His life embraced the history of modern China. Born in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Desmond Shum, grandson of a great lawyer, saw his family downgraded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He grew up in very modest circumstances in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong, then British, where his parents were able to go into exile. But the young man is a fighter. After studying finance in the United States, he launched into business in China in the early 2000s, at a time of dizzying growth.
In a country where nothing is possible without connections, a woman will help him penetrate the heart of communist power. Whitney, who would become his wife, bonded with “Aunt Zhang”, the wife of then Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. By multiplying the sumptuous dinners and the gifts to the “red princes”, the couple becomes immensely rich – their fortune is counted in billions. In Beijing, they are building China’s largest cargo airport and one of the city’s most luxurious hotels.
But everything collapses when the American press reveals the corruption of the Prime Minister’s clan. Desmond went into exile in the UK in 2017 with his son. Whitney, from whom he separated, “disappears” in the middle of the street, in Beijing, and will not give any sign of life until four years later in an attempt to prevent her husband from publishing his book, Chinese Roulette, recently translated into French (ed. Saint Simon), which describes the Chinese system from the inside. Dressed in an elegant electric blue turtleneck, the 53-year-old former businessman returns, in video, to those years when he believed in his country and his disappointed hopes.
L’Express: in your book, you describe the 2000s in China, where everything seemed possible and where the rich displayed their success. What personal memory best sums up for you these spangle years?
Desmond Shum: My watch at half a million euros. My ex-wife, Whitney, ordered it from Switzerland. It had taken two years to make and she gave it to me for my 40th birthday. This gift crystallizes the state of mind of that time, among the very rich. We could afford these follies because our bank account kept swelling. And then, we had never known abundance. We felt like cavemen coming out of their cave and wanting to enjoy the material world to the fullest.
When did this period end?
The change began after the financial crisis of 2008. During this crisis, China did not devalue its currency, which resisted, and the country was seen as a stabilizing force for Asia. Chinese leaders began to think that the Chinese system was not so bad, since the rest of the world was collapsing and China was not. While Western governments had sought to inject money into the economy through banks; China, meanwhile, flooded state-owned companies with cash and ordered them to spend it now. The effects were much faster.
The authorities then became aware of the importance of public enterprises, on an economic but also political level, to control the situation in the event of a crisis. The State and the Party have begun to spread throughout the economy. I had created a joint venture to create the largest freight airport in the country, in Beijing: they assigned us a representative of the Communist Party, who attended all the meetings. The phenomenon then accelerated under Xi Jinping, who came to power at the end of 2012.
You describe by the menu a system of corruption at the highest level. Has the anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping to fight it changed things?
Overall, the situation has not fundamentally changed. In the two decades before Xi Jinping came to power, more than two million bureaucrats were punished for corruption. The latter has increased the pressure a notch by bringing this number to 4.5 million people under his reign. But when you have no political freedom, no freedom of the press, no independent judiciary, and political power comes first, corruption still exists. And then, from time to time, it jams the state machine, and a repression is launched.
In China, people below ministerial status are targeted to clean up this machine. But once you reach the rank of minister, you are generally considered untouchable. You do not fall for corruption, but for political reasons.
You describe a world where “the red princes”, the sons of revolutionary pioneers, enjoy immense privileges…
In this system only your ancestry counts, if your father, your grandfather is a hero of the revolution of the 1940s and 1950s then you have a place. Today some members of this communist aristocracy are part of the third generation. They are not born in the same hospitals as the rest of the population, do not attend the same crèches or the same schools. And belong to a network that extends to uncles and aunts, and that sets them apart.
Since the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, each large family has had easy access to the best positions, and I don’t see this system disappearing. Xi Jinping would not be where he is if he were not part of this elite. Contrary to the practice of the past thirty years, he has not appointed a successor. What will happen if he disappears? The clans will fight to death against each other to take power…
You seem to have believed that you could change China…
Twenty years ago, the economy was growing very, very fast; everything was moving in a positive direction, be it human rights, press freedom, institutional reform. We had the feeling that China was becoming more and more free. Not only was I taking part in this movement, but I was also building concrete things. We felt like we were contributing to the success of our country. Obviously, many practices today seem questionable. But that was the rule of the game in China.
The authorities are bringing whole sectors of the economy to heel, one after the other. Isn’t this a risk for the Chinese economy?
Xi Jinping granted himself the complete monopoly of power, like a true dictator. In his eyes, the short-term economic sacrifices weigh nothing, compared to the long-term gain which is the lasting maintenance in power of the CCP. The regime nearly killed the tech industry. In one year, the giant Alibaba has lost more than two thirds of its market capitalization.
The government has also attacked the sectors of real estate, private education, entertainment… Each offensive taken separately, seems absorbable, on the scale of China. But when you do all of this at the same time, with the side effects, the problem becomes much bigger. Xi Jinping didn’t fully take it into account, in my opinion. And that’s why the Chinese economy slowed so much late last year. In my time, already, policies changed all the time. But Xi Jinping has made matters worse. This is the reason why no Chinese entrepreneur is ready to invest for the long term.
You experienced poverty in your childhood. Do you think upward social mobility is still possible in China?
Much less. Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” project is a message to billionaires like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, to swear allegiance and share their wealth. A few days after the announcement of this slogan, the Internet giants Tencent and Alibaba each paid the equivalent of 16 billion dollars to the State. Their calculation is as follows: it is better to pay now than to wait for the Party to come and help themselves, because in that case it would be worse. For ten years, freedoms have continued to decline in China. The country has taken a huge leap backwards. Nobody knows how far Xi Jinping will go, and that’s what makes me very pessimistic about the future of my native country.