Covering Own Ears While Stealing A Bell (掩耳盗铃)

CHINA BLOCKS BLOOMBERG.COM For Reporting How Much Next President Xi Jinping Is Worth

China has blocked access to Bloomberg's website after the site reported on the assets of Xi Jinping and his relatives.

Bloomberg reported that Xi's extended family is worth $376 million, but no assets were traced to Xi, his wife, or his daughter.

The government is obviously very sensitive to this type of news in a year of leadership transition:

"The government has always been very careful in, on the one hand, emphasizing how they want to contain corruption but yet also worrying about how reports of this nature might galvanize public opinion against the Communist Party," said Dali Yang, a political scientist at University of Chicago Center in Beijing.

Bloomberg was sure to mention that there was no record of any wrongdoing, but the site remains blocked in mainland China.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that his siblings' fortune may be well over $1 billion.

Chinese leader's family worth a billion

Incoming Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's credibility may be damaged by his extended family's wealth. 

WHILE the incoming boss of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, was instructing new cadres to study Mao Zedong Thought and avoid the lure of money, his siblings were quietly amassing a private fortune worth well over $US1 billion.

Most of the identifiable assets have been acquired by the family of Mr Xi's elder sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, in the past 10 years, but obscured beneath assumed names and layers of holding companies, according to a Bloomberg investigation.

Their 33-year-old daughter owns $US50 million worth of Hong Kong real estate, for example, including a $US31.5 million waterside home in Hong Kong that remains empty.

Mr Xi's niece also owns a $US20 million slice of a local technology company, whose share price has jumped 40-fold since she bought in.

Much of the family's wealth remains unclear and untallied because of the absence of Chinese corporate and real estate disclosure rules, as well as a propaganda system that bans media discussion of leaders' personal details and removes them from the internet.
The assets, including a huge Beijing real estate development, are not included in the billion-dollar tally.

The revelations raise awkward questions about the Communist Party's modern alchemy of politics, wealth, inherited privilege, opacity and administrative discretion.

They do so at a time when the party is leaning back towards its Mao-era ideology and struggling to articulate a coherent rationale for retaining its monopoly on power, ahead of a crucial leadership transition later this year.

And they will compromise the credibility of Mr Xi, who has campaigned for "purity" in the party and carries the hopes of many reformers across the country.

The Bloomberg story was blocked on the internet in China last night, within minutes of publication, along with Bloomberg's micro blog accounts.

The extended Xi family portfolio is at least 10 times as large as that which has been traced to the extended family of Mr Xi's colleague, Bo Xilai, whose career came unstuck this year after his police chief tried to defect to the United States and his wife was accused of murdering an English friend.

Both Mr Xi and Mr Bo are members of China's "princeling" generation, being the sons of revolutionary heroes Xi Zhongxun and Bo Yibo respectively.

Mr Xi is on track to replace Hu Jintao as the secretary of the Communist Party at the 18th party congress, before being elevated to the presidency next March and to the top of the military after that.
About half of his new peers in the elite Politburo standing committee will also be princelings.
Mr Xi, like Hu Jintao, has ensured his nuclear family remains relatively financially untainted, in contrast to many senior colleagues.

The Bloomberg investigation uncovered no assets in the names of Mr Xi, his wife or their daughter, who is studying at Harvard.
In China, however, being the child of a leading revolutionary and sibling of a rising political star, is enough to ensure a flow of lucrative opportunities.

The bulk of his siblings' wealth was accumulated over the past decade, largely in sectors that involve significant government intervention, although there is no evidence that Mr Xi played any role.

The family of Mr Xi's sister, Ms Qi (who uses her mother's family name), controls a $US310 million stake in Jiangxi Rare Earth, which has benefited from sharply rising prices through export controls.

The family also owns at least $US373 million in a real estate conglomerate, the Yuanwei Group, which operates in a sector driven by administrative discretion.

The family of another of Mr Xi's sisters, Xi Anan, has an opaque involvement in a communications company, New Postcom, a previously unknown company that surprised Western competitors by winning multi-million dollar tenders from a state-owned telecommunications giant in 2007.

Chinese business people say there is little reason to think Mr Xi's extended family portfolio is unusual alongside other leading princeling families, not yet been subjected to outside media scrutiny.