Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China

Red Roulette generates many conflicting feelings, irrespective of one's views on China's political and economic systems.

Clearly, it is a brave tell-all. This reviewer cannot remember too many insider accounts that are as revealing. The author provides corruption details involving numerous senior-most officials/politicians and their kins. Without the risks of any litigations, there is no equivocation in the descriptions or about the perpetrators. Yet, the author has taken huge personal/physical risks for himself and his loved ones from here to forever. No words are enough to appreciate this bravery.

The other side of the same coin is that the author has thrown a lot of people under the bus who will not have any avenues to defend themselves. This is an account of someone who feels terribly slighted. The pages are used to hurt everyone resented. The book would have invited many defamation suits if the aggrieved parties had recourse in Western legal systems. As much as the author tries to present himself as a relatively passive bystander who just happened to become immensely wealthy, there is a boatload of self-incrimination; the author may have some Western regulators too looking at his past activities by now.

There are two sides to the well-presented Chinese story too. The high-level corruption exposed would make even the biggest Sinophiles cringe. Details of numbers and people are so eye-popping that one cannot use the old ruse that such corruption exists everywhere.

And yet, the completely one-sided book that discusses the system as made up of only crooks and thugs fails to realize how China is much more than an infrastructure story. There are plenty of examples of countries that had some great years and decades on the back of infrastructure and buildings facilitated by corrupt politicians. Unlike in those cases, the Chinese economy was able to transition to mass consumption and innovation since the heydays of around 2010. There must be some extraordinary policies and actors who ensured that the system made the rare leap.

All said, a compelling and unique read.