“If we run the story, we will be kicked out of China,’’ Winkler told the reporters on the conference call, according to the Times, which trumpeted the story of Bloomberg’s capitulation to the Chinese Communist Party on its front page on November 9, 2013. According to a widely publicized account of a conference call between Bloomberg offices in New York and Hong Kong, Matthew Winkler, then the editor-in-chief, likened the decision not to publish the story to the self-censorship of foreign news bureaus that wanted to continue reporting in Nazi Germany. They were preparing to publish a story on the connections in late 2013, but it was reportedly spiked. ![]() While reporting the story about Xi Jinping’s family, Forsythe and his colleagues at Bloomberg stumbled upon a skein of financial ties between Politburo members and Wang Jianlin. The ongoing ban on new visas for Times and Bloomberg journalists has become a diplomatic issue, raised by both President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joseph Biden during recent visits to Beijing. This is the reason that readers so often see Hong Kong and Taiwan datelines on stories about China. Existing staff members could have their visas renewed (it makes bad headlines to expel reporters), but no new hires would be allowed to reside in the country. The Chinese government responded by blocking all new journalist-visa applications from the Times and Bloomberg. A few months earlier, a team of Bloomberg reporters, led by Michael Forsythe, had broken another big story, about the family of Xi Jinping, who was then in line to become China’s President. In 2012, the New York Times published a major exposé on the family of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao, for which the reporter David Barboza won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. But we couldn’t prove it, and we couldn’t expect the heavily censored Chinese press to report it. Back in 2013, when I was the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, we all knew, or thought we knew, that the families of Politburo members had gotten fabulously rich as the Chinese economy prospered. The article was fascinating, and so, too, was its backstory: it had been in the works for three years, at first not at the Times but at Bloomberg News.įor journalists working in China, there is no more sensitive subject than the wealth of the top leadership it poses more potential problems than anything one could write about Tibet or Taiwan or human rights. ![]() Wang’s success has also allowed close relatives of Communist Party officials to become tremendously wealthy: most notably, a longtime business associate of President Xi Jinping’s sister and brother-in-law holds shares in Wang’s Wanda empire that are now worth about two hundred and forty million dollars. ![]() The former People’s Liberation Army foot soldier has become so powerful that, in 2013, he was able to commandeer Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman to China for the announcement of a new “movie metropolis,” with film studios, hotels, and a theme park. Last Wednesday, the Times published a front-page story about the movie and real-estate mogul Wang Jianlin, who is the richest man in Asia, worth an estimated thirty-five billion dollars. A story about the wealth of the Chinese President Xi Jinping's family helped precipitate a ban on new visas for journalists from the New York Times and Bloomberg News.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |