Business Daily meets: Desmond Shum

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We meet the Chinese property tycoon and multi-millionaire who, along with his then-wife, once moved in the highest echelons of power in Beijing.

But the couple fell foul of the Chinese government during Xi Jinping’s inexorable rise to power and in 2017 Desmond’s ex-wife was abducted – he says by the Chinese state. She vanished for two years and even now is restricted in her movements, although she’s never been charged with any crime. Mr Shum now lives in the UK, from where he gave us his extraordinary account of business life at the highest level in China. And he tells us why he thinks the current Chinese economy is rotten to the core. Presenter: Ed Butler

(Image: Desmond Shum. Credit: Desmond Shum)

Transcript

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0:00.0	In our restless world, the news never stops.
0:03.1	There's always something happening somewhere.
0:05.2	So catch up with the day's most important news stories in the Global News Podcast.
0:09.9	The Global News Podcast, from the BBC World Service.
0:13.1	The latest edition is available now.
0:15.5	Search for it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:20.6	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler.
0:22.4	Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:25.3	Today, the remarkable story of a Chinese multi-millionaire who once enjoyed the highest
0:31.6	levels of power in Beijing before he fled China to become an outspoken critic. Why he thinks the current
0:39.6	Chinese economy is rotten to the core. In China, the entire system is based on connection
0:46.2	to political power. You need to give power to the people, to the private entrepreneur,
0:52.5	to the fringe of the country. That means giving their power
0:56.1	away. A former insider's assessment of China and an extraordinary story too. That's Business Daily from
1:03.9	the BBC. So Whitney was to disappear in 2017. My son was eight. And now I need to explain it to him like why his mom disappeared.
1:19.2	This is Desmond Schum. He's 55 years old, a sometime property developer, an author and a dad now living in Britain. In 2017, he discovered that his ex-wife
1:31.0	and former business partner, Duan Wei Hong, known to her family as Whitney, well, she'd seemingly
1:37.5	been abducted by the authorities back in China. How come? We'll examine that question in a moment. But first, what is Desmond Schum's
1:47.0	own story? In many ways, it reflects both the meteoric rise and the inherent fragility,
1:53.2	some would argue, of China's modern economy. I was born in Shanghai, and then my parents
1:59.6	took me with them to Hong Kong when I was 10.
2:03.6	So I grew up in Hong Kong.
	...

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