Senior Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, are engaged in corruption and hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth by using relatives to disguise their activities, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.
By 2012, Mr. Xi had amassed at least $376 million in company investments, an indirect 18% stake in a rare-earth mineral company worth more than $311 million, and $20.2 million holdings in a technology company, according to a CRS report based on published information from news outlets about the hidden wealth.
“Publicly available information on the wealth and/or corruption of currently serving senior CPC leaders is limited,” the report said.
“The [Communist Party of China] does not require its officials to publicly disclose their assets. CPC and PRC media controls ensure that any non-state sanctioned reporting on, or discussion of the wealth and corruption of top leaders or their relatives either does not appear or is quickly removed from the [People’s Republic of China] media ecosystem.”
The CRS produced the document for members of Congress in advance of a congressionally mandated report from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines required under 2022 legislation.
The DNI report was due to Congress in December. A spokeswoman for Ms. Haines said in April that the director was aware of the reporting requirement and analysts were working on the study.
The DNI report was directed to include details of corruption by Mr. Xi and other senior Chinese leaders.
The intelligence report is expected to undermine Mr. Xi’s 12-year anti-corruption campaign, which included investigations into millions of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members.
The CRS report said 266 members of the CCP Central Committee have been ousted. Among them were Defense Minister Li Shangfu, also a former member of the Central Military Commission, and Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
It noted four types of corruption in China: access money, speed money, grand theft and petty theft.
Access money is the dominant form. One expert described it as capitalists’ bribes to powerful party officials for access to privileges, such as cheap financing, land grants, monopoly rights, procurement contracts and tax breaks.
“From a businessperson’s point of view, access money is less a tax than an investment,” Yuen Yuen Ang, a Johns Hopkins University political economist, is quoted in the report as saying.
The report said Chinese business people frequently bribe “Party-state bosses” because the benefits offset the expenses.
The Chinese government has censors, and foreign affairs officials have vigorously sought to hide foreign reporting on corruption and CCP hidden wealth.
Foreign news outlets investigating leadership wealth and corruption have faced government retaliation, including the expulsion of reporters, the closure of foreign bureaus and failed visa renewals.
Censors quickly block and remove all online content related to the wealth and corruption of senior officials and their relatives. Online databases used to identify leaders’ corruption have been restricted.
Chinese staff members of foreign news outlets, often key facilitators of foreign news gathering, have been forced to leave their jobs after corruption is reported, the report said.
A counterespionage regulation enacted last year redefined espionage to include accessing documents and data broadly defined as “state secrets.”
The report identified two major news investigations into Mr. Xi’s hidden wealth, one by Bloomberg News and another by The New York Times, both from 2012.
The news organizations traced money flows from corporate and regulatory documents.
Mr. Xi’s estimated $707.2 million in hidden wealth is said to have been spread among relatives, including his wife, Peng Liyuan, and daughter, Xi Mingze.
Most of the assets are owned by Mr. Xi’s eldest sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, her husband, Deng Jiagui, and their daughter, Zhang Yannan.
The New York Times identified an estimated $2.7 billion held by relatives of then-Premier Wen Jiabao, the CCP’s third most senior leader.
Mr. Wen’s wife, son and brother controlled those assets.
A third news investigation, in 2015, involved politically connected Chinese tycoon Wang Jianlin, who headed the real estate and entertainment empire Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties.
Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler killed the corruption story because of fears that publication would “wipe out everything we’ve tried to build there,” NPR reported in 2020. The reporter who wrote the story, Michael Forsythe, quit and joined The New York Times.
Mr. Forsythe reported for The Times in 2015 that Ms. Qi and Mr. Deng were early investors in Dalian Wanda and paid $28.9 million in 2009 for shares that had risen in value to $240 million by 2015.
In 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported on a corruption case involving Ming Chai, an Australian citizen and Mr. Xi’s cousin.
The report said Mr. Chai is Qi Ruixin, the younger brother of Mr. Xi’s mother, Qi Xin.
Australian police investigated Mr. Chai during an investigation into organized crime, money laundering and Chinese influence operations.
After the article appeared, China expelled one of the two co-authors, Chun Han Wong.
In 2022, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mr. Chai had transferred about $695,000 to a Chinese money laundering operation in Australia.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists produced a database from a leaked document that revealed Mr. Deng was a director and sole shareholder in two British Virgin Island companies.
The database disclosed that Feng Qiya, a member of the Henan Province delegation to China’s National People’s Congress, set up a British Virgin Islands company in 2016 to invest in U.S. stocks.
In 2019, news reports revealed that officials of Germany’s Deutsche Bank promoted their business interests in China by giving expensive gifts to senior CCP leaders, hiring CCP leaders’ relatives and investing in leaders’ businesses.
Those linked to the corruption included Jiang Zemin, Chinese leader from 1989 to 2002, Wang Qishan, a member of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee from 2012 to 2017 and Mr. Wen.
Deutsche Bank also hired adult children of Politburo standing committee members Li Zhanshu and Wang Yang.
The standing committee is the CCP’s highest political body and is regarded as a collective dictatorship that oversees the government.