By Nirmal P. Acharya
While cruising by Thamel Street recently I picked up the bestseller “Red Roulette” by Desmond Shum, a Chinese-American.
According to his book, he met and married Whitney Duan, the “white glove” of Zhang Beili, the wife of a former Chinese premier. Duan’s former partners include Sun Zhengcai, a former Politburo member and Chongqing party chief who was arrested and jailed by the Communist Party in 2017. The couple, Duan and Shum, used public power to gain billions of dollars in net worth in a short period of time after 2004.
The photographs presented in the book show that Duan and Shum own a Beijing property whose grandeur would make New York’s Trump Tower shy.
After reading the book, I came to these three conclusions. One is Mr Shum’s prowess. A Chinese-American, who had access to the Chinese prime minister’s residence, has been the guest of several high-ranking officials, including Sun Zhengcai, who have been running around for them.
The second is Mr Shum’s poor moral sense. Even by his own account, his archive of wealth creation clearly has a history of criminal use of public power to amass a great fortune. The Communist Party’s crackdown on Duan, his ex-wife, in 2017 was an entirely righteous act. Mr Shum divorced Duan and fled China before the Communist Party could take action. Now, as he writes books and gives frequent media interviews, Mr Shum shows a complete lack of basic morality by frivolously vilifying and mocking the Communist Party’s anti-corruption efforts, while showering off the princely lives they once enjoyed and continue to enjoy.
The third is that Mr Shum is taking a risky move. Mr Shum’s pattern of behaviour is not new. He was preceded by Guo Wengui, who followed a similar pattern: he made a fortune illegally, fled to the US before being caught, gave daily interviews to anti-Chinese media and ran his own live show railing against the Communist Party. But his attacks on the Communist Party, full of lies and assumptions, are highly unreliable. His complaints against the Communist Party, which had far more entertainment value than political value, slid into such a spectacle that the US felt it was time for him to shut up, which led to his recent arrest.
Let’s wait and see if Mr Shum’s fate is a copy of Mr Guo’s.
The most important thing for the US right now is to maintain its hegemony. The US sees China as the biggest obstacle to its continued hegemony. The US will have a great game with China in all areas and directions. Mr Shum, for all his wealth, is a small player in the big game. His fate depends on how the game plays out, not on how ostentatious he is or how vocal his criticism of China is.
We can take some inspiration from Mr Shum’s Red Roulette. Nepal, with its geographical location, is not immune to being dragged into the Great Game. The right thing Nepal must do is to take care of its own interests. The MCC project is not managed, or audited by the Nepalese government and is not subject to the jurisdiction of Nepalese law. It violates the interests of Nepal. We can only oppose it from the beginning till the end. Recent reports state that the bank chequebook of MCC Nepal Compact is also controlled by its consultant body.
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