Opinion So who’s crossing the red line?

Dear President Xi,in recent years there’s been a tug of war inside the global investment community between those who think China is a bubble about to burst and therefore a “screaming short” and those who believe that China has big problems — but also big tools and smart leaders — and will find a way forward,even if at a more normal growth rate. I lean toward the second camp,but looking at some of China’s recent behaviour I’m beginning to wonder:

I say that as someone who wants to see China succeed in empowering its people to realise their full potential so they can better participate in shaping China’s future and integrate with the world. That is why I am writing you today. I believe you’re about to make a terrible,terrible mistake.

The Chinese-language websites of The Wall Street Journal and Reuters were recently blocked,and those of Bloomberg News and The New York Times have both been blocked for months. More important,The Times and Bloomberg together have more than 20 journalists in China whose visas are up for renewal by the end of December and,so far,your government is refusing to act on them — in apparent retaliation for both organisations exposing the enormous wealth amassed by relatives of senior Chinese leaders,including yours. The rumour is that you intend to deny both organisations the right to report from China.

China experts tell me that this unprecedented crackdown is prompted by your feeling that we’ve crossed a red line. You apparently thought the rules of the game were that the foreign press,local media and social media could write anything they wanted about corruption and social protests at the local and provincial level — indeed,it was a way for the central government to track and curb corruption — but that such focus should never be brought to the financial dealings of the top leaders of the Communist Party.

Just last March,Chinese authorities quickly deleted from the blogosphere photos of a fatal Beijing car crash,believed to involve the son of a close ally of then-President Hu Jintao. The car was a Ferrari. The driver was killed and two young women with him badly injured. How could such a young man afford a Ferrari?

There was no way the foreign press was going to permanently ignore such stories that so many Chinese were talking about online. And that became even more true with the financialisation of your economy and the emergence of a shareholding culture that required your companies and markets to comply with international norms for public filings of corporate structures and shareholders.

It was inevitable that once those filings were in place reporters in China would,as we did,hire accountants and lawyers to scrutinise these public records and discover things — like the fact that former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s 90-year-old mother,a retired schoolteacher,had in her name an investment in a large Chinese financial services company valued around $100 million and Wen’s son,daughter,younger brother and brother-in-law had all also become extraordinarily wealthy.

Who crossed the red line here? We’d argue that it was some of your colleagues and their kids in opting for industrial-scale greed — combined with the new technology to expose it. That technology is not going away,so the excesses and corruption better. The Times and Bloomberg did your leadership a huge service in exposing this. It was a warning heart attack. The number one cause of death of Chinese regimes in history is greed and corruption.

If you throw all our correspondents out of China,I can tell you exactly what will happen: They will set up offices in Hong Kong,Taiwan and South Korea and do nothing other than comb through financial records from afar,without the balancing alternative to travel in China,meet and hear from Chinese people face to face,and write with nuance about other issues. Also,it will force us to evict your journalists. We will not let you enjoy our openness while you blind us.

President Xi,you are right that exposure of huge,high-level asset grabs poses an existential threat to your party’s rule. But you’re wrong if you blame those exposing these excesses rather than those perpetrating them.