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Chinese premier's family has massive wealth: NYT report
China's Premier Wen Jiabao waves during the European Union-China summit at the Egmont Palace in Brussels September 20, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Laurent Dubrule
(Reuters) - The family of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, a leader known for his humble roots and compassion for ordinary people, has accumulated massive wealth during his time in power, the New York Times reported on Friday.
"A review of corporate and regulatory records indicates that the prime minister's relatives, some of whom have a knack for aggressive deal-making, including his wife, have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion," it said.
The Times' websites in English and Chinese were blocked in China on Friday morning, and searches for the New York Times as well as the names of Wen's children and wife were blocked on China's main Twitter-like microblog service.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily briefing the report "smears China's name and has ulterior motives".
Asked why the websites were blocked, Hong said: "China manages the Internet in accordance with laws and rules."
The Times reported that Wen's mother, siblings and children had amassed the majority of the wealth since Wen was named vice premier in 1998. Wen was promoted to the premiership in 2003.
Giving one example, the Times said partnerships controlled by Wen's relatives and their friends and colleagues held up to $2.2 billion in stock in Ping An Insurance (Group) Co of China Ltd in 2007, the last year those stock holdings were disclosed in public documents.
Wen's 90-year-old mother had one investment in Ping An that was worth $120 million five years ago, the newspaper said.
The Times said it presented its findings to the government for comment. The Foreign Ministry declined to respond. Members of Wen's family also declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment, the Times said.
The private lives of Chinese leaders as well as their assets are kept under wraps, with personal details considered state secrets.
Still, cases against lower-level officials, often exposed by Chinese media, and reports on senior officials by Western and Hong Kong news organizations, underscore the extent to which those with power profit from their standing.
Occasionally, top officials are caught and prosecuted.
"HIDDEN"
In the biggest political scandal in China in decades, now-disgraced senior party leader Bo Xilai, whose wife was convicted of corruption and murder in August, has been expelled from the party and stands accused of corruption, bribery and sexual promiscuity.
Bo was expelled from China's parliament on Friday and is expected to stand trial soon.
The extended family of Xi Jinping, current vice president who is expected to be named head of China's Communist Party next month and president of the country in March, has also amassed great wealth, according to an earlier news report.
Xi's relatives had investments in companies with assets of $375 million, and an 18 percent indirect stake in a company with $1.7 billion in assets, Bloomberg news reported in June.
Bloomberg's website has been blocked in China since that report was published, underscoring the sensitivity of the Party and government towards such revelations about top leaders.
In the case of Wen and his relatives, the names of family members "have been hidden behind layers of partnerships and investment vehicles involving friends, work colleagues and business partners", the New York Times said.
It said Wen's family's holdings include a villa development project in Beijing, a tire factory in northern China, a company involved in building some of the venues for Beijing's 2008 Olympics including the "Bird's Nest" main stadium, and Ping An Insurance, one of the world's largest financial services companies.
Wen's younger brother has a company that was awarded more than $30 million in government contracts and subsidies for waste water treatment and medical waste disposal in some of China's biggest cities, and controls $200 million in assets in a number of companies, the Times said, basing its estimate on government records.
The Chinese public has a fondness for Wen, who is often referred to as "Grandpa Wen" in the media, for his common touch with ordinary people, and for rushing to console victims of disasters, such as earthquakes and accidents.
(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard and Sabrina Mao in BEIJING; Editing by Michael Urquhart and Dean Yates)
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China only pretends to be Communist. In reality The Party runs the country for their own benefit, and the people get no say in it at all.
Where has the NYTs (and the rest of the media) been these thirty years? All capitalized businesses in China are controlled by either the People’s Liberation Army or the relatives and friends of Communist Party government officials. This is no secret even in China, everyone knows.
So why is this news being broken by the Chinese themselves? The article reads, “The private lives of Chinese leaders as well as their assets are kept under wraps, with personal details considered state secrets.”
