Reuters
Police in Tiananmen Square. A duel between China and Western media seems to be coming to a head.
MEMO to: China's President Xi Jinping.
From: A Friend of Your Country.
Dear President Xi, in recent years there's been a tug of war inside the global investment community between those who think China is a bubble about to burst and therefore a "screaming short" and those who believe that China has big problems — but also big tools and smart leaders — and will find a way forward, even if at a more normal growth rate. I lean toward the second camp, but looking at some of China's recent behavior I'm beginning to wonder: Maybe your system is more frail than I thought?
I say that as someone who wants to see China succeed in empowering its people to realize their full potential so they can better participate in shaping China's future and integrate with the world. Anyone who is telling you that American policy makers want to see China fail doesn't know what they're talking about. Our two economies and fates are totally intertwined today.
So, I wish China's people well. Many Americans do. That is why I am writing you today. I believe you're about to make a terrible, terrible mistake.
The Chinese-language websites of The Wall Street Journal and Reuters were recently blocked, and those of Bloomberg News and The New York Times have both been blocked for months. More important, The Times and Bloomberg together have more than 20 journalists in China whose visas are up for renewal by the end of December and, so far, your government is refusing to act on them — in apparent retaliation for both organizations exposing the enormous wealth amassed by relatives of senior Chinese leaders, including yours. The rumor is that you intend to deny both organizations the right to report from China.
China experts tell me that this unprecedented crackdown is prompted by your feeling that we've crossed a red line. You apparently thought the rules of the game were that the foreign press, local media and social media could write anything they wanted about corruption and social protests at the local and provincial level — indeed, it was a way for the central government to track and curb corruption — but that such focus should never be brought to the financial dealings of the top leaders of the Communist Party.
Sir, if a red line has been crossed, it has been by your officials and by technology. How so? There have been enough small stories in your own media — tips of icebergs — that suggest a widespread amassing of assets by family members of the most senior Communist Party officials. This kind of asset grab may not be illegal in all cases, but it surely could not happen at this scale without people taking advantage of their positions and the lack of transparency at the top.
Just last March, Chinese authorities quickly deleted from the blogosphere photos of a fatal Beijing car crash, believed to involve the son of a close ally of then-President Hu Jintao. The car was a Ferrari. The driver was killed and two young women with him badly injured. How could such a young man afford a Ferrari?
There was no way the foreign press was going to permanently ignore such stories that so many Chinese were talking about online. And that became even more true with the financialization of your economy and the emergence of a shareholding culture that required your companies and markets to comply with international norms for public filings of corporate structures and shareholders.
It was inevitable that once those filings were in place reporters in China would, as we did, hire accountants and lawyers to scrutinize these public records and discover things — like the fact that former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher, had in her name an investment in a large Chinese financial services company valued around $100 million and Wen's son, daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law had all also become extraordinarily wealthy.
Who crossed the red line here? We'd argue that it was some of your colleagues and their kids in opting for industrial-scale greed — combined with the new technology to expose it. That technology is not going away, so the excesses and corruption better. The Times and Bloomberg did your leadership a huge service in exposing this. It was a warning heart attack. The No. 1 cause of death of Chinese regimes in history is greed and corruption.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 14, 2013
An earlier version of this column misspelled the name of the president of China. He is Xi Jinping, not Jingping.
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