Chinese high achievers who displease the party become the ‘disappeared’

“Obviously, this is a bad sign,” says her former husband and business partner, Desmond Shum. “My first reaction was, ‘Are they taking all her assets?’ ” The painting was like a stray plank of wood that has floated to the surface from a ship sunk to the bottom of the sea, a token of a life of great intensity lived at the top of the Chinese business elite, now ended in a strange form of living death — stripped of former relationships and connections, unreferenced in state media or online, reduced to the state of what George Orwell called the “unperson”.

There are a lot of once proud wrecks on the Chinese seabed these days, and their number seems to be growing by the month — rich, prominent, high- achieving Chinese who are “disappeared” by their government for reasons that are often obscure. The most recent was Peng Shuai, the 35-year old tennis player who vanished from public view and social media after posting a long and detailed account of emotional and sexual abuse by China’s former vice premier, 75-year old Zhang Gaoli.

There have been journalists such as Rui Chenggang, a brash and confident television anchorman who vanished in 2014; and Haze Fan, a Chinese news assistant for the American news agency Bloomberg, who has been in detention without charge for a year. There have been entertainers, such as Vicky Zhao Wei, a popular actress whose name was scrubbed from the internet in August for unexplained reasons. Most prominent of all was Jack Ma, formerly China’s richest man, who has made only handful of appearances and had the public listing of his Ant Group cancelled after making a speech critical of state regulators last year.

“It happened all around us,” said Duan’s former husband, who has published a book about their life, Red Roulette, subtitled “An insider’s story of wealth power, corruption and vengeance in today’s China”. He added: “People we knew well disappeared.”

What lies behind such disappearances? Who falls victim to them and why? Sudden falls from grace are nothing new in China — in fact, they are as old as the Chinese Communist Party. During Mao Zedong’s decade-long purge known as the Cultural Revolution, millions died; immediately after his death the chairman’s wife and her “Gang of Four” were disgraced and tried. But, although it is difficult to measure such things, many observers of China believe that, like many aspects of life there, the scope and intensity of suppression has increased under President Xi. “Normally, there has been a cycle of tightening and then loosening,” says Richard McGregor, a China expert with the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. “Under Xi, there’s nothing but tightening.”

For nine years, the country has been in the throes of a rolling anti-corruption campaign which has punished more than a million officials but which has often looked like a mechanism for taking out enemies and potential challengers to Xi. Dissidents, democracy activists and human rights campaigners, such as the late Nobel peace prize winner Lu Xiaobo, who explicitly oppose the regime, continue to face house arrest and imprisonment. But there is another category of victim: celebrities and rich business people, working within the communist system rather than against it, among them Whitney Duan.

Each case is different but her story goes a long way towards illustrating the perils faced by high-achieving Chinese in many fields. Shum and Duan came from modest backgrounds and rose to the top thanks to education, hard work, luck and assiduously cultivated contacts among the powerful. They built up a series of businesses in the 1990s and 2000s, in technology, finance, insurance and property; projects included the construction of a huge cargo centre at Beijing’s international airport.

Shum’s book details the grotesque extravagances enjoyed by billionaire Chinese — the millions poured away on cars, private planes, gambling, on $100,000 wine tasting evenings in Paris and $1,000 bowls of soup. But it also sets out the labour — of schmoozing, boozing and sucking up — that went into securing the licences and permissions for their business projects.

To build the Beijing logistics park they needed official stamps from 150 officials, each of whom had to be courted, flattered and won over. The couple employed teams of people to do this over three years. “One of my employees accompanied so many people to so many saunas,” Shum recalls, “that his skin started peeling off.”

Whitney Duan and her ex-husband Desmond Shum in Geneva, left, and Vicky Zhao Wei, who vanished from the internet

LAURIE MCSHEA; GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY IMAGES

The corruption was carefully veiled and rarely involved the handing over of cash. “Instead, we doled out presents,” he says. “A set of golf clubs for $10,000 here, a $15,000 watch there. This was pocket change to the people who accepted them. It wasn’t so much a bribe as a sign of our affection.” The couple had something else just as desirable. “We needed to offer less money and arrange for less sex,” he says. “Whitney and I could provide access to power.”

They had inveigled their way into the favour of a woman known an “Auntie Zhang” — Zhang Peili, a geologist, diamond dealer and wife to the then premier, Wen Jiabao. Intimacy with the communist aristocracy smoothed the path of business for Shum and Duan; in return, they served as Auntie Zhang’s “white glove”, passing her considerable money-making schemes off as their own to shield her from accusations of using her husband’s position to enrich herself.

This, by Shum’s account, is the central truth of life at the top in China: that to succeed in any field you have to ally, and submit, yourself to political power — the power of the Chinese Communist Party and its officials, mighty and petty. Those who forget their obligation to power, or challenge it, or whose powerful friends fail, are instantly vulnerable.

