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The Xi Jinping Family: Formed Before the Summit, Quiet After It

This is the series' finale, and it concerns the family with the heaviest power in the entire series.

The preface began with Mao Zedong: that generation's privilege was perquisites and status — special supplies, guards, housing, medical care — power itself, not yet capital that could be entered into a register. In the pieces that followed, privilege turned step by step into equity: the Liu Shaoqi family was cut off, the Zhou family received its judgments, Li Peng's children sat an industry down into an inheritance, and the Jiang family's third generation turned a surname into a dollar fund. In this piece, the sequence runs the other way: the wealth of this family that can be tracked in public documents was formed mainly before the man in power reached the summit — accumulated by his elder sister's branch during his ascent through provincial governorships, provincial party secretaryships and the vice presidency — and after he reached the summit, what remains in the public record is mostly withdrawal, dormancy and silence.

In 2004, Xi Jinping, then party secretary of Zhejiang, told officials at a teleconference on clean governance: manage your spouses, children, relatives, friends and the staff around you, and never allow them to use your power to seek private gain. Eight years later, Bloomberg, using thousands of pages of public regulatory filings, laid his extended family's investments out on paper. These two things — one sentence and one archive — constitute the whole tension of this piece. This piece reaches no conclusion for either side; it sets the archive out as it originally was: figures together with caveats, transactions together with provenance, withdrawals together with witnesses.

I. Xi Zhongxun: A Generation That Left No Record of Wealth

Xi Zhongxun was born in 1913 in Fuping, Shaanxi, joined the army as a youth, and was one of the founders of the Shaan-Gan border base area. After 1949 he successively served as secretary of the Northwest Bureau and as vice premier and secretary-general of the State Council; in 1962 he was brought down in the so-called "novel Liu Zhidan" case, and thereafter was demoted, held under surveillance and investigated for sixteen years in all, until his return in 1978. After his return he governed Guangdong and was one of the earliest advocates and executors of reform and opening; he later became a vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, lived for many years in Shenzhen in old age, and died in Beijing on May 24, 2002. (Source 10)

In the official record and public materials, Xi Zhongxun himself was known for a frugal style, and there is no record in his name of any family enterprise or commercial arrangement — the form of his generation is the same as that of Mao Zedong's generation as written in the preface: privilege stopped at status and perquisites, and of wealth there is nothing to speak of. Official commemorative texts also repeatedly record that he was extremely strict with his children and forbade them to trade on his name — this is one side, the official narrative, and this piece registers it as usual; the distance between it and the archive of company documents left by the next generation is exactly what this piece preserves as it is, for readers to measure themselves. The change happened in the next generation. Xi Zhongxun and his wife Qi Xin had, in the public record, two sons and a daughter: the elder daughter Qi Qiaoqiao, the elder son Xi Jinping, and the younger son Xi Yuanping. The three walked three entirely different roads: the elder daughter went into business, the elder son went into politics all the way to the pinnacle of power, and the younger son largely faded from public view. This piece's archive of wealth falls almost entirely on the elder daughter's branch; for the politician and the younger son, at the level of public documents, no equity records can be found. This distribution itself is the first key to understanding this piece.

II. Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui: The Yuanwei Group, Rare Earths, and Twenty-Five Companies

Qi Qiaoqiao, born in 1949, is Xi Jinping's elder sister. According to public reporting, she served in her early years in the military and government systems, and moved into business in the 1990s. In 1996 she married the property developer Deng Jiagui, born in 1951. Over the following twenty years, the great majority of the commercial traces this family left in public documents were constituted by three people — Qi Qiaoqiao, Deng Jiagui, and Qi Qiaoqiao's daughter Zhang Yannan — the first conclusory judgment of Bloomberg's 2012 investigation. (Source 1)

Bloomberg's method deserves to be stated first: it used no anonymous leaks at all, but compiled thousands of pages of company registration and regulatory filings. By Bloomberg's count, the names of Qi Qiaoqiao, Deng Jiagui and Zhang Yannan appeared over the past two decades in the documents of at least twenty-five companies in mainland China and Hong Kong, in the capacities of shareholder, director or legal representative. Four blocks of it can be itemized:

