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The Li Peng Family: Thirty Years of an Electric Power Kingdom

Earlier installments described two forms: the Mao family had privilege without business; the Liu family had its privilege crushed once by the whole machine. This installment is a third form, and the most complete: privilege never interrupted, arriving just as its industry was capitalized — the father spent thirty years running an industrial ministry as his own domain; the son took over the sector's largest enterprise; the daughter founded and headed another; the two companies listed in Hong Kong and New York in succession; more than twenty years after the father's premiership ended, the son became a State Council minister and the daughter a deputy general manager of a central power-generation enterprise, before the two exited in 2018 and 2024 respectively. No step of this requires rumor to fill it in: every appointment has an official document, every company a prospectus and annual reports, and even the equity structure of the daughter's offshore company is attested by leaked lawyers' letters and a copy of a passport.

That is the method of this installment: no dramatization, no speculation — only the public record laid out in time order. Once laid out, the four words "electric power kingdom" need no one to pronounce them; they will stand up on their own.

One further detail first: every person this installment concerns — Li Peng, Li Xiaopeng, Li Xiaolin, Li Xiaoyong, Zhu Lin — appears under a real name in the public record, with every post and corporate trajectory checkable in public documents; the family's third generation has no business record in the listed-company filings and two rounds of offshore lists checked for this series (see the material gaps at the end). Strictly speaking, then, this installment is not an "exposé" but a "reconciliation of accounts": the facts scattered across obituaries, annual reports, announcements, personnel appointments, and leaked files, assembled for the first time in the shape of one family.

I. Li Peng: From Fengman Power Plant to the State Council

Li Peng was born in October 1928 in Chengdu, Sichuan. His father, Li Shuoxun, an early CCP leader, was executed in Hainan in 1931, when Li Peng was three. He was raised by the Party organization; during his years in Chongqing and Yan'an he received the direct care of Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao. He arrived in Yan'an in March 1941 and joined the Party in November 1945. In September 1948 he went to the Soviet Union to study hydroelectric generation at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, returning to China in 1955. (Sources 1, 3) This origin deserves an extra line in this series: he was one of the martyrs' orphans raised directly by the Party's highest level. His memoirs recount his childhood wanderings, his Yan'an upbringing, and this care, and the biographical accounts in multiple obituaries corroborate them. In this series' coordinates, the starting point of his privilege was not the ministerial appointment of 1981 but the aftermath of his father's execution when he was three — the organization first gave him a family, and later gave him an industry. (Source 28)

In the more than twenty years after his return, he never left the electric power system: deputy director and chief engineer of Fengman Power Plant; deputy chief engineer and dispatch bureau director of the Northeast China Electric Power Administration; director of Fuxin Power Plant; head of the Beijing Power Supply Bureau and the Beijing Electric Power Administration. In April 1979 he became vice minister of the Ministry of Electric Power Industry; on March 2, 1981, he rose to minister of electric power and secretary of its Party group; in the 1982 institutional reform the Ministry of Electric Power was merged with the Ministry of Water Resources into the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power, and he became vice minister and deputy Party group secretary. Xinhua's obituary sums up this career as "an outstanding leader of China's electric power industry and an important founder of the nuclear power enterprise," recording that in office he put forward "electric power must take the lead" and "electric power should develop moderately ahead of demand," promoted the running of power plants by many parties and through many channels, and took part in guiding the Three Gorges project. (Sources 1, 2, 3)

