct and matter of fact style. Sometimes the author is overly repetitive in continually making the same points about favor-giving over and over, but the story is so unique in the detail it provides that I found it a quick and very interesting read.
Top reviews from other countries
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Jesús A.Reviewed in Mexico on February 28, 2023
4.0 out of 5 stars No traía envoltura
El producto est bueno, de calidad pero no traía plástico ni ningún tipo de envoltura se maltrató un poco
- TonyzeeReviewed in Canada on October 25, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Raw, unfiltered, and entertaining!
Read this book if you:
· Are curious about life under the Chinese government since 1945
· Want to understand how Chinese people build business relationships with each other
· Like juicy Chinese political gossip
· Want to know how people with power build wealth
· Are curious how a nation with developing ethics decides what gets punished and what gets buried.
The history of Communist China
Desmond’s childhood, like many at the time, was close to being normal. Times were hard but it was hard for everyone. Besides a few extra sports trophies, this was a man destined for a normal middle-class life. Then, Desmond got lucky, and his path changed (more on that later). As a child of the late 80s, and although 20 years apart, I resonated with his recollection (as my great grandfather was also punished for owning land, and then my grandfathers on both sides were tricked into moving to essentially Siberia). At this point, I enjoyed his brief recount of the history of Red China. I never quite understood why, for example, Westerners always seem to know more about Confucianism and Daoism than I would. Those were never taught in school. This book made me realize that it was all part of the design, and the government prevented us from taking ancient philosophies seriously. I value honesty and I believe we all need to delve into our past to fish out psychological blockages to heal and grow as a person. Trauma and psychological manipulations occurred when we were young especially tend to feel bigger than they are, and they affect our everyday decision-making as adults. Through this book, I was able to understand some of my own blockages. Therefore, I felt his level of candor and frankness like a breath of fresh air. Desmond wrote as he felt, and he wrote from the heart. I have learned a lot.
Desmond the anti-hero
Desmond’s keen observation yielded many insights into the lives of the Red Aristocrats (sons of daughters of the Chinese political elites) and the satellites that follow them around. As we read between the lines, we start to see Desmond’s own underlying psychology.
You start to pick up, for example, that Desmon’s frank writing style didn’t come from a place of strength but rather a Naïve belief that what they were doing was good and they came from an honest desire to build a better China. Desmond called out many of the Red Aristocrats for their shady dealings and yet his own dealings were highly unethical (although legal at the time). In the case of Sun Zhengcai, Desmond added that “the party accused him of accepting bribes. I don’t think this was the case. It was more like barter.” Apparently, trading favors for favors is vastly different from, say, trading favors for money.
In addition, Desmond himself was severely out of touch with the common society yet he called out many of the Red Aristocrats as being out of touch with the people. In many parts of the book, he mentioned that the red aristocrats succeeded through “rigged treasure hunts” and that Desmond and his wife themselves instead had to work hard to get their riches. Unlike those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, Desmond, and his wife broke their backs bowing to the aristocrats. I don’t think Desmond understands that they had been playing and winning in a rigged game all along. The irony of it all just tickles me sideways.
But I felt the irony was necessary. This book showed the psychological aspects of the communist party and unintentionally the biases and flaws of the author. And that is what makes this book so good. We got an insight into two groups of people when you thought you came here for one. Desmond is a chaotic and flawed hero, and his biography is illuminating.
I am not a political person and therefore I won’t get into whether the Communists are right or wrong, good or bad. It just is. However, I will point out that this book serves as a sobering reminder that you must conduct your life ethically, regardless of legal ramifications. Desmond noted, “when China passes a law it invariably makes it retroactive.” It makes sense, just because regulations haven’t caught up to the times that doesn’t mean you can and should get away with unethical acts.
Secondly, Epictetus, the Greek philosopher warned us, “don’t envy the rich. They have their own problems.” I certainly don’t envy Desmond or Whitney after reading this book. If this is how you make money, I would rather not have any.
Finally, this book further confirms my belief that one of man’s biggest folly is that we confuse luck for skill. This was perfectly captured in Desmond’s introduction as he wrote of his ex-wife, “She’d understood the real China until she didn’t.” When you confuse luck for skill, you tend to succeed, until you don’t.
- Georges L. SegundoReviewed in Brazil on October 24, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars The Rotten Reality of Chinese Wealth
A book who exposes the real truth.
- Joe ZhangReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 29, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars A good read
Entertaining.
- SocratesReviewed in Germany on August 24, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely incredible!
The book that all diplomats should read to understand how the inner world works.