The first block is Shenzhen Yuanwei Investment. Yuanwei Investment is a diversified holding company centered on real estate, held jointly by Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui. According to a regulatory filing of December 2011, the couple's share corresponded to Yuanwei company assets of RMB 1.83 billion, approximately US$288 million; other companies in the Yuanwei group wholly owned by the couple held total assets of at least RMB 539.3 million, approximately US$84.8 million. The two Yuanwei-group items alone add up to about US$373 million, the bulk of the "US$376 million in total assets of the companies involved" in Bloomberg's tally — note that Bloomberg's original wording is always "total assets of the companies," never any individual's personal wealth. (Source 1)

The second block is rare earths. As of June 8, 2012, Deng Jiagui indirectly held about 18 percent of the equity of Jiangxi Rare Metals Tungsten Industry Group. This item is the most easily misstated in retelling, and its caliber must be nailed down: 18 percent is the equity ratio; US$1.73 billion is that company's total assets; the figure produced by multiplying the two does not appear in Bloomberg's report, and this piece does not perform that multiplication either. Rare earths and tungsten are strategic resources under state control; nearly a fifth of the indirect equity of an industry group with US$1.73 billion in assets sat in the hands of the top leader's brother-in-law — the structural fact ends there; everything beyond it is without documents. (Source 1)

The third block is Hong Kong property, accounted for in Section III together with Zhang Yannan.

The fourth block is on the other side of the kinship circle. Bloomberg records that another of Xi Jinping's sisters, Qi An'an, has a husband, Wu Long, who is chairman of New Postcom Equipment Co., Ltd.; New Postcom produces mobile communications network equipment, and its customers include state-owned telecommunications operators. This entry rests on Bloomberg's systematic record alone; this piece registers it on Bloomberg's caliber and does not expand it. (Source 1)

Bloomberg has one further counting detail worth registering: in Beijing and Shenzhen alone, the names of Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui appear as legal representatives in the registration documents of at least eleven companies; and the restrictions on consulting mainland company documents mean that any external count can only be a floor, not the full picture — Bloomberg itself described the figure of the three names appearing in at least twenty-five companies' documents as only the portion it could track. (Source 1)

As this section closes, the timeline must be set straight: the moment at which the map above was counted by Bloomberg was June 2012, and its period of formation coincided exactly with Xi Jinping's successive service as governor of Fujian (2000–2002), party secretary of Zhejiang (2002–2007), party secretary of Shanghai (2007), and Politburo Standing Committee member and vice president (2007–2012), step by step toward the eve of taking power. Bloomberg's original formulation was: as Xi Jinping climbed the party ladder, his extended family expanded its business map into mining, real estate and mobile-phone equipment. This sequence is carried by the public résumés and the company documents themselves; this piece adds no causal explanation to it.

III. Zhang Yannan: A Fortyfold Investment and Hong Kong Properties

Zhang Yannan is Qi Qiaoqiao's daughter, thirty-three years old at the time of Bloomberg's report. She is the only member of this family's third generation to leave clear traces in public commercial documents, and the traces are two.

One is in the stock market. Around 2009, Zhang Yannan invested RMB 3.17 million in Beijing Hiconics Drive Technology, a maker of electronic drive equipment; the company listed on Shenzhen's ChiNext board in 2010 — the moment her money entered was precisely before the listing. As of the close on June 28, 2012, the market value of her investment had reached RMB 128.4 million, approximately US$20.2 million — roughly fortyfold in three years. Bloomberg also noted a relationship footnote: Hiconics' founder Liu Jincheng was a classmate of Qi Qiaoqiao's in the same EMBA class at Tsinghua University, a fact found in Liu Jincheng's biography on the Tsinghua website. A pre-listing investment beyond the reach of ordinary people had as its entrance precisely her mother's circle of classmates — this detail needs no commentary; it is itself the structure. (Source 1)

