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The Zhou Yongkang Family: A Whole Family Written into Court Judgments

The forms this series has covered are completed, in this piece, by one last form. The Mao family had privilege without business; the Liu family had its privilege cut off; the Li family had privilege that was never cut off and that happened to meet the era of industry listings. The Zhou Yongkang family differs from the Lis by a single step — likewise never cut off, likewise turning an entire industry into family turf — and that step is this: this family's ending was not retirement speeches and CPPCC proposals, but a row of court judgments. Among all the stories of red nobility, it is the only one whose ending a court wrote for us.

And wrote in fine detail. On June 11, 2015, the judgment of the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People's Court did the family's arithmetic down to the last digit: bribes of RMB 129,772,113, of which only RMB 731,100 passed through the patriarch's own hands; the remaining nearly RMB 129 million was accepted by his wife and son, with his knowledge after the fact. A year later, a court in Yichang did the eldest son's accounts again: RMB 98.04 million and more taken jointly with his father, RMB 124.44 million and more taken by trading on his father's influence — a determined total of more than RMB 222 million — sentenced to eighteen years, with a fine of RMB 350.2 million. The same day, his wife Jia Xiaoye was sentenced to nine years; two days later, his nephew Zhou Feng was sentenced to twelve. Four adult members of one family, four judgments, all effective — among the sixteen families checked in this series, this is the only one of its kind.

The first lesson of this piece must be set out up front, because the outside world has been getting this family's numbers wrong for a decade: it was not "RMB 90 billion." The RMB 90 billion is the seizure figure reported by Reuters in March 2014 — RMB 37 billion in frozen bank deposits, RMB 51 billion in seized bonds and stocks, some 300 properties worth roughly RMB 1.7 billion, antiques and paintings worth roughly RMB 1 billion, and more than 60 vehicles. The objects of seizure were the entire network of "family members and associates"; over a period of four months, more than 300 relatives, allies and protégés were detained or questioned. Reuters wrote in its own report that it was unclear how much of those assets represented ill-gotten gains; the figure came from two anonymous briefers and has never received any official confirmation or support from any court document. It is a report that really existed, but what it measures is the stock of assets of an entire network, not the amount of bribes a court determined. To call the RMB 90 billion "RMB 90 billion that the Zhou family embezzled" is to turn the turnover of a seized network of three hundred people into the bribery figure on one family's judgment — Section VII of this piece will reconcile the two numbers in detail. The main text proceeds on the judgment caliber first: what the courts determined is RMB 129.77 million and RMB 222 million.

I. Zhou Yongkang: From the Oilfields to the Political and Legal Affairs Commission

Zhou Yongkang was born in December 1942 in Wuxi, Jiangsu. His original name was Zhou Yuangen, and he came from an ordinary farming family in Xiqian Tou village — one of the few patriarchs in this series with no red family background: his starting point was not granted by the organization; he earned it himself. In the 1960s he graduated from the exploration department of Beijing Petroleum Institute (now China University of Petroleum) and was assigned to the Daqing oilfield, starting as a geologist and technician. He then caught the great development campaign at the Liaohe oilfield and spent more than a decade there, rising from oil production plants and the oilfield construction headquarters to party secretary and director of the exploration bureau; in 1983 he concurrently served as mayor of Panjin, Liaoning — holding the top posts of both the oilfield and the local government at once, the typical pattern of the oil system's "build the city on oil" era, and his first taste of one industry's personnel, finances and local relationships concentrated in a single pair of hands. In 1985 he rose to vice minister of the petroleum industry; when the ministry was reorganized into China National Petroleum Corporation in 1988 he became a deputy general manager, and in 1996 general manager. (Source 13)

Now do the time arithmetic: from walking into the Daqing oilfield in 1966 to leaving CNPC in 1998 to become minister of land and resources, he spent a full thirty-two years in the petroleum system. Daqing and Liaohe are the direct-line oilfields of the republic's petroleum industry, and an entire generation of bureau- and ministry-level cadres in the system — Jiang Jiemin, Wang Yongchun, Li Hualin and their cohort at CNPC later on — were promoted and placed into key posts during his years as vice minister and general manager. The Chinese phrase "petroleum gang" is not a media invention: an industry first had a chief of thirty-two years' standing, and only then the network that later formed around him as its axis. The way that network formed is a mirror of Li Peng's relationship to the power system; the only difference is the ending.

