Vanishing Point

You make a lot of money in China and suddenly you’re not just rich, you’re exposed. Somewhere on the party’s ledger, your name gets flagged as a problem—too much power, wrong kind of influence—and then you’re gone. Overnight, no explanation.

I learned about this from a German-French documentary. They profiled an entrepreneur named Hu Kexin who’d made a fortune in household and agricultural products, then pivoted to something almost whimsical: importing French baking culture. He bought thousands of hectares of French farmland, hired French bakers, wanted to create this whole ecosystem around bringing fresh bread back to China through his company. It’s the kind of ambition that sounds charming until it gets you erased.

Estimates put it at around 400 billionaires and millionaires who’ve simply vanished over the past decade. The Chinese government doesn’t acknowledge it. The Western press reports on it in fits and starts, but it never quite registers as the horror it deserves to be.

The documentary also interviewed Guo Wangui, a Chinese billionaire who fled to New York to stay alive. He was straightforward about the mechanism: the Party let entrepreneurs flourish while building the economy. Once that wealth accumulated into real power, it became a liability. They started making people vanish. His own family members were killed. He tries to warn others on social media, probably knowing it won’t help.

What stuck with me wasn’t the fear in what he described—though that was there—it was how casually he explained it. Like commenting on traffic. The system doesn’t need drama or theater. It just marks you as a problem and then you’re gone, and everyone left behind understands the logic perfectly. There’s something beneath the surface of that country, beneath the cultural richness and economic power, that doesn’t see human beings at all—just assets and liabilities. Once you fall into the latter category, that’s it.