One is in Hong Kong. Bloomberg tallied the family's Hong Kong properties at a combined value of about US$55.6 million: one villa valued at about US$31.5 million, and at least six other properties with a combined value of about US$24.1 million; most of these properties are registered in the names of Qi Qiaoqiao, Deng Jiagui and Zhang Yannan. (Sources 1, 3)

Zhang Yannan's public record ends there. Her subsequent business activity and changes in shareholding have not been systematically tracked again by authoritative media; this piece registers that faithfully in the gap list. The third generation's presence in this piece stops at one investment and a number of properties — compared with the archive density of a Jiang Zhicheng in the preceding piece, with his fundraising curves, counterparties and IPO documents, what this generation left to the public world is far thinner.

IV. Xi Yuanping: The Thinnest Public Record

Xi Yuanping, born in 1956, is Xi Jinping's younger brother. His public résumé shows that in his early years he worked in the General Office of the Central Military Commission, and that afterward he kept a low profile for a long time, serving as president of the International Energy Conservation Environmental Protection Association — a post in an environmental international association. In 2013, on the occasion of the centenary of Xi Zhongxun's birth, the authorities held a commemorative symposium in Beijing; he attended in the capacity of a family member, and during the commemorative activities also appeared publicly in Shaanxi, Gansu and elsewhere; since then, the occasions on which he has been seen in reporting have mostly had to do with commemorating his father, and no other public role has entered the news. (Source 11)

For this piece, what matters most about Xi Yuanping is one verification conclusion: Bloomberg's 2012 investigation did not list him as a principal holder of the family's assets; and within the scope of this series' checking, there is no verifiable record of company equity in his name. The conclusion is "none found," not "not checked."

The comparison among the three siblings is thus complete: the elder daughter's branch holds company assets on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and equity in strategic minerals; the younger son's name is entirely empty; and the elder son in politics likewise has no asset record that can be found in his name. Wealth in this family is not evenly distributed; it is concentrated to a high degree in the branch that holds no office — a form appearing for the first time in this series. It can be read neither as proof of incorruptibility nor as evidence of proxy holding; what the public documents can support is only the distribution itself.

V. June 29, 2012: The Report, the Caveats, and the Blocking

On June 29, 2012, Bloomberg published its investigation Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite, one piece in its "Revolution to Riches" series; the same team that year also tallied, by the same method, the assets of Gu Kailai's sisters and the Bo Xilai family (the Bloomberg asset tally cited in this series' Bo Yibo piece comes from this group of reports). The series later won the 2012 George Polk Award for international reporting. The report's entire factual basis is the public regulatory and company filings compiled by its journalists. (Source 1)

This piece announced in its introduction that this report's caveats are as important as its figures and must be preserved verbatim. Bloomberg stated four in the report:

These four caveats are not courtesies; they are this archive's boundaries: what Bloomberg proved with thousands of pages of documents is "the asset map of the elder sister's branch," not "Xi Jinping's own wealth," and still less anyone's crime. The claims circulating in the decade and more since — "the Xi family's wealth exceeds US$1 billion," "net assets of X hundred million" and the like — are without exception secondhand amplifications made after deleting the caveats, and this piece adopts none of them.

As to Peng Liyuan and Xi Mingze, the public record can write only two sentences: Peng Liyuan's public identity is that of a celebrated military singer, and Bloomberg found in the documents no assets in her name or her daughter's; according to public reporting, Xi Mingze enrolled at Harvard University in 2010 and graduated in 2014. Beyond that, this piece includes no information about her — this is the hard constraint written at this piece's opening, and it does not bend for the breadth of any rumor's circulation.

