OPINION:
One of the strangest aspects of the Chinese Communist Party is that its leaders are rich.
No communist should be wealthy; a wealthy communist is like a married bachelor. But Chinese Communist Party leaders are obscenely wealthy. How the party leaders gained this wealth on their nominal salaries is an important issue for the global community to explore and for the Chinese people to know. Exploring this issue is critically important to revealing the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
The truth is, the party is illegitimate. It is so for three reasons. First, it was formed and nurtured by the Communist International, a worldwide organization, and the Chinese Communist Party’s seizure of power in 1949 was made possible by Stalin and the Red Army.
Second, it seeks to sustain the tyranny of the failed ideology of communism on the Chinese. This ideology should be thought of for what it is: an illegitimate polity for China and the last surviving form of Western colonialism. The Chinese Communist Party cannot hide that it is the product of Soviet imperialism.
Third, the Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate because of its abhorrent leadership, which has accelerated under the misrule of dictator Xi Jinping. Seventy years of the party’s tyranny have led to the recognition by the Chinese that the odious, corrupt and illegitimate regime rules for itself, not for the people.
Thus, while the Communist Party rules China, it is not its legitimate government. Party leaders’ grotesque wealth and corruption are a symptom of its illegitimacy.
The exposure of the leaders’ wealth helps the Chinese people identify and people of goodwill to understand the tyrannical and corrupt nature of the regime.
To this end, Sen. Marco Rubio inserted language into U.S. law (the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, Section 6501, Report on the Wealth and Corrupt Activities of the Leadership of the CCP), which tasks the intelligence community of the United States to produce an unclassified — and thus publicly available report — on the wealth and corrupt activities of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
This includes the party’s general secretary, Xi Jinping, and senior officials of the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Politburo Standing Committee and regional party secretaries. The report was due last December.
An important and related Congressional Research Service report was released this past May. The report studied the publicly available information on the wealth and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party and is a study to which people around the globe have access.
The intelligence community report, however, will have a magnified voice and compel attention to this issue. The problem is that the U.S. intelligence community has not produced the public report as the law requires.
The resources of the intelligence community are colossal, and no doubt it possesses ample evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s wealth and corruption. No doubt it will find that the Chinese Communist Party’s leaders are billionaires with untold wealth in New York, Switzerland, Dubai, London, Paris and elsewhere.
While that has long been suspected, the revelation of the facts will be important for the Chinese people and the world to know. The comprehension of amounts and locations and perhaps being able to associate individuals with specific corruption is important for the Chinese. Showing pictures of properties in Manhattan, Belgravia, Bellevue Hill or Gstaad with the name of a specific leader would be a welcome revelation.
What Mr. Rubio has started may be broadened. Other states may come together to identify the sources and location of the wealth of the Chinese Communist Party. There could be a global initiative to document the wealth of party leaders. To a degree, journalists can assist. Media, perhaps most importantly social media, may highlight the party’s wealth and corruption to publicize and inform global populations.
But exceptional reporting by The Washington Times, for example, cannot be substituted for the intelligence community report. But the intelligence community can expand upon reporting with specific monetary figures of their wealth and photos of their possessions.
Therefore, it is important for Congress to query the intelligence community on the report. It is long overdue, and Congress and the American people deserve an answer regarding its status.
With China’s economic downturn, the Communist Party’s legitimization crisis is at hand. The party has failed, as all communist governments do. The Chinese people know it, the party does and Mr. Xi himself likely sees the truth. These actions that the global community, the Chinese diaspora and people of goodwill worldwide may undertake will place the party under greater pressure.
Knowing how many billions Mr. Xi, his family and party comrades have in overseas banks, property and other assets is significant to reveal the corruption in the Chinese Communist Party leadership, with specific amounts and locations documented.
That will allow the victims of the party to move to seize those assets. Equally, it will allow the Chinese and the world to see proof of the Chinese Communist Party’s gross misrule and abuse of the country and its people.
• Paul Berkowitz is a former House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer who covered Asia and the Pacific for Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman and Chairman Dana Rohrabacher. Bradley A. Thayer is the co-author, with James E. Fanell, of “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.”
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