Then came the triple jump. In the 1998 State Council institutional reform he became the first minister of the newly created Ministry of Land and Resources; in 1999 he was transferred to be party secretary of Sichuan; in 2002 he moved up to the center as deputy secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, minister and party secretary of public security, adding the rank of state councilor the following year; at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007 he entered the Politburo Standing Committee as secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, becoming the top official in charge of the country's police, procuratorates, courts, state security and armed police — a post he held until retiring at the Eighteenth Congress in 2012. (Source 13)

Read this résumé within the coordinates of this series, and what matters is not its height but its breadth. The weight of the petroleum thirty-two years has been computed above: an entire generation of the industry's exploration, refining, sales and cadre corps came out of his tenure. In his three years governing Sichuan, the cadres he promoted later spread across the province's officialdom. In his ten years running the political-legal system, the personnel of the police, procuratorates, courts and justice organs were tied to him by a thousand threads. Three systems, each enough to grow a retinue of its own — and the three systems his son's business needed to penetrate were precisely these three: oilfields and filling stations belonged to the petroleum system, Sichuan projects and connections to the Sichuan system, and the still larger political-legal network formed the protective layer that no one dared investigate around the family's business dealings. Later sections will show how these three strata of foundation were pried open, layer by layer, by the judgments.

His family must also be accounted for clearly at the outset; every relationship in this piece follows this list. His eldest son Zhou Bin (born 1972) was born to him and his first wife Wang Shuhua, who has died. His second son Zhou Han stands in sharp contrast to his brother — as an adult he kept away from the family business and lived quietly; later public reporting preserves only scattered mentions of "working at the grassroots of the petroleum system, broken with his father." This piece does not expand on him beyond registering one sentence: this family had four people sentenced, and his name is not on the list. His second wife Jia Xiaoye (born 1970), formerly an editor-director at China Central Television, married Zhou Yongkang in 2001, a full twenty-eight years younger than her husband. His younger brother Zhou Yuanqing worked in the land and resources system in their hometown of Wuxi; Zhou Yuanqing's wife Zhou Lingying went into business; their son Zhou Feng (also written Zhou Feng 锋 in judgment releases) followed his cousin Zhou Bin in business. Another younger brother, Zhou Yuanxing, dealt in Wuliangye liquor distributorships and other business in Wuxi. After December 1, 2013, most of the people on this list would be taken in by the same net.

II. The Periphery of Power: The Petroleum, Sichuan and Political-Legal Systems

The judgments contain a detail easy to skim past: Zhou Yongkang was charged with abuse of power, the specific conduct being that he "required Jiang Jiemin and Li Chuncheng to provide assistance to the business activities of Zhou Bin, Zhou Feng, Zhou Yuanqing, He Yan, Wu Bing and others." At the time, Jiang Jiemin was director of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, and before that general manager and chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation — the head of China's largest petroleum state enterprise. Li Chuncheng was deputy party secretary of Sichuan, and before that had been party secretary of Chengdu for many years. In the judgment, the man who controlled the nation's petroleum assets and the man who controlled the provincial capital are written in as the executors who "provided assistance" to the patriarch's son. (Sources 1, 2)

These two men's own endings are also in judgments: on October 12, 2015, Jiang Jiemin was sentenced by the Hanjiang Intermediate People's Court in Hubei to sixteen years on combined punishment for bribe-taking, holding a huge amount of property from unidentified sources, and abuse of power by a state-company employee; the same day, Li Chuncheng was sentenced by the Xianning Intermediate People's Court in Hubei to thirteen years for bribe-taking and abuse of power. (Sources 9, 10) They are not this piece's protagonists, but their judgments are part of this piece's map: they prove that the Zhou family business operated by a phone call from the patriarch, carried out personally by a central-enterprise chairman and a provincial deputy party secretary — and the traces of that mode of operation are found not in Zhou Bin's company accounts but in other people's judgments.

