As a detail of the typical corruption occurring within China over the past 25 years as it became a foremost geopolitical power Red Roulette is a solid education. Making clear that the entire system is grossly broken with the red elite trading influence and favors for wealth, Shum reveals his position in it all. He and his now ex-wife were at the center of influence peddling being close partners with the wife of China Premier Wen Jiabao for nearly two decades.
Parlaying such a personal relationship into sweetheart investment and development projects made Shum a millionaire hundreds of times over but did not protect him or his ex-wife from Communist inquisitions and eventually kidnapping and imprisonment for his former spouse (who was allowed to make a single phone call just prior to this book’s publishing in the middle of the night to Desmond asking him to stop its publishing…and then back into the gulag she went).
As political fortunes changed within China and Xi Jinping rose to power and now General Secretary for life and the hard(er) line Communists/Nationalists have risen in prominence, “reformers” like Jiabao and the Shum’s have been arrested, “disappeared” or kept to house arrest and silence. Once these useful idiots played their part in recovering China from the disasters that were the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions and the Red Second Generation (the Princelings or Crown Princes of the Communist Party) was firmly back in power (largely the offspring of original Communist revolutionaries) there was no need for soft players like Jiabao nor those with a capitalist or non-bloodline bent such as Shum…so off to the glue factory these people went.
Red Roulette is not a great piece of literature. It is stilted, sometimes boring, often self aggrandizing in its nature. It does however detail the inner workings of the relationships that make (made?) China work at its peak of uninhibited growth. Looking back now after the “disappearance” of Jack and Pony Ma as well as the breathtaking confiscation of their (and their shareholders) wealth by the Red Chinese, one only wishes that such a slap in the face to Western feelings about how much had not changed within China in recent periods had come earlier. Not that it wasn’t recognized—JP Morgan Chase had a policy for years of giving cushy positions and benefits to the “princelings” in order to gain access and favor in the Chinese market…they had just done so thinking that China had changed….corrupt, yes…but still playing by Western rules of similar glad handing corruption—local politicians giving concrete contracts to their cousin Bob for a new bridge style of unethical behavior. What is revealed here is something different. A truly Chinese “long game” of corruption and acquisition of unfathomable, global power to be concentrated in the hands of the Communist elite. Shum was played like a fiddle…as was his wife…and Jiabao…and the rest of the “reformers” that were the Chinese face to the West throughout the early ‘00s. Shum’s work comes 20 years too late and and may assuage his guilt over having made his bones because of the system but it comes across as far too little, too late.