Desmond Shum said he hadn’t heard a peep from his ex-wife, Whitney Duan, since she failed to show up at the unveiling of her luxurious Bulgari hotel in Beijing in 2017.
For four long years, Shum didn’t know where she was, or if she was even alive. She’d built a fortune cutting deals with Communist Party elites; Shum suspected she’d been held by government investigators. But after Shum wrote a memoir denouncing the system that could detain his ex-wife without consequence, he finally heard from her.
A few days before the book’s Sept. 7 release, Duan called with a message: If he published his manuscript, the consequences could be dire. She was on temporary release, she said. The charges against her were confidential, and she could be returned to custody at any moment.
But “Red Roulette,” Shum’s insider account of of business and politics in Xi Jinping’s China, was already in various stages of distribution. His story is particularly timely, as communist leaders have begun to reassert control over the private sector.
“At the moment, every private entrepreneur faces a huge question: where does Xi Jinping want to take China?” Shum said in a video call. “If you’re investing in China right now, you’re not playing a game that you understand. The game has changed completely.”
His vanished ex-wife, one of China’s longest-missing deal makers, is an extreme case of the pressure now facing the country’s rich and powerful. Jack Ma hid away for months after after the government dismantled his planned IPO following his criticism of outdated regulatory practices. Meituan’s Wang Xing was recently warned to stay out of the spotlight after making a controversial post on social media.
Shum reports that Duan lived by the motto, “If you pulled my corpse out of my coffin and whipped it, you’d still find no dirt.” At the same time, he isn’t shy about saying they operated in a crooked system and got rich doing it.
Duan made her career connecting political elites to economic opportunity. In one instance, she bought shares of Ping An Insurance, co-investing with relatives of former prime minister Wen Jiabao, and cashed out after gains in 2007, according to the book. The New York Times detailed her dealings with the Wen family, and particularly Wen’s wife, who had a penchant for diamonds, in 2012.
Shum and Duan’s wealth grew to include interests in real estate, such as the Beijing Airport City project, held through their group, Great Ocean. Duan was also involved in the purchase of a condo in a skinny skyscraper near Central Park at 432 Park Avenue; the unit is now facing foreclosure.
Shum documents the couple’s rise. He toured a $100 million yacht with Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan. He recalled asking a young Ma for a business plan; the future Alibaba founder laughed at him.