One circle further out, whole swathes collapsed. From late August into September 2013, four senior CNPC executives (Wang Yongchun, Li Hualin, Ran Xinquan, Wen Qingshan) were announced under investigation on the same day or in quick succession, and Jiang Jiemin fell immediately after; on the Sichuan side, Li Chuncheng had already been taken away in December 2012, the first provincial-ministerial official to fall after the Eighteenth Congress, followed by Sichuan CPPCC chairman Li Chongxi and former provincial standing committee member Guo Yongxiang, the latter sentenced in Yichang in 2015 to twenty years; in the political-legal and secretarial systems, former vice minister of public security Li Dongsheng fell in December 2013 and was sentenced in Nanjing in 2016 to fifteen years; Ji Wenlin, once Zhou Yongkang's secretary and by then a vice governor of Hainan, was sentenced in Guangzhou in 2015 to twelve years. (Source 16) The common point among these people requires no speculation: every one of their résumés bears a direct superior-subordinate or patronage relationship with Zhou Yongkang. The official account afterward described the handling of the Zhou Yongkang case as the elimination of "cliques and cabals," while investigations by Caixin and other media matched the names of these three networks one by one. (Sources 7, 13) This piece records one structural fact only: this family was not one man doing business; it stood at the center of a power network woven from the petroleum, Sichuan and political-legal systems — and how large that network was became visible on a single day in December 2013, when family members in Beijing, Wuxi and Chengdu were taken away simultaneously (see Section VI).

III. Zhou Bin and Zhongxu Yangguang: RMB 5 Million Takes Down 8,000 Filling Stations

Zhou Bin's public résumé is abnormally thin: after graduating from Southwest Petroleum Institute he went to the United States and worked for several years in the oilfield equipment industry, returning to China in the early 2000s. The one company in that résumé that he founded himself and that left a complete trail of business registration and investigative records is Beijing Zhongxu Yangguang.

Beijing Zhongxu Yangguang Petroleum and Natural Gas Technology Co., Ltd. was established in Beijing in 2004, with registered capital of only RMB 5 million (approx. US$600,000 at the exchange rate of the time). Its initial shareholders were Zhou Bin himself and his mother-in-law Zhan Minli — Zhou Bin's wife Huang Wan comes from an academic family, and her mother Zhan Minli's name appears on the company's shareholder register. Not long after its establishment, actual operations were handed to the Sichuan businessman Wu Bing: Wu Bing was the controller of Chengdu Zhongxu Investment and Zhou Bin's partner of many years, playing the role of "white glove" in the Zhou family's business map — signing contracts, holding shares and running projects in the open, while the company's true beneficiary stayed hidden behind him. (Source 7)

The business Zhongxu Yangguang did sounds utterly unremarkable: installing retail management systems in filling stations. Yet that unremarkable system spread across half of PetroChina's realm. According to Caixin's investigation, Zhongxu Yangguang built the retail management systems for more than 8,000 of PetroChina's filling stations — roughly forty percent of PetroChina's national total at the time — and supplied logistics and engineering systems to the Tarim, Jilin, Changqing, Liaohe and other oilfields. The project timeline deserves a year-by-year look: in 2004 PetroChina launched its overall information technology plan, with the filling-station management system included; in 2006 the project was formally initiated, piloted first at thirty stations in East China, Shandong, Dalian and elsewhere; from 2009 contracts were signed in batches for rollout — a first batch of 4,855 stations and a second batch of 5,115. A company founded only in 2004, with RMB 5 million in registered capital and a few dozen employees, and with no traceable industry track record, took on the core downstream informatization project of the country's largest oil company — and kept it for nearly a decade. (Sources 7, 14)

The structure of this business is what this section exists to record. Its profits required no falsified accounts and no hoarding for speculation; they required exactly one thing: that PetroChina's procurement door open to this one company alone. And the key to that door, in 2004, was in the hands of the senior CNPC leadership of the day — the names that, years later, appear in Zhou Yongkang's judgment in the line "required Jiang Jiemin … to provide assistance to the business activities of Zhou Bin and others." The judgment's determined bottom line: Zhou Yongkang required Jiang Jiemin, Li Chuncheng and others to assist the business activities of Zhou Bin, Wu Bing and others, causing the persons concerned illegally to gain more than RMB 2.136 billion and causing economic losses of more than RMB 1.486 billion. (Sources 1, 2) Note the nature of this set of figures: it is the determination of "illegal gains and losses to the state" — the harmful consequence under the abuse-of-power count — and is a completely different account in the judgment from the RMB 129.77 million in bribes; this piece does not merge them into any "total family wealth."

