‘Red Roulette’: Tell-All Book Reveals the Dark Underbelly of China’s Gilded Age
Beneath Desmond Shum’s deeply personal memoir about corruption and wealth, we can glimpse the profound political and economic tectonic shifts that foreshadowed Xi Jinping’s second term of office.
Whitney Duan was once the poster woman for China’s rags-to-riches narrative of business success. But she went missing in 2017 following reports that she facilitated business dealings with family members of China’s then-Premier Wen Jiabao and other senior Communist Party officials.
Four years after Duan’s mysterious disappearance, her ex-husband and business partner, Desmond Shum’s tell-all book, “Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China” is quickly shaping up to be the new must-read among observers of Chinese elite politics. The book so startled Beijing that it elicited two consecutive phone calls from Shum’s ex-wife, who is now in detention, in a last ditch effort to scuttle its publication.
In an exclusive interview, Desmond Shum said that Duan left another message for him after the two calls. “She is apparently reachable now,” Shum said, adding that he had asked their son to call his former wife in hope that they could communicate on a regular basis. Shum revealed that three months prior to the book’s official launch, Chinese authorities had taken one of his warehouses in Beijing where he had kept some of his personal belongings, though whether the incident was related to the book remains unclear.
