📚 Red Roulette

Life was a game of red roulette, with the odds stacked against those who dared to challenge the powerful. Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China. In the backdrop of contemporary China, follow Xia, a Chinese-Canadian accountant, as she unknowingly gets caught in a dangerous web of political power struggles, deceitful billionaires, and international espionage. Get ready for a gripping journey through the shadows of modern China, where the stakes are high, and the consequences are deadly.

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About the book

Author:	Desmond Shum
Year of release:	2021
Genre:	Cultural, China, Nonfiction, Politics, Business, Autobiography, History, Economics
Pages:	320
Average WPM:	425
Date Started/Finished:	10-May-2022 to 12-May-2022
Time took:	2.62 Hours

Impressions

What I Liked About It

The story felt unfiltered for the most part

First time reading about politics from a POV of a person who rose to power and had a downfall

The beginning chapters were somewhat relatable because of the similarity between middle-class Asian households

What I didn’t

They kept bringing up new people every chapter so it got hard to keep track (maybe cuz they had Chinese names?)

How I Discovered It

Ankur Warikoo’s video - 17 Books to Read in 2022

Who Should Read It?

Someone who is interested in Politics or wants to learn more about China and how things work there in terms of power

Actionable Takeaways

• Playing with power and politics is a very risky thing.
  • You are on top of the world and the next thing know you are 100 million dollars in dept.
• Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
• Trust no one when it comes to politics, anyone will sell you out

Top Quotes

• Eventually, most of my interactions with my parents became attempts to avoid criticism rather than win praise. It wasn’t about embracing achievement. It was about escaping failure. I constantly worried that I wasn’t good enough.

• He taught me to swim in typical Chinese fashion: he tossed me into the pool. I struggled to the surface and gulped down a lot of water.

• 2/3 of the people on China’s 100 wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and/or politically motivated prosecutions

• In China, officials never reveal their ambitions in public. Biding one’s time is a key tenant of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

• Control what you can control. Don’t bother with the rest. You will always, I tell myself, get out of the pool.

Summary + Notes

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Epigraph

“寧鳴而死，不默而生” — Better to speak out and die than keep silent and live

~ Fan Zhongyan (989–1052)

Chapter One

• 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.

• Eventually, most of my interactions with my parents became attempts to avoid criticism rather than win praise. It wasn’t about embracing achievement. It was about escaping failure. I constantly worried that I wasn’t good enough.

• He taught me to swim in typical Chinese fashion: he tossed me into the pool. I struggled to the surface and gulped down a lot of water. Within weeks, however, I was ready for a tryout with a local team. At the age of six, I won a spot.

Chapter Four

• I undertook a journey of self-criticism and self-discovery. It was then that I finally grasped the meaning of the Chinese proverb

  “if you want to jump, you must first learn to bow.”

• She and I actually did a SWOT analysis, a checklist used to assess a business. Separately, we broke down the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to our emotional ties. Then we compared notes.

• Whitney’s view of passion, love, and sex was that we could grow into them, but it wouldn’t be the glue that would bind us. What would cement the relationship would be its underlying logic—did our personalities match; did we share values, desire the same ends, and agree on the means?

Chapter Five

She discovered that the only ones who truly succeeded in China were people with guanxi, connections into the system.

• Guanxi is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual’s social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships.

Whitney discovered that to unlock the door to success in China she needed two keys … Only by possessing both keys would success be possible.

• One was political heft.
• Second was the ability to execute once an opportunity arose.

Chapter Six

Among the clientele were representatives of the two Chinas that coexisted in Beijing.

• One was newly rich and comically flamboyant. Men who intentionally left the tags on their jacket sleeves to show off the brands.
• The other China, the official China, avoided flash to escape unwanted attention and potential jealousy.

Chapter Seven

There was something in him that recalled George H. W. Bush’s 1992 visit to a grocery store and his puzzled reaction to a barcode scanner.

Chapter Eight

Our deals required more work. None were sure bets. You needed judgment on two levels.

• The first was basic due diligence. That was where I came in. I analyzed the industry and had a good sense of the market. I did the legwork, visiting the site and delving into the details.
• The second type of judgment was an ability to size up a proposal’s political cost.

Two-thirds of the people on China’s one hundred wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and/or politically motivated prosecutions

Chapter Nine

In China, connections constitute the foundation of life; we didn’t want to divulge ours to potential competitors or the public at large.

Chapter Twelve

In China, officials never reveal their ambitions in public. Biding one’s time is a key tenant of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Chapter Thirteen

• Li Peiying’s fatal mistake was speaking too much. Generally, if you’re arrested for corruption in China, you’re supposed to shut up.

• Another official, Chen Tonghai, the former chairman of the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, was convicted of corruption involving $28 million—almost twice Li’s alleged haul. Except Chen wasn’t executed. His father, Chen Weida, had been a major underground Communist leader in prerevolutionary Shanghai and had held leadership positions after 1949.

• Mao Zedong’s former assistant Li Rui, who was close to Xi’s father, recalled meeting Xi a few years earlier and complained that he wasn’t educated. Regardless, Xi Jinping would prove to be a savvy and cold-blooded political infighter and become China’s most powerful Party boss in a generation.

Chapter Fourteen

We four couples departed for Paris. We’d planned to travel in the three jets, but at the last minute the other men decided they wanted to play cards. We still took the other two jets; they just followed empty. Face played a role here. “If you have a private jet, well, I’ve got to have one, too.” Also, being Chinese, you never knew, maybe a business opportunity would arise and one of us would have to rush back early to cut a deal.

Chapter Seventeen

As Xi’s corruption campaign played out, I finally concluded that it was more about burying potential rivals than about stamping out malfeasance.

Chapter Eighteen

• Control what you can control. Don’t bother with the rest. You will always, I tell myself, get out of the pool.

• I learned that friendships aren’t reliable. Nor are marriages. What kind of relationship is left?

• For years, Western commentators insisted that people like Wolfgang who’d been educated overseas were agents of change in China—that they’d import universal values from the West and push China in a better direction. But people like Wolfgang never saw themselves in that role. His interest was in China’s remaining the way it was. That’s what made him a very rich man and allowed him to reap the benefits of two systems at once, the freedoms of the West and the managed duopolies of authoritarian China.

Afterword

I’ve come to realize that, more than wealth or professional success, ==basic dignity== and ==human rights== are life’s most precious gifts. I want to live in a society that shares that ideal. So I’ve chosen the Western world over China—not only for me, but also for my son.

Acknowledgments

Ancient poem by Fan Zhongyan —

“Better to speak out and die than keep silent and live” —has stayed with me until today. Fan’s poem has been the motto of this book-writing journey, and that line serves as the book’s epigraph.