In June 1983 Li Peng became a vice premier of the State Council, with a portfolio covering precisely energy, transport, and key construction projects — electric power remained in his jurisdiction. In November 1987 he became acting premier; in April 1988 he formally became Premier of the State Council, serving ten years until 1998; he then served as Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress until 2003. Those ten years included the political turmoil of 1989 and the governance rectification that followed; its historical assessment belongs to a dedicated installment elsewhere and is outside this installment's scope. This installment records only the line connected to electric power and to the family, of which the boldest stroke is the Three Gorges. On April 3, 1992, the Fifth Session of the Seventh National People's Congress voted on the resolution to build the Three Gorges project: 1,767 votes in favor, 177 against, 664 abstentions, and 25 delegates not pressing their voting buttons — an extremely rare distribution in a National People's Congress known for near-unanimous passage; the principal promoter was the then Premier, Li Peng. In January 1993 the State Council's Three Gorges Project Construction Committee was established, with Li Peng as its director; on December 14, 1994, he personally announced the formal start of construction. China's first large commercial nuclear power station, the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant, was also decided and built during his tenure overseeing energy; construction began in the same period on the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant Phase I (started 1985, connected to the grid 1991), China's first self-designed and self-built nuclear plant — the obituary's "important founder of the nuclear power enterprise" refers to this. (Sources 1, 2, 3, 22) On July 22, 2019, Li Peng died in Beijing, aged 91. (Sources 1, 2, 3)

Viewed alone, this career is the rise of a technocrat. To see what it meant for the next generation, one must reckon a time account: Li Peng worked in the electric power system for nearly twenty-eight years, four of them as the industry's highest administrative officer (vice minister, minister, vice minister of the merged ministry); thereafter, as vice premier and premier, he oversaw energy for another fifteen years. An industry's personnel appointments, project approvals, investment allocations, and policy line issued for thirty years from the same system and the same group of people — and at the top of that system sat the same man. This is not a "kingdom" in the metaphorical sense; it is one in the organizational sense: in the China of the 1980s, government and enterprise were not separated in the electric power industry; the Ministry of Electric Power was both regulator and operator, and every power plant, grid, design institute, and equipment factory in the country answered to it. The whole process by which Li Peng's three children came of age, entered the industry, and were promoted took place inside this structure.

II. The Kingdom's Foundation: A Ministry Without Separation of Government and Enterprise, and the Window of Capitalization

To understand this family's second generation, first look at the two years 1985 and 2002.

In 1985, in order to use foreign capital to build power plants, the State Council approved the establishment of Huaneng International Power Development Corporation — a "window company" set up by the power system itself, tasked with bringing in foreign capital and foreign debt to build plants; it later evolved into the Huaneng Group and the listed company Huaneng Power International. To maintain, inside a planned-economy ministry, a company that operated in a market manner — the headship of that company was naturally the position in the whole system closest to capital. And in 1985, when this arrangement was approved, Li Peng was overseeing energy as a vice premier; the same year the State Council issued the "Interim Provisions on Encouraging Fund-Raising for Power Construction and Implementing Multiple Electricity Prices," opening power investment — long monopolized — for the first time to capital outside the system. Huaneng was the system's own company established under this policy; policy and company issued from the same overseeing system. In 1994 another window company appeared in Hong Kong: China Power International Holding Ltd. (CPIH), the Hong Kong investment and financing platform of the Ministry of Electric Power (later the State Power Corporation and China Power Investment Corporation), from which the listed company China Power International Development (China Power, 02380.HK) was later spun off. (Sources 14, 19)

At the end of 2002, the electric power system reform landed: the State Council issued the "Electric Power System Reform Plan" (State Council Document [2002] No. 5), and the enormous State Power Corporation was split into eleven entities — grid assets formed the State Grid Corporation and China Southern Power Grid; generation assets were divided among five groups, Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, Guodian, and China Power Investment; plus four auxiliary groups. Whoever sat in which seat at the moment of the split took away which block of assets. Thereafter the five generation groups raced to package their assets for listing, and the power industry completed its turn from ministry offices into a flock of listed companies. (Sources 4, 7)

One node is often overlooked: in 1998, the State Council's institutional reform abolished the Ministry of Electric Power Industry; the "kingdom's" administrative shell ceased to exist, its assets and personnel passing wholesale into the State Power Corporation formed the same year, and regulation and operation were nominally separated for the first time. It was also in 1998 that Li Peng stepped down as premier and became Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee. Yet the family's position did not disappear with the ministry: the son promptly rose to deputy general manager of the State Power Corporation — the heir to the ministry's mantle — and the daughter's CPIH was precisely this company's Hong Kong platform. The shell changed three times — ministry, state corporation, five groups — but the people inside did not change. This is the key frame for understanding this family.