Beyond Zhongxu Yangguang, Zhou Bin's reach extended to the oil and gas blocks themselves. According to Caixin's investigation, Zhou Bin's side, working through connections, obtained cooperation interests in CNPC-system oil and gas blocks in Sichuan, Shaanxi and elsewhere at low prices and resold them at high prices, profiting handsomely; Zhou Bin's cousin Zhou Feng (see Section V) operated precisely along this line in Sichuan and Shaanxi. (Source 7) The details of this line are only partially disclosed in the official judgment releases — the judgment in Zhou Bin's case determined only the charges and the totals, without publishing the provenance of each transaction. This piece records it faithfully at the level of investigative reporting: the investigation can prove that the business existed, the path existed, the beneficiary existed; whether each transaction was illegal, and at what price, is for the judgment alone to say, and the judgment does not say it item by item. This boundary is the same one drawn in the Li Peng piece between "holding" and "illegality."

Wu Bing's ending is appended here: in August 2013, Wu Bing was taken away by police at Beijing West railway station and thereafter faded from public view; the Zhongxu companies under his name stalled with him. Zhou Bin himself was taken away some months later (see Section VI). (Sources 7, 14) There is also a thought-provoking sequel: through successive changes of shareholding and name (Zhongxu Yangguang later evolved into "Zhongxu Nengke"), the contracting entity's filling-station management system continued to operate within PetroChina's system for years afterward, and the contracting company remained in existence in the business registration records — the people were taken away, the people were sentenced, while the system ran on as usual and the contracts were performed as usual. This entry belongs to no judgment's scope; this piece registers it from the public record because it happens to state the essence of this business: what was valuable was never the company, but the door that had opened for it alone; once the door closed, the company itself was just an ordinary information technology firm. (Source 14)

IV. The Liu Han Section: What Did RMB 20 Million Buy?

In 2003, Zhou Bin made a transaction that has been cited repeatedly ever since: he sold a Sichuan tourism asset held in his own name to Liu Han of Sichuan Hanlong Group for about RMB 20 million. Two years later, in 2005, Zhou Bin bought into a Hanlong Group power company in Sichuan, taking a 20 percent stake, and afterward returned that stake for nothing. (Source 7)

Liu Han himself must be introduced first, because without him the weight of this transaction is invisible. Liu Han was a businessman from Guanghan, Sichuan, chairman of the board of Hanlong Group, who had dealt in futures, timber, hydropower and mining and appeared on rich lists for years; but his true identity is in the 2014 judgment: organizing and leading a mafia-style organization, and committing intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention and numerous other offenses. In March 2013, Liu Han was taken into police custody in Beijing; Liu Han, his brother Liu Wei and their gang, thirty-six people in all, were transferred for prosecution — one of the largest organized-crime cases in the country at the time. On May 23, 2014, the Xianning Intermediate People's Court in Hubei sentenced Liu Han to death at first instance; on February 9, 2015, Liu Han was executed. In its case briefings the procuratorate described his gang as "colluding with overseas gambling syndicates" and "lording it over the locality." (Sources 7, 11)

So why, in 2003, would Liu Han spend RMB 20 million buying a tourism asset from Zhou Bin? Caixin's investigation offers the most widely accepted version of this line: what Liu Han bought was never the asset but the relationship — using this markedly overpriced transaction to make Zhou Bin's acquaintance, and through Zhou Bin to enter Zhou Yongkang's circle; the 2005 stake purchase and gratuitous return is read in the investigative reporting as the maintenance fee for the relationship. The grade of evidence for this section must be labeled clearly in this piece: the transactions themselves (the 2003 asset sale, the 2005 stake purchase and return) are supported by Caixin's investigation and business registration records; the motive for the transactions (cultivation, tribute) is the analysis of investigative reporting, not the determination of any judgment. Liu Han's judgment contains no mention of Zhou Bin's name, and Zhou Bin's judgment contains no mention of Liu Han's — neither judgment characterized this transaction. This piece registers only this: a mafia-linked tycoon later executed, in the key years of his rise, made two transactions with the patriarch's eldest son running in the same direction (one purchase, one gift), after which Hanlong Group's expansion in Sichuan entered the fast lane. What this line can prove is "a channel existed"; it cannot prove "consideration was established." Readers should take it at that grade.

There is one further layer to state in this section: the circulating claims that "Liu Han was the Zhou family's henchman" and that "the Liu Han case led to the Zhous" treat the analysis of investigative reporting as a judicial conclusion. By this series' rules, what the judgments do not write, this piece does not write for them. Of the relationship between Liu Han and the Zhou family, this piece can pin down only the two transactions of 2003 and 2005, and Liu Han's own judgment and execution in 2014–2015; everything else belongs to the reporting and rumor layer, and is noted in the gap list at the end.

