Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive is as much a campaign to consolidate power as a sincere attempt to reform a rotten system
The call from Ms Duan, who also used the English name Whitney, was followed quickly by a second. Both contained a warning. She urged her ex-husband to halt the publication, on September 7th, of a book he has written about their joint career as entrepreneurs in the 1990s and 2000s.
The machine was right to be worried. Large scandals of the recent past are revisited in “Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China”, including allegations that the family of Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister, amassed vast fortunes by facilitating business deals and taking stakes in state-owned firms on strikingly generous terms. Some of those deals were brokered by Mr Shum and his ex-wife, though he denies law-breaking.
Mr Shum names the hotel in Beijing where, on any given night, three or four government ministers were hosted by entrepreneurs eager to buy their favour, in a labyrinth of private dining rooms designed to keep different groups from spotting each other. His book turns a jaundiced, insider’s eye on claims that, in the absence of a free press, independent judiciary and other checks and balances, officials are held to account by internal targets.
Still, leaders have grounds to dislike the book. It argues that Mr Xi’s anti-corruption drive is as much a campaign to consolidate power as a sincere attempt to reform a rotten system. The campaign has spared some notoriously corrupt princelings, the children or grandchildren of high officials. A self-made man, Mr Shum calls red aristocrats a “separate species”, reared in high-walled compounds, sent to special schools and fattened on food supplies reserved for senior leaders.
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