The résumés of the Li family's second generation happen to catch each of these chokepoints one by one: the eldest son entered Huaneng in 1991 and took the chairman's seat in 1999; the daughter was transferred to Hong Kong in 1994 to set up CPIH, and in 2004 rang the bell at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with China Power; on the eve of the 2002 split, the eldest son took part in the split as deputy general manager of the State Power Corporation, and after the split what he took over was the most asset-rich of the five — Huaneng. This temporal fit needs no behind-the-scenes explanation to stand; it only needs to be recorded as it happened: when the industry passed from the hands of power into the hands of capital, this family's hands were exactly at the point of handover.

III. Li Xiaopeng: From Huaneng Chairman to Minister of Transport

Li Xiaopeng, born in June 1959, is Li Peng's eldest son. He graduated in August 1982 from the North China Electric Power Institute with a degree in power plants and power systems, entered the Electric Power Research Institute, and worked his way up from technician and assistant engineer; from February 1987 to February 1988 he studied in Canada at Ontario Hydro, the Manitoba HVDC Research Centre, and the University of Manitoba. On returning he served as deputy director of the Planning and Operations Division of the Electric Power Research Institute and director of its Power Techno-Economics Research Institute. (Source 4)

In October 1991 he moved to Huaneng International Power Development Corporation, starting as assistant to the general manager: deputy general manager in 1993, general manager in 1995, and in March 1999 chairman, general manager, and Party group secretary of Huaneng International Power Development Corporation, concurrently chairman and general manager of the listed company Huaneng Power International, Inc. (listed in New York, Hong Kong, and Shanghai). In December 1999 he became general manager and Party group secretary of China Huaneng Group Corporation. In December 2001 he concurrently became deputy general manager and Party group member of the State Power Corporation — the number two of the national power industry; after the 2002 reform split he returned to Huaneng as general manager and Party group secretary of China Huaneng Group, concurrently chairman of Huaneng Power International, until May 2008. Inside the industry he presided over Huaneng for nearly nine years; Huaneng had the largest installed capacity of the five generation groups, and the media therefore called him the "Electricity King of Asia" — a media appellation, not an official title, but current inside and outside the industry. (Sources 4, 6)

His departure likewise left documents. On June 2, 2008, he submitted his resignation to the board of Huaneng Power International; the company's 2008 annual report records that he resigned as chairman and director "due to a work transfer," succeeded by Huang Yongda. The plate he handed over carries numbers in the annual report: in 2007 Huaneng Power International generated 173.688 billion kWh, with controllable installed capacity of 37.404 million kW at year-end — the largest listed power generator in China at the time. Financial media, looking through the 2007 annual report at the time, noticed one detail: as chairman, Li Xiaopeng held no shares of Huaneng Power International in his own name. During his tenure, Huaneng Power International completed its A-share listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2001, completing the New York–Hong Kong–Shanghai three-market pattern — the assets he controlled were on a group scale, but his own power was always positional, not equity-based. This point must be recorded clearly, because it delimits the nature of this family's "inside-the-system block": positions can be passed on; shares cannot. (Sources 19, 23, 26)

Note the coincidence of two time points. When Li Xiaopeng graduated from university and entered the Electric Power Research Institute in 1982, his father had just moved from minister of electric power to vice minister of water resources and electric power; when he became head of Huaneng in 1999, his father had stepped down as Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee one year earlier, after ten years as Premier of the State Council. No step of these appointments states any connection to his father in any public document, and no public document can prove that his father ever put in a word for him. This installment records only the structure: when he entered the industry, his father was the industry's chief; when he took over the industry's largest enterprise, his father was the country's premier. The record stops there; judgment is left to the reader.

