Opinion In the black
The Panama Papers also reveal what we knew already: Red China has turned flamboyantly capitalist.
Beijing has blocked internet traffic and told news organisations to delete stories about the scandal from their servers.
The news is that eight relations of present and former members of the standing committee of the politburo in Beijing used the good offices of Mossack Fonseca, one of which is conveniently located in Hong Kong, to offshore their assets. Including the brother-in-law of resident Xi Jinping, former Premier Wen Jiabao’s son and the daughter of Li Peng, these worthies number among the 22,000 Chinese citizens who have parked their gains, however gotten, in tax havens. Apart from the big names, this isn’t really news, since Beijing throttled the flight of capital in 2014, thwarting citizens using hawala-like networks and over-invoicing rackets. Even more controversially, leading banks were facilitating the offshoring of huge sums of money.
How has Beijing reacted to the news about the relations of party officials spending too much time with Mr Fonseca? Well, that isn’t news either. It has blocked internet traffic and told news organisations to delete stories about the scandal from their servers. While China has transited economically from Maoism to a slightly surreal mashup of socialism and bare-naked capitalism, its soul is still in the grip of the once and forever Chairman. It is another matter that the Chinese are not permitted to have souls.
China harbours a financial schizophrenia even wilder than India’s. Our country only wants to be a global superpower with a controlled currency, a relatively harmless neurosis. Theirs has wanted to globalise the renminbi, urging its use to settle international trade and creating offshore markets for the currency in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, while scrambling to seal mainland borders against cash leakages. This is the sort of financial miasma in which the mind turns idly to shell companies. How else could the Chinese elite unseat the sheikhs as the real estate tycoons of the first world?
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