Thread by @PekingMike

THREAD: I have been documenting the assets of China’s top leaders for 10 years now. It is not easy. And it is getting harder. But it is a walk in the park compared to tracking the wealth of Vladimir Putin. 1/x

I took a brief foray into the world of Putin’s wealth with @mmcintire - just published. We found wildly varying estimates of his wealth, mostly guesswork. 2/x nytimes.com/2022/02/26/wor…

Of course Putin’s name isn’t on any of the palaces, yachts and villas attributed to him or his relatives. Often those assets are linked to his close friends - oligarchs like Rotenberg or Timchenko. But how much of their billions - of any - “belongs” to Putin? We don’t know. 3/x

CONTRAST THIS WITH CHINA: We don’t know the full extent of the wealth of China’s leading families, but we know a lot. The names of relatives of politburo members show up on company records in China and Hong Kong. They show up in offshore records in tax havens. 4/x

And the names of the relatives show up in property records. Xi Jinping’s older sister and his niece own tens of millions of dollars in apartments and villas in Hong Kong. A daughter of the No3 member of the Politburo Standing Committee is also linked to a Hong Kong villa. 5/x

We’ve been writing about this for years, without any denial from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party. Here’s one example by @jotted and me. 6/x nytimes.com/2020/08/12/bus…

As I said, we know a lot. Hundreds of millions attributed to the extended family of Xi Jinping. Billions owned by the family and biz associates of former premier Wen Jiabao as @DavidBarboza2 reported. Millions more to the families of other leaders. Documented. Bulletproof. 7/x

Both China and Russia are authoritarian states. But China is in a different league than Russia. There are anti war protesters in Moscow. Plucky Russian papers write exposes of oligarchs’ wealth. Russians can use Facebook. There is an OPPOSITION leader, albeit a jailed one. 8/x

China has no political opposition. Its internet is censored, street protests against the central government are exceedingly rare. There is no free press. And yet, to this day, any Chinese citizen can document the wealth of Xi’s relatives in online searches. 9/x

I don’t know if there’s any meaningful insight we can draw from this but I do find it fascinating that in a hard authoritarian country like China one can authoritatively document the fortunes of leaders but in Russia, authoritarian but far more open, it is a murky mess 10/x

Of course, a Chinese reporter can document the assets of Xi’s relatives but would swiftly feel the wrath of China’s security services if they dared try to write anything about it. Only foreign reporters like me (now safely in NYC) have that freedom. 11/x

So you could say that in Russia, where the (much maligned) independent press does try to hold Putin’s government accountable, the response is to make his fortune unaccountable. In China, where the public cannot hold top leaders accountable, there’s less of a reason to hide. END

PS: I would add that there has been fabulous journalism, much of it stemming from the @ICIJorg @SZ leaks like Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers showing that people close to Putin have unexplained wealth. An example: theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/…