Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

that if the authorities wanted to target anyone for prosecution, they always
could.
The dismantling of the state-run work unit system in the cities where people
had lived in apartments provided by the factory, sent their kids to the factory
school, and worked together on the assembly line opened up a vast sector for
new investment and new wealth: real estate development.
Corruption owed through the system as Chinese Communist Party o cials
and their families made ample use of their connections to assign lucrative plots
to friendly real estate developers. Party leaders used corruption investigations to
purge their political foes. I arrived in Beijing as a case against the capital’s mayor
was wending its way through the courts. Mayor Chen Xitong had been accused
of embezzling millions of dollars in a scheme to build vacation homes for the
Party elite. His real “crime” was that he led the “Beijing clique,” a Party faction
that opposed the “Shanghai clique,” overseen by Party chieftain Jiang Zemin. In
1998, Chen was sentenced to sixteen years in prison. Chen’s downfall was
memorialized in the lightly ctionalized potboiler The Wrath of Heaven, which
re ected the ever-widening gap between the o cial version of an honorable
Party leadership and the street-level view of that leadership as a self-selected cabal
of money-grubbing apparatchiks whose lives were far removed from those of
ordinary folk.
As ChinaVest’s representative in Beijing, I could feel the roar of China’s
engine stoked by decades of material scarcity. China’s Communist system had
failed to satisfy the material demands of China’s people. But that was changing,
and fast. Televisions, refrigerators, fans, microwaves, and washing machines were
ying o the shelves. Still, I had trouble getting anyone to lift the hood for me so
that I could become expert in how China really worked. Our investments were
limited mostly to foreign-funded enterprises, which were building factories,
cobbling together distribution chains, and transferring technological know-how
as they turned China into a manufacturing powerhouse. This activity would
only intensify as China negotiated the terms of its accession to the World Trade
Organization in 2001.
I was unprepared for the job. I knew no one in business or in the Party. I was
barely thirty years old. I couldn’t even drink Moutai, a highly potent liquor that