Cult of Personality

Xi Jinping, Hogging Spotlight, Elbows Communist Titan Aside

By Steven Lee Myers

In a painting touring museums across China, Xi Jinping is front and center while a statue of Deng Xiaoping is a distant image.

SHENZHEN, China — Shortly after taking over as China’s leader, Xi Jinping made a pilgrimage to lay a wreath at a large bronze monument to one of his predecessors, the man credited with ushering in the country’s new era of capitalist prosperity 40 years ago, Deng Xiaoping.
Xi’s gesture here in the southern city of Shenzhen was hardly remarkable. 

Deng is second only to Mao in the pantheon of Communist China’s founding fathers, and his influence and popularity lingered long after his death in 1997. 

Every Chinese leader since has sought to position himself as heir to Deng’s legacy.
Xi, though, now appears to be taking a different approach.
A large painting of his visit to the monument is touring museums across China ahead of the December anniversary of the Communist Party leadership meeting that Deng used to inaugurate the country’s “reform and opening up.” 

In it, Xi stands front and center, while Deng’s statue is a distant image receding into a golden sunset.
It is the latest example of what some observers see as a concerted effort to elevate Xi’s role in the party’s official history, largely at Deng’s expense — a propaganda shift that could have a profound impact on Chinese politics and policymaking.

Xi has been the focus of a lavish, highly choreographed multimedia campaign that is a throwback to Mao’s cult of personality.

Xi has not sought to erase Deng entirely. 

He traveled to southern China last month on a visit with deliberate echoes of Deng’s famous 1992 tour of the region, for example. 

Deng’s stature has been diminished, however, as Xi has centralized power and enhanced his own image with a lavish, highly choreographed multimedia campaign that critics have derided as a throwback to Mao’s cult of personality.
“Xi certainly isn’t content to operate in Deng’s shadow,” said Julian B. Gewirtz, a scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, adding that Xi wanted to “establish a distinctive political system with himself at the center.”
Mr. Gewirtz noted that Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, owed their positions and political legitimacy to Deng. 

Xi, by contrast, rose to national prominence only after Deng’s death and is the first Chinese leader to take power without having been elevated by Deng into the party’s top ranks.
Still, Deng’s legacy represents both a challenge to and a potential constraint on Xi — a historical yardstick by which he is being measured, and a source of tradition that others in the party can use to limit Xi’s options.
In many ways, Xi has favored policies that depart from Deng’s agenda. 

In addition to self-aggrandizing propaganda, which Deng eschewed, Xi has pressed a more assertive foreign policy that openly challenges the United States, worked to limit Western influence on Chinese society and sought to shield Chinese companies from foreign competition.

Xi has relegated his predecessors, including Hu Jintao, left, and Jiang Zemin, right, to transitional roles in the party’s official history.

Xi has also removed constitutional term limits on the presidency, prompting many Chinese to quote Deng’s warning from 1980 that “tenure for life” could only corrupt party leaders — a dig at Xi that was censored as quickly as it appeared online.
More recently, a speech by Deng’s influential son, Deng Pufang, at the annual congress of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation in September has attracted attention because portions of it were viewed as an oblique critique of Xi’s far-reaching ambitions.
“We must always maintain a pragmatic attitude and a clear mind,” said Deng, who was paralyzed in an attack during the Cultural Revolution and serves as chairman of the federation. 

“We should be neither overconfident nor belittle ourselves.”
Xi has consolidated his position as China’s supreme leader and appears to face no significant political rival. 

After a summer of discontent over the threat of a protracted trade war with the United States and pushback against the infrastructure investments at the heart of his Belt and Road Initiative, Xi has reasserted his place atop the political system.
The coming anniversary of the reforms associated with Deng remains fraught for Xi, however, because the nation’s direction under his leadership continues to draw unfavorable comparisons to Deng’s “hide your strength, bide your time” approach — at least among some liberal-minded analysts and officials.

Deng Xiaoping, shown here on his famous 1992 tour of southern China, has been second only to Mao in the Chinese Communist pantheon.

The party celebrated the 30th anniversary with great fanfare in 2008, but official plans to commemorate the 40th anniversary this year have been scaled back considerably, according to a veteran journalist with a state news outlet. 