He talks of the “grey zone”, in which all but the simplest business takes place; a world in which what is permitted or banned is endlessly negotiable, depending on who is asking, how they are asking, how much they are offering and who their friends are. “The legal framework should be the foundation of society, but in China it’s shifting all the time,” he says, speaking from exile in Oxford. “Many of the laws as they exist are vague, many things are not defined and there is always wriggle room. The law changes all the time. New laws are applied retroactively. The authorities control the courts, and the conviction rate is 99 per cent. If you want to achieve anything, the starting point is the grey zone — and you have to have a counterpart to dance with you in the grey zone. When they arrest you, it could be you they are after or it could be because they want you to implicate someone you’re dealing with.”

The circumstances of an individual’s fall vary from case to case. In the case of Shum and Duan, the change in their fortunes was brought about by the disgrace of their patrons. In 2012, an investigation in The New York Times exposed Auntie Zhang’s secret money-making schemes and massive wealth. The embarrassment, to Wen Jiabao and to the government which he served as prime minister, was colossal. Despite being Auntie Zhang’s “white glove”, the couple avoided arrest but lost assets. Three years later they divorced and Shum moved to Britain with their son while Duan remained in Beijing and became close to another powerful member of the Politburo, Sun Zhengcai. He was arrested, tried for corruption and eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018. It was during this period that Duan vanished.

“You’re living on a knife edge,” says Shum. “That’s true of every business person, even a small shop with ten people. We have a saying: doing business is like licking blood off the blade of a knife.”

Other disappearances are harder to understand, especially the case of Jack Ma, who had made his fortune by establishing the payment system Alibaba, and expanded into online retail and media. Apart from being the richest man in the country, he appeared to be an invaluable unofficial ambassador and a living advertisement for the rising new China — a charming, ebullient English speaker, at ease among foreign politicians and business leaders.

For many people, Ma’s confidence amounted to cockiness and he had often clashed with regulators. Last October in Shanghai he gave a speech criticising “regulation by yesterday’s methods”. It was characteristically punchy but not obviously transgressive. But the consequences, for a man whom many would have considered untouchable, were staggering. Apart from a handful of low-key public appearances, a man who was constantly in the public eye has disappeared, and clearly not through his own choice. “He made one ill-judged speech and within a day or two he was basically out of his own company,” says McGregor. “He crossed that invisible red line and, puff, he was gone.”

The Chinese leadership is deeply conscious of the example of other countries, and anxious not to permit the rise of the kind of oligarchs who became politically, as well as economically, influential in Russia in the 1990s. Ma’s status as a media owner would have added to their anxiety. His fearless self-confidence was itself a threat.

“This is a system in which people shouldn’t think too highly of themselves,” says Shum. “Political power trumps everything. Wealth is nothing in their eyes. The way the party looks at it is this: ‘I give you licence to do business on my turf. I can take it away any time. If I see what you do as a threat to my authority, I take you out.’ Like the mafia. Those are the rules of the game.”

It seems obvious that, in a competitive capitalist system, such an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear must have consequences: to deter potential entrepreneurs from setting foot in the arena and diminish the pool of talent on which the economy has to draw. According to Shum, the effect is twofold. Everyone who can smuggles their assets out of the country; and business people focus on short-term profit. “If I couldn’t get returns in five years it wasn’t a project [for me],” he says. “That’s why I don’t think China will overtake the US to become the leading power. When you have an entire society looking at such a short-term timeframe, how can you be competitive in the long term?”

Even so, the country is doing well enough and is still on course to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy. “Will they drain that entrepreneur energy and the economic growth it brings with it?” asks McGregor. “We won’t know that for quite a few years.”

Xi’s China is not Stalin’s Soviet Union, where convicts were led from their show trials to the firing squad, and disappearance is often not complete. Jack Ma was allowed to go to Europe in October, although rather than hanging out with Bill Gates at Davos he visited an orchid farm in the Netherlands. Videos, suspiciously staged looking, have been released showing Peng Shuai, the tennis player, “socialising” with friends.

Shum does not know where his former wife is, but he does at least know she is alive. After four years of silence, she phoned one day out of the blue to plead with him not to publish his book. He refused the request; it was obvious that she was prompted, and monitored by her captors, whoever they are. He feared the worst, but since then there have been regular calls from Duan, who speaks to their 12-year-old son, Ariston, once a week. She reports that she was held incommunicado for four years and had no idea that the Covid pandemic had occurred, or that her mother had recently died. He doesn’t expect to meet her again, or ever to be able to travel safely to China.

From the perspective of pure power, setting aside such western preoccupations as morality, the rule of law and human rights, the practice of crushing a few as a warning to the many may be a wise one. Wealth, celebrity, even the sporting prowess of an athlete such as Peng, represent potential threats to the party. “It’s a central tenet of communist rule that there should be no alternative centres of power,” says McGregor. “These various people [who have disappeared] were all considered in different ways a threat to state power and party power. Some might appear trivial, quixotic, eccentrically cruel, but that’s what they have in common: an individual stepping too far out of line to embarrass the party, weaken the party, diminish the party. And there’s no coming back — once you go into the abyss, it is a very dark place.”

Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia editor