V. The Wuxi Hometown: The Younger Brothers' Businesses

This family's roots are in Wuxi, and the people at the roots were not idle either.

The younger brother Zhou Yuanqing worked for many years in the land and resources system of Huishan District, Wuxi — not a conspicuous post, but in an era when land was the core asset, the real power of a district- and county-level land system was not small. His wife Zhou Lingying went into business, a shareholder in Wuxi Xishan Changlong Trading and other companies, in the same line of business as filling stations: Changlong Trading dealt in the retail of refined oil products, with many intersections with PetroChina's local filling-station network — note this detail: in Beijing, the eldest son Zhou Bin fed on PetroChina's informatization contracts; in Wuxi, the sister-in-law fed on PetroChina's oil retail. One family occupied both the upper and lower reaches of the same central enterprise's industrial chain. (Source 7)

Zhou Yuanqing's son Zhou Feng was the only member of the next generation deeply involved. Zhou Feng followed his cousin Zhou Bin from early on; according to Caixin's investigation, he traded on his uncle's influence to deal in cooperation interests in oil and gas blocks around Sichuan and Shaanxi — obtaining block interests from CNPC-subordinate oilfields at low prices and reselling them at a profit. Before December 2013, Zhou Feng was active in Chengdu and Wuxi, the only "businessman" among the family's nephews. (Source 7)

Another younger brother, Zhou Yuanxing, ran distributorships for Wuliangye and other famous liquors and other small businesses in Wuxi — the most marginal of the brothers. In December 2013 his Wuxi residence was searched; in February 2014 Zhou Yuanxing died of illness, never tried. He was the first person in the family to fall, and the manner of his falling was death by illness — the judgment chain is therefore permanently missing a link, and no judicial document will ever account for the businesses and books in his name. (Source 7)

The grade of evidence in this section must be stated: as to the subsequent judicial handling of Zhou Yuanqing, Zhou Lingying and Zhou Yuanxing, there is to this day no citable judgment or official notice in the public channels — after they were taken away in December 2013, their names vanished from the public record. What this piece can write as fact is only the posts and companies publicly checkable from before they were taken (the land-system post, the Changlong Trading shareholding) and the event of their being taken itself (see Section VI). The light of the judgment chain reaches as far as Zhou Feng; beyond that, into the hometown generation, it does not penetrate. This does not contradict the opening statement that this piece's grade of evidence is the highest: highest refers to the core four; where the light does not reach, this piece leaves the space blank, faithfully.

VI. The Chain of Judgments: December 1, 2013 to June 17, 2016

First pin down the starting point of the collapse. Zhou Yongkang's last public appearance was on October 1, 2013, when he returned to his alma mater, China University of Petroleum, for its sixtieth anniversary — choosing that day to return to a petroleum university was widely read at the time as a gesture. Two months later, the net closed.

December 1, 2013: according to investigative reporting by Caixin and other media, Zhou Bin was taken away in Beijing; the same day, Zhou Yuanqing and Zhou Lingying were taken away in Wuxi, Zhou Feng was taken away in Chengdu, and Zhou Yuanxing's Wuxi residence was searched. In a single day, in three cities, the core members of one family lost their freedom simultaneously. (Sources 7, 14)

July 29, 2014: the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced that, Zhou Yongkang being suspected of serious disciplinary violations, the CPC Central Committee had decided that the CCDI would open a case for investigation against him. This was the first time since 1949 that a figure at the level of the Politburo Standing Committee had been publicly announced as under case investigation; the convention that "criminal punishment does not reach the Standing Committee" was broken at that moment. (Source 3) December 5, 2014: a Politburo meeting decided to expel Zhou Yongkang from the party and transfer his suspected criminal issues and clues to the judicial organs; the notice listed, among other items, using his position to seek gains for numerous persons, receiving huge bribes directly or through family members, abuse of power, leaking party and state secrets, and adultery with multiple women involving sex-for-power and sex-for-money transactions. (Source 4) April 3, 2015: the First Branch of the Tianjin Municipal People's Procuratorate filed a public prosecution at the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate People's Court on three charges: bribe-taking, abuse of power, and intentional disclosure of state secrets. (Source 1)