“Once you dredge up these matters, it’s very easy to lose control and set off new debate,” the journalist said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
During Xi’s visit to southern China last month, he noted the coming anniversary, attended an exhibition devoted to it and vowed to continue the economic transition that Deng began, but did not mention Deng — at least in the remarks chronicled by the state news media.
Inevitably, many compared the trip to the famous “southern tour” in 1992 that Deng used to steer the nation back toward market-oriented policies and out of the diplomatic isolation and economic retrenchment that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“Xi Jinping has been pickpocketing policies from the Deng era,” Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian scholar of China, wrote this summer. 

“He does so while diminishing the man hailed for decades as the ‘Architect of Reform and the Opening Door Policies.’ At the same, he crucially overrides aspects of Deng’s legacy that might limit his afflatus and sense of mission.”
Mr. Barmé, in an interview, said Xi was eager to position himself as “the greater unifier after Mao,” relegating Deng and the leaders who followed him to an era of economic transition leading to a new era of strength that only he can achieve. 

Tellingly, Xi’s trip included a visit to China’s southern military command, where he urged commanders “to strengthen the mission” and focus on “preparations for fighting a war.”

Xi visited this statue of Deng in Shenzhen soon after taking power but has departed from Deng’s agenda.

The painting of Xi visiting the monument to Deng is part of an exhibition that first appeared in Beijing and then in the southern province of Guangdong. 

It covers the 40 years of “reform and opening up,” but Deng appears clearly in only one painting — seated, smoking a cigarette and listening to a lecture by the party secretary of Guangdong, Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun.
“We all know that Deng Xiaoping is, of course, the helmsman, a very great figure, but many people don’t know that Comrade Xi Zhongxun is also being studied by a lot of people nowadays,” said Fan Bo, an artist who was commissioned to create a portrait of the elder Xi for the exhibition.
It shows Xi’s father, his pants rolled up, bathed in a ray of light through the clouds, speaking with workers on the site of Shenzhen’s first special economic zone. 

Fan titled the painting “First Steps.”
“It’s an objective restoration of the historical fact,” he said.
Others are pushing back against efforts to diminish Deng’s legacy.
“Chinese society today is a result of Deng’s reform and opening up,” wrote Sheng Hong, the director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, in a recent essay. 

“There is a countercurrent at the moment. However, it should not be very difficult to resist the countercurrent and maintain Deng’s vision for further reform and opening up.”
On Monday, Sheng said on Twitter that he was told not to attend a conference at Harvard devoted to the anniversary and Deng’s legacy on the grounds that it would “endanger national security.”

‘Human impulses run riot’: China’s shocking pace of change

Thirty years ago, politics was paramount. Now, only money counts. Yu Hua examines a nation that has transformed in a single lifetime. 

By Yu Hua

Souvenirs featuring portraits of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, Beijing. 

When I try to describe how China has changed over the past 50 years, countless roads appear in front of me. 

Given the sheer immensity of these changes, all I can do is try first to follow a couple of main roads, and then a few smaller ones, to see where they take us.
My first main road begins in the past. 

In my 58 years, I have experienced three dramatic changes, and each one has been accompanied by a surge in suicides among officials. 

The first time was during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. 

At the start of that period, many members of the Chinese Communist party woke up one day to find they had been purged: overnight they had become “power-holders taking the capitalist road”. 

After suffering every kind of psychological and physical abuse, some chose to take their own lives. 

In the small town in south China where I grew up, some hanged themselves or swallowed insecticide, while others threw themselves down wells: wells in south China have narrow mouths, and if you dive into one headfirst, there is no way you will come out alive.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, many people from the lowest tiers of society formed their own mass organisations, proclaiming themselves commanders of a “Cultural Revolution headquarters”. 

These individuals – rebels, they were called – often went on to secure official positions of one kind or another. 

They enjoyed only a brief career, however. 

Following Mao’s death in 1976, the subsequent end of the Cultural Revolution and the emergence of the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping as China’s new leader, some rebels believed they would suffer just as much as the officials they had tormented a few years before.
Thus came the second surge in suicides – this time of officials who had clawed their way to power as revolutionary radicals. 

One official in my little town drowned himself in the sea: he smoked a lot of cigarettes first, and the stubs littering the shore marked the agony of indecision that preceded his death. 

This was a much smaller surge in suicides than the first one, because Deng was not out for political revenge, focusing instead on kickstarting economic reforms and opening up to the west. 

This policy led in turn to China’s economic miracle, the downside of which has been environmental pollution, growing inequality and pervasive corruption.
In late 2012 came the third dramatic change in my lifetime, when China entered the era of Xi Jinping. 

