Red Roulette: an Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

July 15, 2021
A Hong Kong-raised entrepreneur chronicles a high-flying life of wealth and political connections, eclipsed in harrowing fashion by a new wave of Chinese Communist Party authoritarianism. In September 2017, Shum's ex-wife and business partner, Whitney Duan, disappeared without a trace from Beijing, most certainly among the countless victims of trumped-up corruption charges by the relentless arm of Xi Jinping's Communist Party apparatus. Together, Shum and Duan had built a vast fortune from real estate dealings in China, from the late 1990s through the global recession of 2008, a span of time during which China fully embraced private entrepreneurial energy in order to jump-start the economy. Around 1997, sensing the "go-go energy" of the new boom, in which "stories of instant millionaires and financial sensations" abounded, the couple leapt at the opportunity to enrich themselves, their families, and associates. However, the same intricate political connections that Duan had assiduously cultivated through the years, such as with Zheng Peili ("Auntie Zhang"), the wife of former premier Wen Jiabao, would prove the couple's undoing as the political winds began to shift with the accession of Xi in 2013. Through a deliberative, slow-building, suspenseful narrative that reveals numerous insights about the mechanics of power and greed, Shum chronicles his humble early beginnings in Shanghai, then Hong Kong, where his family moved for more opportunity and he excelled as a swimmer, through college at the University of Wisconsin and attempts at trying his hand in the fledgling field of private equity. He effectively shows how Duan, a boldly calculating investor from a humble background, helped mold him into a highly successful entrepreneur. While Shum insists that they both fervently believed their wealth could foster social changes, he learned early on that what the Party gives, the Party can take away. 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."

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September 1, 2021

Shum's debut memoir deals with the September 2017 disappearance of his ex-wife, Whitney (Zong) Duan, a successful, politically connected Chinese entrepreneur, who has not been seen since. Key to the narrative are the couple's business ventures, their generational wealth, and the rise and fall of the private sector in China. Shum had a modest upbringing in Shanghai and later Hong Kong, with schoolteacher parents descended from the landlord class penalized during the Cultural Revolution; he went on to study business in Wisconsin, then bounced between Hong Kong and Beijing as an investment banker. In 2003 he married Duan, whose family's political connections enabled the couple to invest in Chinese infrastructure projects, including a huge air cargo facility in Beijing. The couple became billionaires, but their fortunes began to change in 2006, when the cargo facility's manager disappeared and was subsequently arrested and executed. Shum believes that Duan's 2017 disappearance also had to do with the cargo facility--most likely she was imprisoned as part of president Xi Jinping's massive anti-corruption campaign--but he's never gotten a concrete answer. VERDICT Students of Chinese politics and business will appreciate Shum's personal narrative of China's turbulent economic rise; this book deserves a wide audience.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2021
The ex-husband and long-time business partner of entrepreneur Whitney Duan, who disappeared in 2017, possibly at the hands of the Chinese government, looks back at his life and hers in this gossipy, unsparing memoir. Born in China but raised in Hong Kong, Shum moved back to the country after attending college in the U.S. There he met the ambitious and politically connected Duan, who had painstakingly forged a friendship with the wife of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. "I became her project, Eliza Doolittle to her Henry Higgins," Shum writes. They built a real estate empire together, greasing palm after palm along the way, and schmoozing with "a whole slew of middle-aged chain-smoking heavy drinkers." This worked until the head of government changed, and Duan's connections disintegrated, by which time Shum had divorced her and moved with their son to England. While hardly unbiased, Shum provides a harrowing, often fascinating look inside a system where politics and business are inextricably intertwined.

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Starred review from September 13, 2021
“You’ve heard about America’s extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. Well, this is China’s version,” writes entrepreneur and philanthropist Shum in his thrilling debut. Shum’s ex-wife and former business partner, Whitney Duan, “disappeared from the streets of Beijing” in 2017, and has not been seen since. Shum explores how Duan—the mastermind of “real estate projects worth billions”—went missing, by tracing the arc of both of their careers, which exploded as China’s attitude toward profits shifted dramatically from the days of Chairman Mao. Born in Shanghai, Shum attended college in the U.S. and returned to China in the ’90s to work in private equity, where, with Duan, he spearheaded high-profile real estate projects, including China’s largest air cargo logistics facility. While the reason for Duan’s abduction is unknown—though it’s presumed that Communist Party operatives carried it out—Shum makes it clear that his former spouse’s treatment is not an outlier in China, where powerful people like Duan, who played China’s “roulette-like political environment” with “unparalleled skill,” are kidnapped and held indefinitely. 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. Agent: Peter Bernstein, Bernstein Literary.