May 22, 2015: the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate Court opened the trial; because state secrets were involved, the trial was not public; Jia Xiaoye and Zhou Bin appeared to testify by video. June 11, 2015: judgment at first instance. All of this piece's core figures come from this judgment (whose main points Xinhua's release published): (Sources 1, 2)

• Bribe-taking, sentenced to life imprisonment: the court determined that Zhou Yongkang used his position to seek gains for others, personally and directly receiving property worth RMB 731,100 given by Jiang Jiemin; that his wife Jia Xiaoye and his son Zhou Bin received property totaling more than RMB 129 million, with Zhou Yongkang knowing after the fact — determined as joint crime, the total bribery in the case was RMB 129,772,113. The court also determined that after the case broke, all illicit money and property involved had been recovered.
• Abuse of power, sentenced to seven years: the court determined that he required Jiang Jiemin, Li Chuncheng and others to provide assistance to the business activities of Zhou Bin, Zhou Feng, Zhou Yuanqing, He Yan, Wu Bing and others, causing the persons concerned illegally to gain more than RMB 2.136 billion and causing economic losses of more than RMB 1.486 billion, inflicting exceptionally grave losses on the interests of the state.
• Intentional disclosure of state secrets, sentenced to four years: the court determined that he handed five top-secret-level documents and one secret-level document to Cao Yongzheng (a Beijing businessman who insinuated himself with the powerful in the persona of a "qigong master," later — according to public reports — sentenced in 2016 to seven years for illegal business operations and other offenses), in direct violation of the secrecy law.
• Combined punishment for multiple offenses: life imprisonment, deprivation of political rights for life, and confiscation of all personal property. Zhou Yongkang stated in court that he admitted guilt and repented, accepted the judgment, and would not appeal. His words of admission were broadcast by CCTV: "I accept the court's judgment against me; I admit guilt and repent." (Sources 1, 2, 15)

The historical position of this judgment must also be recorded: Zhou Yongkang is the first Politburo Standing Committee member since 1949 to be placed under case investigation, expelled from the party and brought before a court; officials and media alike summarized the weight of the case as "breaking the rule that punishment does not reach the Standing Committee." On the evening of the verdict, CCTV broadcast trial footage and images of his confession — for a figure of this rank, every step of the procedure was designed, and the design itself was the signal: what was shown to the whole party was not only one man's fate, but also a newly drawn line. (Sources 1, 3)

A year later it was the next generation's turn. June 15, 2016: the Yichang Intermediate People's Court in Hubei delivered the first-instance judgment in Zhou Bin's case (the same day, Jia Xiaoye's case was decided by the Yiling District People's Court in Yichang): (Source 5)

• Zhou Bin: convicted of bribe-taking, bribe-taking by trading on influence, and illegal business operations. The accounts determined by the judgment were: together with his father (using Zhou Yongkang's official acts), jointly taking bribes of more than RMB 98.04 million; trading on Zhou Yongkang's influence to take bribes of more than RMB 124.44 million — the two sums determined together come to more than RMB 222 million. On combined punishment for multiple offenses, he is to serve a fixed term of eighteen years, with a fine of RMB 350.2 million, and his illegal gains confiscated. Zhou Bin stated in court that he would not appeal.
• Jia Xiaoye: convicted of bribe-taking and bribe-taking by trading on influence — the judgment determined that she, alone or together with Zhou Bin, accepted bribes, and was one of the principal handlers of the RMB 129 million in family bribes. Sentenced to a fixed term of nine years, with a fine. Jia Xiaoye stated in court that she would not appeal.

June 17, 2016: the Jianyang District People's Court in Deyang, Sichuan, delivered the first-instance judgment in Zhou Feng's case: Zhou Feng was convicted of bribe-taking by trading on influence and other offenses — the influence he traded on was precisely that of his uncle Zhou Yongkang — and sentenced to a fixed term of twelve years, with a fine of RMB 59 million. (Source 6)

With that, the chain of judgments closes. Lay the whole chain out and look at it: December 1, 2013, multiple family members taken away the same day → July 29, 2014, case investigation opened against the patriarch → December 5, 2014, expulsion from the party and transfer to the judiciary → April 3, 2015, public prosecution filed → June 11, 2015, the patriarch gets life → June 15, 2016, the eldest son gets eighteen years, the wife nine → June 17, 2016, the nephew gets twelve. In two and a half years, a network was written into judgments one node at a time, from center to edge. In this series there is no second family with so complete a chain — in the Bo Xilai case only the patriarch stood trial, and Gu Kailai's was a separate case (intentional homicide); the Zhou chain is four people, four courts, four effective judgments.