No sooner did Xi become general secretary of the Communist party than our new leader launched an anti-corruption drive, the scale and force of which took almost everyone by surprise. 

The third surge in suicides followed. 

When officials who had stuffed their pockets during China’s breakneck economic rise discovered they were being investigated and realised they could not wriggle free, some put an end to things by suicide. 

In cases involving lower-ranking officials who were under investigation but had not yet been taken into custody, the government explanation was that their suicides were triggered by depression. 

But, if a high-ranking official took his own life, a harsher judgment was passed. 

On 23 November 2017, after Zhang Yang, a general, hanged himself in his own home, the People’s Liberation Army Daily reported that he “had evaded party discipline and the laws of the nation” and described his suicide as “a disgraceful action”.
These three surges in suicide demonstrate the failure and impotence of legal institutions in China. 

The public security organs, prosecutorial agencies and courts all stopped functioning at the start of the Cultural Revolution; thereafter, laws existed only in name. 

Since Mao’s death, a robust legal system has never truly been established and, today, law’s failure manifests itself in two ways. 

First, the law is strong only on paper: in practice, law tends to be subservient to the power that officials wield. 

Second, when officials realise they are being investigated and know their position won’t save them, some will choose to die rather than submit to legal sanctions, for officials who believe in power don’t believe in law.
These two points, seemingly at odds, are actually two sides of the same coin. 

The difference between the three surges in suicide is this: the first two were outcomes of a political struggle; framed by the start and the end of the Cultural Revolution. 

The third, by contrast, stems from the blight of corruption that has accompanied 30 years of rapid economic development. 

Of course, the anti-corruption campaign is conducted selectively, with the goal of purging Xi Jinping’s political opponents. 

And the underlying problem is: how many officials are there today who are truly clean? 

A few years ago, an official from China’s prosecutorial agencies put it to me this way: “If you were to stick all of today’s officials in a line and shoot every one of them, that would be unfair to some. But a lot would slip through the net if you only shot every other one.”
When I turn onto the second main road that stretches from the China of my childhood to the present day, what I see before me is the declining importance of the family and the growing importance of individualism. 

In Mao’s China, the individual could find no fulfilment in ordinary social life. 

If one wanted to express a personal aspiration, the only way to do so was to throw oneself into a collective movement such as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. 

Mind you, in those grand campaigns, the individual’s aspirations had to conform entirely to whatever the “correct” political line happened to be at that moment – the slightest deviation would cause disaster.
To use an analogy current at the time, each of us was a little drop of water, gathered into the great flood of socialism. 

But it wasn’t so easy to be that drop of water. 

In my town, there was a Cultural Revolution activist who would almost every day be at the forefront of some demonstration or other, often being first to raise his fist and shout “Down with Liu Shaoqi!” (Liu, nominally the head of state, had just been purged.) 

One day, however, he inadvertently misspoke, shouting “Down with Mao Zedong!” instead. 

Within seconds he had been thrown to the ground by the “revolutionary masses”, and thus he began a wretched phase in life, denounced and beaten at every turn.

Students wave copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Beijing, 1966. 

In that era, the individual could find space only in the context of family life – any independent leanings could only be expressed at home. 

That is why family values were so important to Chinese people then, and why marital infidelity was seen as so intolerable. 

If you were caught having an extramarital affair, the social morality of the day meant that you would be subjected to all kinds of humiliation: you might be paraded through the streets with half your hair shaved off or packed off to prison.
During the Cultural Revolution, there were certainly cases of husbands and wives denouncing each other and fathers and sons falling out, but these were not typical – the vast majority of families enjoyed unprecedented solidarity. 

A friend of mine told me her father had been a professor at the start of the Cultural Revolution, while her mother was a housewife. 

Her father, born to a landlord’s family, became the target of attacks, but her mother, from a humbler background, was placed among the revolutionary ranks. 

Pressed by the radicals to divorce her father, her mother outright refused – and not only that: every time her father was hauled off to a denunciation session, she would make a point of sitting in the front row and, if she saw someone beating her husband, she would rush over and start hitting back. 

Such brawls might leave her bruised and bleeding, but she would sit back down proudly in the front row, and the radicals lost their nerve and gave up beating her husband. 

After the Cultural Revolution ended, my friend’s father told her, with tears in his eyes, that had it not been for her mother he might well have taken his own life. 