In May 2008 Li Xiaopeng left the power system and entered politics: member of the Shanxi Provincial Party Standing Committee and vice governor, executive vice governor in 2010, deputy Party secretary and acting governor in December 2012, and formally elected governor of Shanxi in January 2013. His governorship collided with the most turbulent years of Shanxi officialdom: in 2014 the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced in succession that several Shanxi provincial-ministerial-level cadres were under investigation, later officially characterized as "systemic, collapse-style corruption"; on September 1 of that year the provincial Party secretary Yuan Chunqing was transferred out and Wang Rulin parachuted in to succeed him, and the responsible official of the Central Organization Department stated bluntly at the cadres' meeting that Shanxi's "political ecology has not a few problems," deciding on a major adjustment of the provincial Party committee. In this earthquake, Li Xiaopeng himself received no public accountability, remained governor to the end of his term, and was promptly promoted into the State Council. (Source 24) On September 3, 2016, the NPC Standing Committee appointed him Minister of Transport; from May 2023 he concurrently served as the ministry's Party group secretary. On October 11, 2024, he was appointed vice chairman of the Economic Committee of the 14th CPPCC National Committee; on November 8 of the same year the NPC Standing Committee decided to remove him as Minister of Transport, with Liu Wei succeeding him — eight years and two months after he became minister. From entering the Electric Power Research Institute in 1982, he had completed a full forty-two years inside the system: twenty-six years in the power system, sixteen in local government and the State Council, every stop attested by a formal appointment document. (Sources 4, 5)

Of the three children, Li Xiaopeng is the one with the "cleanest" record: his whole life he drew only an inside-the-system salary and posts, holds no commercial shareholding in any public document, and has no investigation notice or judicial record directed at him personally. What this installment can record for him is a record of appointments complete to the point of rigidity — and that record is itself material: it shows that half of this family's transmission of power traveled this sunlit road of officialdom.

IV. Li Xiaolin: The Woman Who Founded a Listed Company with Her Own Hands

The other half traveled the daughter's capital line.

Li Xiaolin, born in June 1961, is Li Peng's only daughter. In 1988 she received a master's degree in engineering in power systems and automation from Tsinghua University, and later was a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management. On returning to China she served successively at the North China Electric Power Administration Bureau and in the International Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Electric Power, rising to director of that department's Economic and Trade Division. (Source 7)

In 1994, the Ministry of Electric Power decided to establish China Power International Holding Ltd. in Hong Kong as the power system's overseas investment and financing platform, and Li Xiaolin was transferred to take part in setting it up; on July 7, 1995, CPIH was announced as established in Hong Kong, with her as assistant to the general manager, rising to deputy general manager in 1998. In the December 2002 power system reform, the China Power Investment Corporation group was formed; she became the group's deputy general manager and a Party group member; in January 2003 she concurrently became general manager of CPIH, and from March 2004 its chairwoman. On October 15, 2004, China Power International Development Limited (China Power, 02380.HK), spun off from CPIH, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Thereafter she concurrently served as chairwoman of China Power New Energy Development Company Limited (00735.HK) and a director of Companhia de Electricidade de Macau. On January 1, 2008, she succeeded Wang Binghua as chairwoman of the listed company China Power — from co-founder to chairwoman, she sat for a full twenty years in the company she had helped create. The expansion curve of those twenty years is written clearly in the company's own results announcements: at the 2004 listing, the attributable installed capacity of its three power plants was about 3,010 MW; by the end of 2014, on the eve of her departure, attributable capacity had reached 15,028.4 MW, nearly quadrupling in ten years — the largest single step on the curve being the 2009 acquisition of a 63% stake in Hunan Wuling Power for a consideration of RMB 4.465 billion (approx. US$650 million at the exchange rate of the year of reporting, 2009). (Sources 7, 19, 27)

