Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Author:Desmond Shum [Shum, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Business, Asia, General, Personal Memoirs, China, Biography & Autobiography, International, Business & Economics, History
ISBN: 9781982156152
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-09-07T07:00:44.914031+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

LABORING TO MAKE THE AIRPORT project happen was hard work, but it also gave Whitney and me a sense of optimism, not just about ourselves, but about China. We were building something big in our homeland. Even though we were entrepreneurs, we were operating deep within the belly of the Communist Chinese system and we were making headway.

We had the impression that China was evolving in a positive direction. We saw how capitalists like us were becoming essential to its modernization. Entrepreneurs were creating most of the new jobs and much of the wealth. Sure, we read the criticism of the Party in the Western press. But we felt like we were living in a different country than the one depicted in the Washington Post or the New York Times. Whitney and I were convinced things were improving. Today was better than yesterday and this year was better than last year. The official Chinese defense was “Look how far we have come.”

And we agreed. You could argue that China’s march into modernity needed to be even more rapid, but the country was definitely on the march. And it wasn’t just people like Whitney and me in the upper crust who felt this way. The whole society shared our optimism. We all sensed that we were heading ineluctably toward a more open, freer society.

As early as July 1, 2001, the Party had officially changed its policy on capitalists when then Party boss Jiang Zemin made a speech that welcomed all leading Chinese, including entrepreneurs, into the Party’s ranks. Even though Jiang wrapped this announcement in Party-speak, calling it the “Three Represents,” that word salad couldn’t mask the momentous nature of this change. Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, had relegated capitalists like those in my father’s family to the bottom rung of society. Deng Xiaoping had given them a leg up by acknowledging that with economic reforms a small group would “get rich first.” Now, a generation later, Jiang Zemin was inviting entrepreneurs to join the Party and enter at least the margins of political power. It was enough to make you dizzy.

Even high up in the Party, the elite seemed to be preparing mentally for a change. In 2004, Chen Shui-bian was reelected as the president of Taiwan, the island of 23 million people that the Communists have long claimed belongs to China. In 2000, Chen had become the first opposition candidate to be elected Taiwan’s president, ending five decades of one-party rule by the Nationalist Party. Taiwan’s democratization process shook Communist Party bigwigs because they saw in it a potential road map for mainland China and thus a threat to the Party’s monopoly on power. After his reelection, Chen announced that it was time to go after the riches of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party.

When the Nationalists ran the island, they’d treated its economy as their party’s piggy bank. After the vote in Taiwan in March 2004, I was invited to a dinner with Deng Lin, Deng Xiaoping’s eldest

daughter. A painter,

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