Beijing China blocked access to Bloombergs website on the mainland after the business and financial news agency published a report on Friday detailing the multimilliondollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the countrys next president
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The report says that the extended family of Vice President Xi Jinping holds interests that include investments in companies with total assets of $ 376 million, an 18 per cent indirect stake in a rareearths company with $ 1.73 billion in assets and a $ 20 million holding in a tech company. The report cites public documents Bloomberg reporters compiled.
Bloomberg noted that no assets were traced to Xi, his wife, or their daughter and said in the report that there was no indication of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family.
Still, the move to block access to Bloombergs main website, on which the Xi story was the lead news item, underscores the governments sensitivity to such exposure of wealth belonging to people linked to top leaders amid a burgeoning gap between rich and poor and rampant official corruption.
” The government has always been very careful in, on the one hand, emphasising how they want to contain corruption but yet also worrying about how reports of this nature might galvanise public opinion against the Communist Party,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at Chicago University.
