“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 bo...ok. 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
Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
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, a...t 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 pla
데즈먼드 슘 [저]
상하이에서 태어나 홍콩에서 자란 데즈먼드 슘은 미국으로 건너가 위스콘신-매디슨대학교에서 재무 및 회계를 공부했다. 노스웨스턴대학교와 홍콩과학기술대학교의 공동 EMA 프로그램을 졸업했다. 대학 졸업 후 홍콩 사모펀드 회사인 차이나베스트에서 일했다. 그때 전 부인 휘트니 단을 만나 결혼했으며 부인이자 사업 파트너로서 함께 베이징 수도국제공항에 세계에서 가장 큰 물류 거점을 건설했으며, 중국 수도의 번화한 중심부 근처의 최고 대지에 호화로운 불가리 호텔과 비즈니스센터를 구상하고 이를 완공시켰다. 중국에서 13년간 휘트니 단과 사업을 하며 권력과 부의 최고 정점에까지 올랐다. 이 책은 그 과정에서 알게 된 중국의 화려한 경제 성장 뒤의 내막을 폭로한다.
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알아두세요!!!
도매상 및 제작사 사정에 따라 품절/절판 등의 사유로 취소될 수 있습니다. 오픈마켓업체의 배송지연시 주문이 자동으로 취소될 수 있습니다. 출고가능 시간이 서로 다른 상품을 함께 주문할 경우 출고가능 시간이 가장 긴 기준으로 배송됩니다. 유통의 특성상 출고기간은 예정보다 앞당겨지거나 늦춰질 수 있습니다. 택배사 배송일인 서울 및 수도권은 1~2일, 지방은 2~3일, 도서, 산간, 군부대는 3일 이상의 시간이 소요됩니다.
;)
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교환 및 반품이 가능한 경우 
상품을 공급 받은 날로부터 7일이내 가능 
상품은 월~토요일 오전 10시 이전 주문분에 대하여 당일 출고/당일 배송완료를 보장하는 상품입니다.
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상품은 유통특성상 인터파크에서 재고를 보유하지 않은 상품으로
상품은 업체가 주문을 확인하고, 출고하기까지 걸리는 시간입니다.
