When the Party Takes Back What It Lent You
Hu Kexin made his fortune in household goods and farming equipment, then decided what he really wanted was to bring French bread to China. He bought thousands of hectares of farmland in France, hired French bakers to train their Chinese counterparts, and was building something both improbable and oddly touching—a man who’d spent his career in pragmatic goods now consumed by croissants. Then he disappeared. Not metaphorically. One day he was in France, the next he was nowhere, unreachable in both countries, as if he’d simply been switched off.
The Arte documentary that traced his story estimates up to 400 super-wealthy Chinese citizens have vanished this way—billionaires and hundred-millionaires who at some point became inconvenient. The official version, when there is one, usually involves corruption charges. The unofficial version is simpler: the Communist Party spent decades letting these people build the economy, and once they’d accumulated enough wealth to have real influence, the Party decided to take them back off the board.
Guo Wangui, a Chinese billionaire who’d gotten out and was living in New York at the time—a $40 million apartment with a direct view of Central Park—told the Arte reporters that relatives of his had been killed and that he was still being hunted. He used social media to warn other wealthy Chinese to leave while they could. Watching him in that apartment, you understand the view is also a kind of fortification. He’s officially wanted in China on corruption charges, which is the Party’s favorite all-purpose disposal label.
What I keep coming back to isn’t the scale of it, though 400 people is staggering. It’s the bread. A man who bought French farmland and hired French bakers to import croissants—and then: gone. There’s something about the sheer specificity and ordinariness of the project that makes the disappearance more disturbing, not less. He wasn’t running a dissident newspaper or funding opposition politics. He was making bread.
Beneath whatever image of cultural and economic dynamism China projects outward, there’s a system that treats private wealth as a provisional license, revocable at any moment, and the people who built that wealth as assets to be managed or liabilities to be erased. Human dignity doesn’t appear to factor into whoever runs that operation. That the story barely registers as news in most of the world feels like its own kind of verdict.