The reason the Chinese Communist government is revealing these “secrets” about Premier Wen Jiabao has nothing to do with corruption, it has to do with the Chinese Communist Party setting the stage for the fraudulent collapse of the Beijing government, to be replaced by an equally fake “democratic” government:
“Since at least the early 1970s, the Communist party of China has been poised to create a spectacular but controlled “democratization” at any appropriate time. The party had by then spent two decades consolidating its power, building a network of informants and agents that permeate every aspect of Chinese life, both in the cities and in the countryside. Government control is now so complete that it will not be seriously disturbed by free speech and democratic elections; power can now be exerted through the all-pervasive but largely invisible infrastructure of control. A transition to an apparently new system, using dialectical tactics, is now starting to occur.”
Premier Wen Jiabao is playing his little part in this Chinese opera, where he will act as one of the many “fall guys” to come that will lead to “reforms”, where such “reforms” will “unexpectedly” take on a life of their own, resulting in the “collapse” of the Chinese Communist government.
Honestly folks, the Communists can only get away with such an outlandish scheme because we in the West have forgotten how to think/analyze.
Some inspiring and informative words from Dear Lenin and KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn are in order, I think, to awaken the slumbering Western masses:
“Lenin advised the Communists that they must be prepared to “resort to all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, illegal methods, evasions and subterfuge” to achieve their objectives. This advice was given on the eve of his reintroduction of limited capitalism in Russia, in his work Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.
… Another speech of Lenin’s … in July 1921 is again highly relevant to understanding “perestroika.” “Our only strategy at present,” wrote Lenin, “is to become stronger and, therefore, wiser, more reasonable, more opportunistic. The more opportunistic, the sooner will you again assemble the masses round you. When we have won over the masses by our reasonable approach, we shall then apply offensive tactics in the strictest sense of the word.”
If you examine the backgrounds of prominent Russian figures, you will find that they have long Communist Party/ KGB or Komsomol pedigrees. Yet for some inexplicable reason, the Western media have accepted their sudden, orchestrated, mass “conversion” to Western-style norms of behavior, their endless talk of “democracy,” and their acceptance of “capitalism,” as genuine. “Scratch these new, instant Soviet “democrats,” “anti-Communists,” and “nationalists” who have sprouted out of nowhere, and underneath will be found secret Party members or KGB agents,” Golitsyn writes on page 123 of his new book [The Perestroika Deception]. In accepting at face value the “transformation” of these Leninist revolutionary Communists into “instant democrats,” the West automatically accepts as genuine the false “Break with the Past” — the single lie upon which the entire deception is based.
In short, the “former” Soviet Union — and the East European countries as well — are all run by people who are steeped in the dialectical modus operandi of Lenin. Without exception, they are all active Leninist revolutionaries, working collectively towards the establishment of a world Communist government, which, by definition, will be a world dictatorship.
It is difficult for the West to understand the Leninist Hegelian dialectical method — the creation of competing or successive opposites in order to achieve an intended outcome. Equally difficult for us to comprehend is the fact that these Leninist revolutionaries plan their strategies over decades and generations. This extraordinary behavior is naturally alien to Western politicians, who can see no further than the next election. Western politicians usually react to events. Leninist revolutionaries create events, in order to control reactions to them and manipulate their outcomes.” — KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn (his 1984 book, “New Lies for Old” can be read at Internet Archive).
You ask, what does Golitsyn mean when he says, “Leninist Hegelian dialectical method — the creation of competing or successive opposites in order to achieve an intended outcome”?
Simply explained, and on a tactical level, it’s called the “Scissors Strategy”, where one blade represents (for example) Putin & Company, however the other blade of the scissors–the leadership of the political “opposition” to Putin & Company–is actually controlled by Putin & Company*, which leaves the genuine opposition in the middle wondering why political change isn’t taking place. Understand this simple strategy?
On a strategic level, back in the 1960s the USSR and China played the “Scissors Strategy”, by pretending to be enemies. This strategy allowed one side to play off against the other with the West, thereby gaining political advantages from the West, which neither Communist giant could have achieved if it was believed they were united. Clever, huh?
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