【讀者分享】《紅色輪盤》讀後感：從作者的獨特經歷，香港人應該學會甚麼？ (Patreon)

Dear Dr. Shen,  

I learn with great pleasure of the upcoming interview with your QC senior Desmond Shum. I very much look forward to this first-ever interview in Cantonese. I believe many patrons, including myself, are interested in knowing more exclusive stories about his past in Hong Kong and his insightful view on Hong Kong’s future wedged between two competing superpowers and on fierce power struggles among the party factions provoked by external confrontation.   

With more spare time during the sledgehammer blow of Lionrock to Hong Kong, I finished reading his compulsive book “Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China.” It would be great if you can enlighten me and furnish patrons with an analytic review, specifically on whether one can use a prying perspective reading this book, despite the tip of the iceberg, to more or less herald the red aristocracy and princelings and one-party-state capitalism steer Mainland China toward today's economic and foreign policy. I would like to share some, perhaps subjective as an outsider, of my thoughts on his story.  

I particularly like his vivid account of boyhood in Shanghai and Hong Kong and of his study in the US, the part with the most elements of human beings. It shows how parents, experience and friends can obliviously shape up a person’s mindset, unflinching determination to succeed and attitude toward good times and bad times. His own narrative isn’t tinged with insignificance, nor does it make me feel out of tone when compared with other local stories of moving up the social ladder in the 1970s and ‘80s. Instead, it’s part of many different strands which come together in a complete story about the good old days.  

When Shum decided to move to Beijing, it was as if he had entered from a highly competition domain invigorated by the rule of law into a dog-eat-dog, ruleless city - a completely different ecosystem brimmed with opportunities and risks. A fusion of money, power and politics begets corruption in anywhere whenever human exists, and Chinese communists push this phenomenon to the far end. Businessmen and politicians in the west are comparatively easy to go with foes, reconcile their differences and reach a win-win scenario. On the contrary, Mao-trained protégés buy “winners take all” and “a great joy to fight with people” under the Leninist system. Every single fight is a life-and-death matter. They work flat out to pick foes off one by one, root their network out and take all slices of the cake. They often resort to carrot and stick to expand the scale of the purge and have many appalling ways to push their foes and anyone, especially those from business sectors, pertaining to the matter over the edge. The process would go on indefinitely until new leaders come to power and spin a new web of purge. In his retrospect, if any, Shum’s decision of moving to Beijing might be just the lull in bonanza years before the big storm over his lifetime.   

Unlike typical hearsay and rumors, Shum’s book offers a rare but solid snoop into the way of doing big business in Mainland China through political connections with the upper echelons of the Party (In return, he was surprisingly rewarded a proof that his ex-wife is still alive, shattering his years-long suspicion and letting him learn of his book as fatal as a sword which may cost a life). The interplay between them has deeply shaped a political-economic landscape that breeds a cannibal society. How big a business can start up and run hinges on how well and how high in the party hierarchy one can reach out to. Not only have successful businessmen to be of gregarious sorts, but also to be conversant with parlaying “guanxi” among the circle of bigwigs into billion-dollar deals and to be adept at wheeling and dealing with powerful government officials who can use their influence to make deals happen. 

Every relationship formed among groups of common interests, on the other hand, is immersed in political calculations of cost and benefit. Once you get into trouble and seek help from your close friends or partners, you would quickly feel estranged from or even be disowned by them. People who owe you a great debt of gratitude for many years of “dedicated service” could be very cool with hanging you out to dry, or even ruthlessly stab you in the back for their own sake. The entrepreneur class bothers on sorts of serfs in the eyes of the ruling class. If you’re rich enough and are very eager to let yourself off the hook, one way out is to rat on the names the authorities want and to “donate” all your assets to the state, or more precise the clique in charge of, as a quid pro quo for a tacit pledge to drop some charges or at least to give a lenient sentence. 

A tall, heavyset but helpless lifeguard (Shum was a 6’5” former swimmer during his boyhood who nearly made the Olympic swim team for Hong Kong) standing outside a stormy sea under dark clouds, he can do nothing to save her woman from political drowning other than trying hard to delineate her only messiah – then-number-two in the Politburo - as an outsider or innocent guy who was unaware of the scale of his wife’s “water world.”   

Each person has his ups and downs, either leave his own fate to God or decide his own. To certain extent, Shum and Whitney Duan, his ex-wife and business partner, were enablers of wealth and corruption, gliding riskily through the core of power that underpins the red aristocracy to reach the apogee of their well-considered business empire. The early rumbles of Xi’s crackdown sparked off Shum’s instinct, thereby prompting him to plan on leaving for the UK years ago. He once expressed, in retrospect, he was grateful for this decision. As luck would have it, he managed to leave Beijing with his son just before the disappearance of Duan and then wrote this book four years later. 

Duan, however, is down on her luck and has not been able to tell her part of the story. If a person is hell-bent on doing business with the belief of nothing ventured, nothing gained, he should have been well-informed of licking blood off the blade. This’s the price for playing a wealth-seeking game on this soil despite that many well-educated and canny people like the power couple of Shum and Duan think they know how the game is played and insist their doings stay within the boundaries of the law, a tool in the clutches of the ruling party.  I’m worried about how well Shum has braced after his book release for a potential barrage of abuse and threat from the Party and its overseas apologists hurling not only at him but his son and the people around (if fortune smiles on Shum, reading this book from a combative angle is meant to be a triggering point which could provide plenty of ammunition for another round of the purge. And then its whistle-blower would be immunized from fear, at least for a short moment).   

I wish him and his family all the best.   

Best regards.