In public, Li Xiaolin presented another face: she was a member of the 11th and 12th CPPCC National Committees, submitting thirty-two proposals in eight years, mostly around power reform and new energy; in 2007 she was selected for Fortune magazine's list of the most powerful women in business globally; in 2011 she entered Fortune's list of the 25 most powerful business leaders in Asia, at No. 21 — the only Chinese businesswoman selected that year; the media called her the "First Lady of Electricity"; Fortune described her as believed to be the only female chief executive among Hong Kong-listed red-chip companies at the time. (Sources 10, 11) Public attention on her was not all praise: during the CPPCC session in March 2012, she proposed that "a moral file should be established for every citizen, to restrain everyone, so that everyone knows shame," provoking an uproar, with netizens asking why officials should not be filed first; she later clarified that her intent was to propose a social credit system. The episode is a footnote for understanding her public image: when a member seated at the top of a monopoly industry, and a former premier's daughter, speaks of moral restraint for ordinary citizens, what the public thinks of first is precisely the position she herself occupies. (Source 25) These are public honors, and they are placed here alongside what the next section describes because this installment's rule is to record both sides: the same person both gathered a full professional reputation in Hong Kong's capital market and left, in the offshore world, the most complete set of concealed-equity documents in this series.

The turn came in 2015. On May 29, 2015, China Power Investment Corporation and the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation were restructured into the State Power Investment Corporation; in mid-June, SASAC confirmed the new group's ten-person leadership team, five from China Power Investment and five from State Nuclear Power — Li Xiaolin's name was not on the list. On July 7, Liu Qiang, a deputy director of SASAC, announced at China Datang Corporation: Li Xiaolin was transferred to Datang as a Party group member and deputy general manager, ranked third; SASAC characterized the transfer as "decided according to work needs" and affirmed that she was "familiar with the electric power industry and has relatively rich listed-company management experience." Mainland media generally described her relation to the new group with the word "out" (chuju). That day she wrote a farewell poem and left the China Power system in which she had worked for twenty-one years. (Sources 8, 9, 20)

On May 23, 2018, Li Xiaolin retired from Datang Group, aged 57. In her retirement remarks she said Datang was "the last stop of my work in this industry." Thereafter she retained only social posts such as director of Companhia de Electricidade de Macau and faded from the power industry. Her father Li Peng died the following July. (Source 7)

V. Offshore: The Equity Maze of Cofic

Li Xiaolin's name appears in the offshore files not once but twice, in two independent leaks.

The first batch is the ICIJ's (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) "China Leaks" of January 2014: based on leaked files of the offshore service providers Portcullis TrustNet and Commonwealth Trust, the ICIJ reported that Li Xiaolin was connected to two British Virgin Islands (BVI) companies; subsequent reporting, citing the same body of files, stated that Li Xiaolin and her husband Liu Zhiyuan were the beneficiaries of five Swiss bank accounts which, at their highest combined point in 2006–2007, held about US$2.48 million. The caliber must be marked here: the US$2.48 million is a restatement of account balances contained in the ICIJ files — "the combined highest value of five accounts" — not a court-determined amount, still less her total wealth. (Source 15)

The second batch is the "Panama Papers" of April 2016 — 11.5 million internal files of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca leaked, one complete equity chain among them pointing to the Li Xiaolin couple, which can be taken apart step by step:

• 1994: a company named Cofic Investments Ltd. was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. That year, Li Peng was Premier of the State Council, and Li Xiaolin had just been transferred to Hong Kong to set up CPIH.
• Cofic's actual financial backers were Li Xiaolin and her husband Liu Zhiyuan, but the equity was long held in the form of bearer shares — whoever physically holds the shares owns the company; no names appear in the register. Bearer shares are among the most complete instruments of ownership concealment in the offshore world, and precisely for that reason were later expressly prohibited by anti-money-laundering rules in many jurisdictions.
• 2009: the British Virgin Islands tightened its anti-money-laundering standards, and bearer shares became untenable. 2010: Cofic's equity was moved into another concealment structure: the Liechtenstein foundation Fondation Silo became Cofic's sole shareholder, and the foundation's registration documents show its beneficiaries to be Li Xiaolin and Liu Zhiyuan.
• The handling Swiss lawyers, Charles-André Junod and Alain Bruno Lévy, two partners of a Geneva firm, served as Cofic's directors. When Mossack Fonseca demanded verification of the source of funds, Junod explained in a lawyer's letter: Cofic's funds came from other clients of his firm — clients who exported European heavy industrial equipment to China; the Li Xiaolin couple "through Cofic" provided services for these transactions, and the profits collected were the source of the funds. The files also show that Cofic held an account at UBS and an account at the asset manager Mirelis InvesTrust.
• To satisfy background checks, the lawyers submitted Li Xiaolin's passport to Mossack Fonseca — a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passport; in the accompanying letter her signature was "Xiaolin Liu-Li." For years Mossack Fonseca did not realize that this client was the daughter of a former Chinese premier; only in 2014–2015, when the BVI financial regulator raised inquiries about Cofic, did the firm confirm the identity of the beneficial owner behind it. (Sources 12, 13, 15)