The fate of the report is likewise part of the archive. On the day of publication, Bloomberg's main site and its Businessweek website were blocked in mainland China; the next day, Weibo and other platforms blocked searches for terms such as "Xi Jinping." The authorities never publicly responded to or denied the report's specific contents item by item; the method of handling adopted was the blocking itself. Bloomberg's website remained inaccessible in mainland China for a long time afterward. (Source 2) Xi Jinping himself never publicly commented on the report — in the public record, the entire official response this archive of his family received is that it cannot be read. In October of the same year, after the New York Times published its comparable investigation of the Wen Jiabao family, the Times' website was likewise blocked; these two 2012 attempts to tally the wealth of the topmost families from public documents have never been repeated since — the journalists and institutions who came later faced an environment of tighter document access and higher cost. The aftershocks continued into the following year: at the end of 2013, the resident-visa renewals of several Bloomberg journalists in China were delayed, a matter that many media at the time read in connection with the 2012 wealth reporting; the Chinese side said visa processing followed normal procedure. Causation has not been officially confirmed, and this piece registers it as "adjacent in time, with interpretations of their own." (Source 12) One further detail belongs to the same set of facts: after Bloomberg's journalists contacted Qi Qiaoqiao and Deng Jiagui for comment on the report, the couple's publicly available biographical materials on the internet were deleted; in the end the two did not respond to the request for comment. (Source 1)

VI. After Taking Power: Withdrawal and Going Quiet

Xi Jinping became general secretary of the CPC Central Committee in November 2012 and president of the state in March 2013. Afterward, this family's trajectory in the public record stands in glaring contrast to the other families in this series: what the Zhou family received was a chain of judgments, the Bo family a judgment, the Wen family a New York Times report and a formal denial by the family's lawyers; what this family left behind are two verifiable acts of withdrawal, and a long absence of record thereafter.

The first act is on the offshore side. The two British Virgin Islands companies Deng Jiagui acquired in 2009 were already dormant by the time Xi Jinping took power (see Section VII for details); another company, acquired in 2004, had been struck off as early as 2007. That is to say, the shutting down of the offshore instruments all happened before or at the moment of his reaching the summit; not one of them dragged on, still active, into his tenure. (Sources 5, 6)

The second act is Wanda. Bloomberg left a foreshadowing in Section II: it had already recorded a precisely timed share purchase by Deng Jiagui's side in connection with Dalian Wanda. In April 2015, the New York Times reported that relatives and friends of several top leaders had profited handsomely from investments in Wanda's commercial property and cinema businesses, with a company of Deng Jiagui's side among them. Half a year later, on October 29, 2015, Wang Jianlin, asked about the matter in person at a forum at Harvard University, confirmed orally: an investment company of Deng Jiagui's side had bought into Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties many years earlier (the Times reported it as 2009) and, two months before Wanda Commercial Properties' Hong Kong listing in December 2014, had sold all of its shares at a low price. Wang Jianlin said Deng Jiagui had "given up the opportunity to realize huge returns," and said the matter showed that Xi Jinping "is strict not only in governing the country; in governing his family he is even stricter" (as quoted in an Agence France-Presse dispatch). (Source 7) The form of evidence for this entry is unique in this series: what proves the withdrawal happened is not a document, not a journalist's tally, but the confirmation of the counterparty himself on a public occasion. The specific prices of the purchase and the sale were never made public; this piece does not estimate them.

In the same period there runs a parallel public timeline: in December 2012, at the very start of Xi Jinping's tenure, the Central Eight-Point Regulation was introduced, and thereafter the anti-corruption campaign that continues to this day was launched. Against this background, the family of the topmost leader himself was the first to leave no new traces in the public record — whether the two timelines are related, and how, no document can prove; this piece registers only their parallelism and does not connect the wires for the reader.

At the same time, outside interpretations of this trajectory have always existed. After the Panama Papers were published in April 2016, the Associated Press quoted several analysts as noting that Xi Jinping had set about constraining his family members, including asking them to sell their interests, and had personally made clear to local officials that his family members did not act on his behalf. This is analysts' assessment, not archival fact; this piece registers it at its own level and does not promote it into a conclusion. (Source 8)

From then to the present, no new large investment by Qi Qiaoqiao or Deng Jiagui has been tracked by authoritative media in the public record; nor is there any public update to be found on changes after 2012 in the Yuanwei-group companies or in that rare-earths equity (see the gap list). This family's financial archive was, in effect, closed around the time he reached the summit.

