How China’s economic revolution created billionaires overnight

In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited warning to his communist successors: ‘Whoever doesn’t reform will have to step down! We must let some people get rich first!’

These words were the starting-gun for the country’s opening, and its intense economic reform. In the decades since, Chinese cities have never stopped hungering for more space, with new suburbs swallowing up old villages and steel skyscrapers growing ever higher. Even taxi drivers lose their way. One sheepishly explained to me: ‘That road never used to be there.’

With the economic growth, even ordinary people became billionaires overnight, forming a new elite alongside the communist old guard and their children. Those who didn’t quite make it, like my parents, sneered at the successful as baofahu — nouveau riche who ‘exploded in wealth’. The political and business elite needed each other. Party officials would dole out construction permits and licences to sell in return for a cut of the profits from entrepreneurs who went on to build airports, hotels and roads. Widespread corruption ensued. Traditional Chinese ways came flooding back — of giving lavish presents and hosting generous banquets — and a competitive drinking culture developed, fuelled by the sorghum-brewed spirit Moutai, ‘China’s national drink’, as Desmond Shum calls it. Anyone who was anyone back then would have failed a breathalyser test after lunch.

This was the game that Shum’s wife, Whitney Duan, played so well. Her speciality was creating networks of contacts — or guanxi. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. At times Red Roulette reads like a Who’s Who of Chinese politicians: dinner with Deng Xiaoping’s daughter; tea and fruit with Vice President Wang Qishan.