Among the relatives of at least eight sitting or former Politburo Standing Committee members named in the same body of files, the Li family's chain is distinctive for its completeness: year of incorporation, bearer shares, foundation takeover, bank accounts, passport and signed letter — every step of the evolution left a document; it is one of the few cases in which an offshore structure can be drawn as a full picture. (Source 12)

The ICIJ attached explicit caveats when publishing these files: the files do not show that Li Peng himself held any beneficial interest in these offshore companies, and do not suggest wrongdoing by the political figures themselves. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson responded at the time that the relevant reports were "fabricated out of nothing." The named Swiss lawyer Junod declined to comment to the ICIJ but said he had always complied with the relevant laws; Li Xiaolin herself did not respond to the ICIJ's repeated requests for comment. (Sources 12, 13)

The offshore section also pulls in an older report, which must be recorded together with its denials. In October 2013, Britain's Daily Telegraph, citing U.S. court documents, reported that in 1995 Li Xiaolin had acted as intermediary, introducing senior Zurich Insurance executives to three Chinese businessmen holding stakes in New China Life Insurance (among them Zhang Hongwei, chairman of Orient Group), and that the Zurich side then paid a US$16.9 million "good faith" sum into an offshore account in the Bahamas in exchange for a stake of nearly a quarter of New China Life — at a time when foreign investment in China's insurance industry was still prohibited; the report said part of the money was used to bribe officials. After publication, Orient Group chairman Zhang Hongwei issued a statement through Beijing media denying that "a woman surnamed Li" had participated in any business of his company, calling the claim "malicious defamation"; China Power International, Li Xiaolin's employer, also issued a statement saying that Li Xiaolin "has never had any personal transaction with any insurance company, and does not know anyone at an insurance company," and that the online rumor was pure malicious defamation. Zurich Insurance did not immediately comment at the time, and later stated that its shareholding in New China Life complied with Chinese laws and regulations. (Source 16) The matter had no subsequent judicial conclusion; this installment registers the reporting and the denials on both sides and makes no judgment.

Bringing this section back to this installment's evidence standard: the incorporation and holding of the offshore companies have been proven at the level of documents — a passport and lawyers' letters — the hardest offshore record of any family in this series; but what lies between "holding" and "illegality" — whether the funds were lawful, whether taxes were compliant — has never been concluded by any official document. This installment does not supply that conclusion for any institution. A follow-up note: when the Panama Papers were published in April 2016, Li Xiaolin had been at Datang for nine months; thereafter neither China Power International, Datang, nor she herself publicly explained or responded to these files, and at the official level there was no sequel. (Sources 12, 13)

VI. Li Xiaoyong: The Thinnest Record of the Three Siblings

Li Xiaoyong, born September 6, 1963, is Li Peng's youngest son (the birth date appears in published records of the Li Peng memoir system). He is the only one of the three siblings who did not enter the central power-enterprise system — though strictly speaking he was not far from electricity: public biographical compilations and overseas media reports state that he enlisted in 1978 at 15, later served in the People's Armed Police hydropower forces system, serving as deputy director of the Political Department of the PAP Hydropower Command, with rank up to colonel; the compilations also state that he chaired the PAP Anya Technology Development Company, an enterprise under the PAP hydropower system. The PAP hydropower forces were nominally military but in substance one of the main forces of national hydropower construction; in 2018 they were restructured into China Anneng Construction Group. An academic work on the structure of China's power industry (a 2024 Leiden University doctoral dissertation) specifically records that Li Peng's younger son served in the hydropower forces and held a management post, treating it as an example of the hydropower forces' special position within Li Peng's "electricity empire." (Sources 17, 18)

