Red Roulette Quotes

“笨鸟先飞 - Stupid birds need to start flying early.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“寧鳴而死，不默而生。──范仲淹 ∣導讀∣”
― Desmond Shum, 紅色賭盤：令中共高層害怕，直擊現代中國金權交易背後的腐敗內幕

“Many in the West, unhappy with the West’s obsession with individual rights, buy into this fantasy that the Chinese Communist Party focuses on the common good.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“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.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Wolfgang and I used to talk about the Chinese system and he regaled me with stories of plying Party bigwigs with prostitutes. He noted that a particularly effective way to bond with a Party official was to share a room with him and several girls at once.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“This type of duopoly was common in China, with a state-run player sharing the market with a company controlled by a descendant of the red elite.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Those two ordeals taught me a lot about the vagaries of life, especially in China. I learned that friendships aren’t reliable. Nor are marriages. What kind of relationship is left?”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Control what you can control. Don’t bother with the rest. You will always, I tell myself, get out of the pool.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“January 2014, the Party ordered high-end nightclubs to shut down in Beijing. But David Li’s Moutai Club didn’t close its doors.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Then there was the case against Sun Zhengcai. Sun had been in the running to succeed Xi Jinping after Xi’s second term as China’s president and Party boss ended in 2022–2023.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“It’s like China’s economic growth rate. The Party sets a target and every year China miraculously hits the bull’s-eye, down to the decimal point.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“In China, the Communist Party can fabricate evidence, force confessions, and level whatever charges it chooses, untethered to the facts.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Whitney actually stopped going out with her because she thought Gu lacked the political backing, the vision, and the will to get anything done. “She’s all talk and no action,” Whitney complained.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“As Xi’s corruption campaign played out, I finally concluded that it was more about burying potential rivals than about stamping out malfeasance.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“As Party chief in Chongqing, Bo raised his profile by launching political campaigns redolent of the mass mobilizations that occurred under Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Executives at state-owned enterprises love to build hotels because they can use them like clubhouses to entertain contacts or woo mistresses, all at state expense.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“LUCK lies at the heart of most fortunes.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Just a few years ago,” I mused out loud, “we’d be lucky to be pedaling around on Flying Pigeon bikes. Now we’re in private jets. From there to here in less than a lifetime, it’s enough to make your head spin.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“In China, politics is the key to riches, not the other way around,”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Equating a prison term served by a businessman with a military education completed by a patriotic Chinese cadet was blasphemous.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Jasmine would later attend Stanford University and then be identified in the Panama Papers as the sole shareholder of two offshore investment entities that were registered in the British Virgin Islands and specialized in investments and consulting.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“The counterfeiting industry in China faked everything: Moutai in particular.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“best thing about a private club was that you could open the club on state-owned property, harnessing a government-owned asset for personal gain.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“David had made a fortune apparently by leveraging his father-in-law’s connections.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“The general consensus in our social circle was that Xi would follow the established rules in China.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“This vastly different treatment of two corrupt officials was a telltale sign of how things were being run. Red aristocrats got a prison sentence; commoners got a bullet in the head.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“The Chinese Communist Party functions like the Mafia; it has its own code of omertà.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“The economic changes Deng ushered in were driven not by any belief in the tenets of free-market capitalism but by necessity.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“The Party has an almost animal instinct toward repression and control. It’s one of the foundational tenets of a Leninist system. Anytime the Party can afford to swing toward repression, it will.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

“Taiwan’s democratization process shook Communist Party bigwigs because they saw in it a potential road map for mainland China and thus a threat to the Party’s monopoly on power.”
― Desmond Shum, Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China