VII. RMB 90 Billion and RMB 129.77 Million: Reconciling the Two Numbers

This section is the caliber hub of the whole piece, and the place where this family has been described wrongly in Chinese public discourse for a decade; it deserves a section of its own to take apart.

The RMB 90 billion side. On March 30, 2014, Reuters reported exclusively that, according to two sources who had been briefed on the case, the Chinese authorities had seized at least RMB 90 billion (approx. US$14.5 billion) in assets in the names of Zhou Yongkang's family members and associates, including about RMB 37 billion in frozen bank deposits, about RMB 51 billion in seized bonds and stocks, some 300 properties seized with an estimated value of about RMB 1.7 billion, antiques and paintings seized worth about RMB 1 billion, and more than 60 vehicles; the report also said that over the previous four months, more than 300 of Zhou's relatives, allies and protégés had been detained or questioned. Two caveats must appear together with this figure; neither may be dropped: first, the sources were anonymous, never officially confirmed, and supported by no court document; second, Reuters' original text itself stated that it was unclear how much of the RMB 90 billion constituted ill-gotten gains. (Source 8)

The RMB 129.77 million side. The judgment of June 11, 2015 determined: Zhou Yongkang's total bribes were RMB 129,772,113 (RMB 731,100 received directly by himself, plus more than RMB 129 million received by family members with his knowledge); the judgment in Zhou Bin's case separately determined that Zhou Bin's bribes totaled more than RMB 222 million. This set of figures comes from effective judgments, with trials, evidence and recovery records — a caliber that can be confronted in a courtroom. (Sources 1, 5)

The two numbers differ by a factor of roughly 400, and what differs is not "who is lying" but the thing being measured: the RMB 90 billion measures the stock of assets of a relationship network spanning the petroleum, Sichuan and political-legal systems at the moment the whole network was seized — mixed into it are the equity, properties and deposits of lawfully run companies; seizure is an investigative measure, not a conclusion of guilt, and how a considerable portion of it was disposed of after the investigation ended has never been publicly accounted for. The RMB 129.77 million and the RMB 222 million measure the flow of bribes that the procuratorate could prove transaction by transaction and the court determined transaction by transaction. The former is the volume of a power network of an era; the latter is the amount of crime legally pinned on one family. To state the former as the latter is the most common fabrication of the past decade concerning this family — it requires inventing no episode at all, only changing the unit and deleting the qualifiers. This piece's handling is written at its head: the RMB 90 billion appears in only two places — the introduction and this section — in its complete form as "the seizure total reported by Reuters, anonymous sources, never officially confirmed"; everywhere else in the main text, only judgment figures are used. Readers who later encounter the claim "the Zhou Yongkang family was corrupt to the tune of RMB 90 billion" elsewhere can reconcile it directly with this section.

Another account must be explained the same way: the judgment's determined "illegal gains of more than RMB 2.136 billion and economic losses of more than RMB 1.486 billion" is the aggregate estimate, under the abuse-of-power count, of the business activities of five people; it is neither money that landed in the Zhou family's pockets nor a bribery amount. It, the RMB 129.77 million, the RMB 222 million and the RMB 90 billion are figures from four different drawers. This piece keeps the four drawers locked separately, and merges none of them.

VIII. Map and Boundaries: The Fourth Form

Finally, unfold this family's map and draw it together. Its composition differs from every preceding piece: the Li family's map is a list of posts and companies; the Zhou family's map is three networks — thirty years of petroleum-system connections and procurement channels, three years of a Sichuan retinue, ten years of a political-legal protective layer — with the patriarch seated at the center and business done at the edges: the eldest son in Beijing taking PetroChina's informatization contracts and oil and gas blocks, the wife, carrying her CCTV background, handling the family's accounts, the sister-in-law in Wuxi taking PetroChina's oil-product business, the nephew in Sichuan and Shaanxi trading block interests, and a younger brother dying of illness after a search. Every thread of this network eventually found its corresponding page in a judgment: the patriarch's abuse-of-power count carries the names of Jiang Jiemin and Li Chuncheng, his bribe-taking count the names of his wife and son, his state-secrets count the name of Cao Yongzheng; the son's judgment bears the four characters "trading on influence," and the nephew's judgment bears the same four characters.