For the record beyond that, this installment must downgrade as a whole. From the late 1990s onward, several overseas Chinese-language media (Bowen Press and others) in their reporting linked Li Xiaoyong's name to the "Xinguoda" futures fraud case that collapsed in 1998, stating that after the case broke he and his wife Ye Xiaoyan (granddaughter of General Ye Ting) emigrated to Singapore and obtained residency there; after Li Peng's death in 2019, overseas media further reported that he appeared at the mourning hall in Beijing. None of these episodes is corroborated by any Chinese official document, court instrument, or listed-company announcement, and Li Xiaoyong himself has never been charged or convicted in any public judicial proceeding — they constitute only the fact itself that "overseas media have reported this for years." This installment registers the existence of the reporting and states clearly: not officially confirmed, not treated as settled fact. (Source 18)

A note on the in-law side, because it is likewise part of this family's structure: according to public reporting and biographical compilations, Li Xiaolin's husband Liu Zhiyuan and Li Xiaoyong's wife Ye Xiaoyan are both descendants of revolutionary martyrs — Ye Xiaoyan is the daughter of Ye Zhengming, the second son of General Ye Ting. Intermarriage among red families appears twice in this family's second generation; together with posts and companies it forms a channel of intergenerational transmission of privilege, though the details of this channel likewise survive only in outline in the public record. (Sources 3, 18)

The third generation likewise gets a single line: apart from scattered public-activity reports (for example, Li Xiaoyong's daughter once took part in a figure-skating competition, seen in sports-reporting compilations), the children of Li Xiaopeng, Li Xiaolin, and Li Xiaoyong show no verifiable company postings or shareholding records in the listed-company filings and offshore lists checked for this series. The Li family's third generation does not, as a whole, constitute a business footprint. (Source 18)

VII. Zhu Lin: Even the Spouse's Career Is Inside the Power System

Zhu Lin was born on November 7, 1933, in Shanghai, into a family of technical personnel. In the early 1950s she studied Russian at the Harbin Foreign Languages Institute and, after graduating, was assigned as a Russian translator to the Jilin City Chemical Plant; in 1957 she met Li Peng, then deputy chief engineer of Fengman Power Plant; they married in July 1958 and had two sons and a daughter. Her posting trajectory deserves its own line: head of the Foreign Affairs Office of the North China Electric Power Bureau; director of the Beijing office of the Guangdong Daya Bay Nuclear Power Station; director of the Research Office of the State Council Special Economic Zones Office; her professional title was senior economist; after retirement she held social posts including deputy director of the China Committee for Caring for the Next Generation and vice president of the China Women's Development Foundation. (Sources 3, 21)

That is to say, the careers of all four adult members of this family — husband, eldest son, daughter, wife — took place wholly or mostly within the electric power and nuclear power systems, over a span from Li Peng walking into Fengman Power Plant in 1955 to Li Xiaolin's retirement at Datang in 2018: sixty-three years. As far as the public record goes, Zhu Lin's posts were all administrative and foreign-affairs positions, with no commercial shareholding record; her significance in this family's structure is to complete the four words "one family, electric power."

VIII. The Sector Footprint, and This Installment's Boundaries

Finally, lay the footprint out. The Li Peng family's "footprint" differs from the footprints of private enterprises, offshore companies, and funds in earlier installments; it consists of two blocks:

The inside-the-system block. The family's chain of posts within the power system: minister (Li Peng, 1981) → the industry's number two and head of its largest generation group (Li Xiaopeng, deputy general manager of the State Power Corporation and general manager of Huaneng Group, 1999–2008) → founder and chairwoman of the Hong Kong listing platform (Li Xiaolin, CPIH and China Power, 1994–2015) → a nuclear plant's office organs and the industry's foreign-affairs posts (Zhu Lin). Thereafter Li Xiaopeng converted this seniority into a governorship and a State Council ministry. Every step of this block has documents; no step of it is unlawful — what it presents is the organizational form of industry heredity, not a criminal record.

