Probe into future leader’s family irks China
China blocked access to Bloomberg’s website after the business and
financial news agency published a report on Friday detailing the
multimillion-dollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the
country’s next President.
The report says that the extended family of Vice-President Xi Jinping
holds interests that include investments in companies with total assets
of $376 million, an 18-per-cent indirect stake in a rare-earths company
with $1.73 billion in assets and a $20-million holding in a tech
company. The report cites public documents Bloomberg reporters compiled.
Bloomberg noted that no assets were traced to Mr. Xi, his wife, or their
daughter and said in the report that there was no indication of any
wrongdoing by Mr. Xi or his extended family. Still, the move to block
access to Bloomberg’s main website, on which the Mr. Xi story was the
lead news item, underscores the government’s sensitivity to such
exposure of wealth belonging to people linked to top leaders amid a
burgeoning gap between rich and poor and rampant official corruption.
The government has always been very careful in, on the one hand,
emphasising how they want to contain corruption but yet also worrying
about how reports of this nature might galvanise public opinion against
the Communist Party,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at
University of Chicago Centre in Beijing.
The outage also points to the government’s concerns about ensuring the
country’s leadership transition goes smoothly. Mr. Xi is poised to take
over as Communist Party leader in the fall and President next spring.
Bloomberg’s spokeswoman in Asia, Belina Tan, said the company believed
the Bloomberg site was inaccessible in China because of a story that it
published on Friday. Ms. Tan did not elaborate.
Officials at several departments at the Ministry of Industry and
Information Technology either could not be reached or said they were not
in charge of censorship of the Internet. This underscores a problem
that companies face when their sites are blocked in China — it is
unclear which government department to even approach to seek an
explanation.
In a sign that censors were vigorously scrubbing the Internet to prevent
circulation and discussion on the story within China, searches on the
popular Twitter-like site Sina Weibo for Bloomberg’s account and the
company’s full name in Chinese were blocked or partially censored. In
searches that did go through using an abbreviation of the news agency’s
name, no results related to the Mr. Xi story appeared.
Among details revealed by Bloomberg were that Most of Mr. Xi’s extended
family’s assets it traced were owned by his older sister Qi Qiaoqiao,
her husband Deng Jiagui and her daughter. The report said Mr. Deng held
an indirect 18 per cent stake in a rare-earths company while Ms. Qi and
Mr. Deng held assets in a real estate and a diversified holding company
called Shenzhen Yuanwei Investment Co. totalling 1.83 billion yuan ($288
million), among other assets
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