Red Families
Red Families documents how privilege and wealth passed through China’s red families — the descendants of the Party’s founding generation and its senior leaders. Each family is written up from court judgments, official documents and personnel records, listed-company filings, and major investigative reporting. Reporting caliber and judicial findings are kept strictly separate throughout: what a court determined, what journalists reported, and what no public record could be found for are labeled as such in every piece.
The Mao Zedong Family and the Origins of Red Privilege
The series’ preface. In three generations of the Mao family no business of any kind can be found — what this piece records instead is how the privilege system itself was built: famine-era special supply, graded schools, and rank, decades before it could be cashed in.
The Liu Shaoqi Family: A Family Interrupted
Nine children of a president destroyed by the movement he served: privilege crushed, partly restored after 1980, and never converted into a family business.
The Relatives of Zhou Enlai: The Family with No Empire
A younger brother imprisoned on the premier’s own signature, an adopted daughter dead in custody, nephews capped at major general and bureau rank — an inventory of positions with a ceiling, and assets of zero.
The Children of the Ten Marshals and the Ten Senior Generals: A Generation in Uniform
Twenty military families: a second generation of lieutenant generals and major generals whose record stays inside ranks and posts — with the Ye Jianying family as the lone near-exception.
The Li Peng Family: Thirty Years of an Electric Power Kingdom
A son chaired Huaneng, a daughter founded a listed power company, and an offshore maze sits in the ICIJ files — position fully documented, personal corruption never judicially charged.
The Jiang Zemin Family: Three Generations from State Capital Platforms to a Dollar Fund
From Shanghai state-capital platforms and China Netcom to a grandson’s dollar fund, Boyu Capital, and the Sunrise duty-free franchise.
The Zeng Qinghong Family: The Family Whose Name Is Missing
The Luneng privatization — completed in 2006, attributed by later reporting, annulled in 2008 — and a Sydney mansion whose paper trail, unusually, is complete.
The Wen Jiabao Family: Three Readings of $2.7 Billion
The New York Times investigation, the family’s formal denial, and the official blockade, kept in three strictly separate readings from the first line to the last.
The Bo Yibo Family: An Elder’s Seven Children, and a Life Sentence
One son’s life sentence rebuilt from the judgment itself, item by item — and two calibers of “family wealth,” the court’s and Bloomberg’s, that must never be substituted for each other.
The Zhou Yongkang Family: A Whole Family Written into Court Judgments
The only family in this series sentenced member by member. It is also the series’ lesson in figures: RMB 129.77 million as a court determined it, and “RMB 90 billion” as reporting heard it, are not the same account.
The Xi Jinping Family: Formed Before the Summit, Quiet After It
Bloomberg's 2012 investigation, compiled from thousands of pages of public regulatory filings: the extended family's investments were formed by the elder sister's branch before the summit, and met with withdrawal and silence after it — the figures presented throughout together with Bloomberg's own four caveats.
Red Capital: How Power Turns into Money
The cross-cutting overview: the five machines — licenses and approvals, restructuring and listing, private equity, offshore structures, and the judicial boundary — that converted the fathers’ power into the descendants’ assets.
Four Short Cards: The Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao, Li Keqiang and Hua Guofeng Families
The control group: four premier- and chairman-level families whose descendants’ public records stop at the column “post held,” with no column leading to “shares held.”
Index Card of Ministerial-Level Descendants
A one-line index of 22 ministerial-level descendants, each with a publicly verifiable destination and its sources. Those for whom no specific post can be found are not listed.
The pieces are listed in the order of the series. Every piece carries its own source list and a candid note on gaps in the material.
Contact: endccpworld@proton.me