The offshore block. Only one location, the Li Xiaolin couple: Cofic, incorporated in 1994; the Liechtenstein Fondation Silo; two Swiss account systems. This block has the ICIJ's original files nailing down the word "holding," but no official conclusion exists on the lawfulness of the funds or the tax questions. Outside estimates of Li Xiaolin's personal wealth in circulation (for example, the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars claimed in individual reports) have no documentary source, and this installment adopts none of them — in this series, numbers are written only by documentary caliber.

This structure has entered the field of academic research: a 2024 Leiden University doctoral dissertation, taking China's electric power industry of 1978–2013 as a case study of "oligarchic politics," devotes a chapter to the relation between Li Peng and the power system and lists family kinship as one of three lines explaining the industry's oligarchization. The factual skeleton of this installment — appointments, announcements, annual reports, offshore files — broadly agrees with that study's archival conclusions. (Source 17)

Set alongside the first two installments, the three forms of red privilege are now complete: in the Mao family, privilege stopped at living treatment and never became business; in the Liu family, privilege was interrupted by a higher power, and what was restored was only the inside-the-system portion; in the Li family, privilege was never interrupted, and it happened that the industry it occupied listed as a whole — so it took the most "modern" form: chairmanships, listed-company annual reports, CPPCC proposals, and global businesswomen rankings, all in plain sight; while the part in shadow required a batch of leaked law-firm files before the world could see the name that the share register had not written out.

Place the three siblings side by side at the end of the timeline, and this family's pattern of transmission is complete: the eldest son took the official road, converting twenty-six years of industry seniority into a governorship and a State Council ministry, ending as vice chairman of a CPPCC specialized committee; the daughter took the capital line, converting industry standing into a listed-company chairmanship and an offshore structure, retiring in 2018 and appearing in no public post thereafter; the youngest son took a marginal road, his public record essentially breaking off after the late 1990s, leaving only the outline drawn by overseas reporting — every stroke of it unverifiable against official documents. Three modes of conversion, one common source: the seat the father occupied in the power system for nearly thirty years. This installment's record ends here — what could be nailed down has been nailed down; what could not is left in the gaps list below.

Material Gaps (stated candidly)

• Total family wealth: no official document, listed-company disclosure, or authoritative investigation gives a total of the Li Peng family's assets or wealth. Individual estimates in circulation outside (for example, the figure of about US$550 million for Li Xiaolin's personal wealth claimed in overseas reporting) have no documentary source and were not adopted in this installment. The only offshore figure with an amount in the whole text is the approximately US$2.48 million combined peak of five Swiss accounts in 2006–2007, as restated from the ICIJ files — its caliber is marked in the text.
• Li Xiaoyong: apart from his birth date and the compilatory records of his service in the PAP hydropower system, all of his later episodes (connection to the Xinguoda futures case, emigration to Singapore, return for the 2019 funeral) appear only in overseas Chinese-language media reporting, with no corroboration from Chinese official, judicial, or listed-company documents; no public record of companies or assets in his name can be found. This is the lowest-evidence-grade section of the installment, marked at each point.
• Liu Zhiyuan (Li Xiaolin's husband): his public record appears mainly in his beneficiary identity and lawyers' letters in the ICIJ files, and in scattered reporting on his energy-project investments (media journalists' investigations, such as a coal-water slurry project, with no listed-company documents); the scale and outcomes of his business cannot be checked in documents, and the text does not expand on him.
• Final characterization of Li Xiaolin's offshore funds: the source of Cofic's funds rests only on the handling lawyer's one-sided statement in his letter (commissions from European industrial equipment exports); there is no independent audit or judicial check, and to this day no official conclusion exists on the tax and compliance questions.
• Li Xiaopeng's family and property: no public record of his spouse or children appears in listed-company filings or the offshore lists; at the public level of cadre property declarations, this installment has no material to add.
• The third generation: no verifiable company postings, shareholdings, or offshore records for the Li family's third generation appear within the scope checked for this series (no names of Li third-generation members appear in either round of the ICIJ lists) — the conclusion is "no public record found," not "not checked."

Contact: endccpworld@proton.me