VII. Offshore: The ICIJ's Two Waves of Documents

The offshore record of this family comes from two rounds of leaks by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), two years apart, and they must be written separately.

The first wave is "China Leaks" of January 2014. Its basis was some 2.5 million documents leaked from two offshore service providers, involving nearly 22,000 clients in mainland China and Hong Kong; one of the ICIJ's conclusions was that relatives of at least five sitting or former Politburo Standing Committee members held offshore companies, Xi Jinping among them. Directly relevant to this piece is one entry: Deng Jiagui held 50 percent of the shares of the British Virgin Islands company Excellence Effort Property Development. The company's purpose and the assets it held are not stated in the documents. (Source 4) This wave of reporting also carries a footnote the ICIJ wrote itself: a mainland Chinese news organization that had participated in analyzing this batch of documents withdrew from the collaboration before publication, on the ground that the authorities had warned it not to publish any related content — the attempt to record this archive was conducted, from the first wave onward, under this kind of pressure. (Source 4)

The second wave is the Panama Papers of April 2016. Its basis was 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca; Deng Jiagui's three offshore companies were all obtained through that firm. According to the ICIJ's dedicated page on Deng Jiagui and the documents' records: in 2004, Deng Jiagui acquired the British Virgin Islands company Supreme Victory Enterprises, as sole director and sole shareholder; the company was struck off the British Virgin Islands register in 2007. In September 2009 he further became sole director and sole shareholder of two "shelf companies," Best Effect Enterprises and Wealth Ming International; Mossack Fonseca assisted in having a company seal made for Best Effect. What the two companies were used for, the documents do not state; by the time Xi Jinping became general secretary in 2012 and state president in 2013, both companies were already dormant. Deng Jiagui did not respond to the ICIJ's request for comment. (Source 5)

The caveats the ICIJ wrote itself must, like Bloomberg's, be preserved with the text: these documents do not show that the political figures concerned themselves held any beneficial interest in these offshore companies, and do not imply that any wrongdoing exists; holding an offshore company is not in itself illegal. (Source 6)

The Chinese side's reaction has two faces. One face is deletion at home: after the Panama Papers were published, related content on the Chinese internet was blocked on a large scale, and even the word "brother-in-law" （姐夫） at one point became an object of Weibo censorship — it was precisely the term netizens used to refer to Deng Jiagui (reported by many media at the time). The other face is a single sentence directed outward: at the Foreign Ministry's regular press conference on April 5, 2016, spokesperson Hua Chunying, asked about the Panama Papers, called the claims concerned "fabricated out of thin air" （无中生有） and declined to comment further. (Source 9) One phrase, "fabricated out of thin air," aimed at 11.5 million primary law-firm documents — that response itself has become part of this archive.

VIII. Map and Boundaries

Gathering the facts this piece can pin down, there are only this many: as of the 2012 point in time, the branch of Xi Jinping's elder sister Qi Qiaoqiao — Qi Qiaoqiao, Deng Jiagui and Zhang Yannan — held, in their own names and in the companies involved, total assets of US$376 million (Bloomberg caliber, liabilities not deducted, not representing net assets); including the approximately US$288 million share in Shenzhen Yuanwei Investment, at least US$84.8 million in other Yuanwei-group companies, an 18 percent indirect stake in a rare-earths and tungsten group with US$1.73 billion in assets, Zhang Yannan's pre-listing investment with a market value of US$20.2 million, and Hong Kong properties of about US$55.6 million. On the offshore side, there is a 50 percent shareholding in one British Virgin Islands company (reported by the ICIJ in 2014), and directorship and shareholding records in three British Virgin Islands companies (one struck off in 2007, two acquired in 2009 and dormant before 2012). After he took power, there is the counterparty's testimony that the Wanda shares were sold at a low price before the listing. What does not exist: this family's net-asset figure, any judicial or disciplinary conclusion against any of its members, and any record of new investment after 2012.