Set it beside the other fallen Politburo member in this series and the difference is immediate: Bo Xilai stood trial in Jinan in 2013, with determined bribes of more than RMB 20.44 million and a life sentence — that was the judgment of the patriarch alone; his wife Gu Kailai's was another, a murder case; his son Bo Guagua never entered any judicial process, and the family's commercial side (as indicated in the testimony of Xu Ming, Ma Xiaoxia and others) remained forever at the level of "witnesses said so." The Zhou family is different: patriarch, eldest son, wife, nephew — four people, four courts (Tianjin, the Yichang Intermediate Court, Yichang's Yiling District, Deyang's Jianyang District), four effective judgments, with the paths of the family's bribe-taking — who collected the money, who knew, who traded on influence — registered in the judgments person by person and item by item. In the stories of red nobility, the words "the whole family" are mostly rhetoric; for this one family alone, they are the table of contents of the judgments.

That is precisely this piece's place in the series: it is the final-instance version of the line "privilege turned into business." In the preceding pieces, most of what we can prove is structure — who sat in what position, whose company took what project, what was in whose offshore account; this family's special feature is that above the structure there is also a conclusion: China's own courts, through their own procedures, wrote this network's mode of operation (one phone call, two levels of executors, family members collecting money, knowledge after the fact) item by item into effective judgments. To study this family, one does not need to infer "what would happen if it were investigated" — it was investigated, it was judged, and the numbers are all there.

The boundaries must likewise be written in full; that is this piece's rule. First, the judgment chain covers only four people; the subsequent handling of Zhou Yuanqing and Zhou Lingying, and Zhou Yuanxing's accounts, have no public judicial documents, and this piece leaves them blank. Second, the motive for the transactions in the Liu Han section belongs to the investigative-analysis layer and has been determined by no judgment; this piece presents it at the reporting grade. Third, the Reuters RMB 90 billion appears forever with its caveats attached; it is part of the history of reporting, not this piece's conclusion. Fourth, the judgment in Zhou Bin's case did not publish the item-by-item composition of his RMB 222 million, nor is there any judicial document itemizing the legality of each Zhongxu Yangguang project; this piece does not write in the details on the judgment's behalf. This piece's record ends here — what the judgments pinned down is pinned down; what the judgments did not say has been left in the gap list below.

Material Gaps (stated faithfully)

1. No public document on the subsequent judicial handling of Zhou Yuanqing and Zhou Lingying: after the two were taken away on December 1, 2013, there is no citable judgment or official notice in the public channels; their final disposition, charges and sentences are all without public record, and this piece makes no speculation. Zhou Yuanxing's residence was searched in December 2013 and he died of illness in February 2014; no judicial document accounts for the businesses and books in his name.
2. The item-by-item composition of Zhou Bin's RMB 222 million has not been published: the Yichang Intermediate Court's judgment release published only the two totals — joint bribe-taking and influence-peddling bribe-taking — without itemizing each transaction's requester, date and consideration; nor is there any judicial document determining the legality, item by item, of each Zhongxu Yangguang project or oil and gas block transaction. This piece's commercial narrative stops at the investigative layer and does not fill in the details on the judgment's behalf.
3. The motive for the Liu Han transactions has no judicial determination: the two transactions — the 2003 asset sale and the 2005 stake purchase and return — are supported at the investigative and business-registration level, but "cultivation at a premium" is Caixin's investigative analysis; neither Liu Han's nor Zhou Bin's judgment mentions the other's name, and neither characterized the transactions.
4. The composition of the Reuters RMB 90 billion figure cannot be verified: anonymous sources, no official confirmation; the proportions of lawful and unlawful portions within the seized assets, and the final disposition of the seized assets, have no public accounting. This piece cites it, with its complete caveats, only in the introduction and in Section VII.
5. No public record of the judicial status of Zhou Bin's wife Huang Wan: her role in the joint-bribery channel appears in investigative reporting; whether she herself was prosecuted and how she was handled has no public judicial document, and this piece does not expand on it.
6. The amount of Jia Xiaoye's fine has not been separately verified: the Yichang releases confirm her sentence of nine years' imprisonment with a fine; this piece does not cite a specific fine figure (relayed accounts of the release differ; better to omit than to err).
7. No authoritative source on the date and cause of death of Zhou Yongkang's first wife Wang Shuhua: the car-accident accounts circulating in informal channels rest only on relayed material; this piece records only the fact that she "has died" and adopts no details.

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