Return to the preface's question: red privilege took two generations to turn from perquisites into capital. For most families written of in this series, capital expansion ran in step with tenure in power — expanding while in office, settled when they fell. This family presents a different sequence: capital was formed mainly during the ascent, wound down around the time of reaching the summit, and the archive closed thereafter. What formed it was the elder sister's branch rather than the man himself; the act that wound it down has a counterparty testifying in public; and the investigation that tried to record all of this was blocked in that country on the day it was published, and no public tracking of comparable scale has been able to appear in the decade and more since.

Set beside the other families of the series, this piece's difference of form is clearer still: the Zhou Yongkang family has a complete chain of judgments, with amounts governed by court determinations; the Wen Jiabao family has the New York Times' US$2.7 billion "controlled assets" reporting caliber standing against the family's formal denial to this day; the Jiang Zemin family's third generation left public documents of fund raising and transactions. This family has neither judgment nor denial nor new documents — only that single 2012 investigation carrying its four caveats, one counterparty-confirmed withdrawal, and a silence in which the blocking itself serves as the response. Setting these four forms side by side happens to constitute this series' closing picture: within one and the same system, the relationship between power and wealth can have four endings, and which ending falls to which family was never decided by the archive itself.

The family with the heaviest power in the whole series has not left the thickest financial documents to the public world. Its thickness is bounded by two things: the record appeared early — before the summit was reached; and after the record appeared, the record itself became the object to be dealt with. This is both this piece's boundary and its final conclusion: the furthest step this piece can prove, and what it cannot prove, have both been written into the record. The final tally date of this archive stops in 2012; should new public documents appear in the future — updated company registrations, new leaks, any judicial or audit instrument — this piece's boundary should move with them. Until new documents appear, any claim that goes beyond this piece, whether it writes this family richer or cleaner, does not belong to the archive.

Material Gaps (stated faithfully)

• Total family wealth and net assets: no adoptable caliber exists. Named and discarded: "the Xi Jinping family's wealth exceeds US$1 billion," "the Xi family's net assets are X hundred million" — Bloomberg's original is US$376 million in total assets of the companies involved, liabilities not deducted, expressly with no assets traced to Xi Jinping himself (item 2 of the source map's avoid list).
• The post-2012 status of the Yuanwei group and the rare-earths equity: subsequent changes in Yuanwei Investment's equity, and whether and when Deng Jiagui's 18 percent indirect stake in Jiangxi Rare Metals Tungsten was transferred, have no public documentary update; the "closed archive" conclusion in Section VI of this piece is limited to "no public record" and does not amount to an assertion that there were absolutely no transactions afterward.
• Zhang Yannan's subsequent shareholding: increases, decreases, reductions and exits in her Hiconics holding after that point have not been tracked to any public disclosure; her business activity after 2012 has no systematic reporting by authoritative media.
• The Wanda transaction prices: the consideration for Deng Jiagui's side's purchase of Wanda Commercial Properties and the 2014 sale price were never made public; only the fact and timing of "purchase — sale at a low price two months before the listing" can be confirmed (Wang Jianlin's testimony).
• Excellence Effort Property Development: the company's purpose, the assets it held and its state of existence are not stated in the ICIJ documents.
• Qi Qiaoqiao's early résumé: the specifics of her service in the military and government systems and the exact point at which she went into business are fragmentary in public materials; this piece writes only the verifiable part — "moved into business in the 1990s"; the entry on Wu Long and New Postcom rests on Bloomberg's systematic record alone, has no second source, and is not expanded.
• Xi Yuanping: no record of commercial equity found; public records beyond his association post are extremely few, and the length of Section IV of this piece is itself a faithful reflection of the thickness of his archive.
• Xi Mingze: beyond the publicly reported Harvard enrollment (entered 2010, graduated 2014) and Bloomberg's "no assets found in her name," this piece, under its hard constraints, includes no other information, including all manner of online-alias rumors.

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