There are many such stories.
After Mao’s death, the economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping brought dramatic changes to China, changes that permeated all levels of Chinese society. 

In a matter of 30 years, we went from one extreme to another, from an era where human nature was suppressed to an era where human impulses could run riot, from an era when politics was paramount to an era when only money counts.
Before, limited by social constraints, people could feel a modicum of freedom only within the family; with the loss of those constraints, that modest freedom which was once so prized now counts for little. 

Extramarital affairs have become more and more widespread and are no longer a cause for shame. 

It is commonplace for successful men to keep a mistress, or sometimes multiple mistresses – which people often jokingly compare to a teapot needing at least four or five cups to make a full tea set. 

In one case I know of, a wealthy businessman bought all 10 flats in the wing of an apartment complex. 

He installed his legally recognised wife in one flat, and his nine legally unrecognised mistresses in the other flats, one above the other, so that he could select at his pleasure and convenience on which floor of the building he would spend the night.
Having taken a couple of main roads that trace China’s journey over the past half-century, it is time to travel down some smaller ones. 

The first begins with Buddhist temples. 

During the Cultural Revolution, temples were closed down and some suffered serious damage. 

In my little town, Red Guards knocked off the heads and arms of every Buddhist sculpture in the local temples, which were then converted into storehouses. 

Afterwards, the damaged temples were restored and they all reopened, typically with two round bronze incense burners in front of the main hall: the first to invoke blessings for wealth, the second to invoke blessings for security.
When I visited temples in the 1980s, in the first censer I would often see a huge assembly of joss sticks, blazing away furiously, while in the second, a paltry handful would be smoking feebly. 

In those days China was still very poor, and, as most people saw it, when you didn’t have money, being safe didn’t amount to much. 

Now China is rich, and when you go into a temple you see joss sticks burning just as brightly in the security censer as in the wealth one – it is when you are rich that security acquires particular importance.
In China today, Buddhist temples are crowded with worshippers, while Taoist temples are largely deserted. 

A few years ago, I asked a Taoist abbot: “Taoism is native to China, so why is it not as popular as Buddhism, which came here from abroad?” 

His answer was short: “Buddhism has money and Taoism doesn’t.”
His explanation, although it rather took me aback, expresses a truth about Chinese society: money, or material interest, has become the main motivating force. 

In the 1980s, there was a series of student protests in China, culminating in the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, when not just students but city dwellers all across the country joined the rallies. 

Back then, the demonstrations were largely motivated by concern for the fate of the nation and a desire to see democratic freedoms put in place. 

Today, people still demonstrate, but on a very small scale, and these demonstrations – “mass incidents” in official parlance – are completely different from the protests in the 1980s. 

Protests today are not geared towards transforming society – they are simply designed to protect the material interests of the group involved.
A few years ago, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the education authorities announced that universities would be reserving more places for students from poor areas in west China. 

This triggered an uproar among the parents of Jiangsu high-school students preparing for the university entrance examination. 

Concerned that this new policy would reduce their children’s chances of getting into university, they marched in the streets to protest. 

Something similar happened a few years ago in Shanghai, when retirees took to the streets, worried that if welfare funds were allocated to poor areas, their own retirement benefits would be slashed.
These constant “mass incidents”, I should point out, reflect real issues. 

In recent years, for instance, many retired military veterans have gathered together across the country in protests against the stingy benefits and pensions they receive from the state. 

Back in the 1980s, they argue, veterans used to be more generously rewarded, relative to the cost of living. 

Today, even though China is richer, they receive little. 

Unsurprisingly, veterans feel shortchanged and disrespected.

A reconstructed traditional shopping street in Beijing, 2008. 

Other mass incidents, such as the widespread demonstrations by truck drivers in June, have been sparked by the fierce economic competition that now characterises life in China. 

In numerous industries, it has become common practice to try to secure more business by pushing down prices as low as they can possibly go. 

I was struck by this new reality a few years ago, at the end of a trip I had taken to South Africa for the World Cup. 

At the airport, I bought a vuvuzela in the airport as a souvenir, paying more than 100 yuan (£11). 

It was only when I got back to Beijing that I realised it was made in China. 

At the start, Chinese manufacturers had set their factory price at over five yuan a piece, but they soon found themselves being underbid. 

Some factories ultimately set their price as low as 2.2 yuan, when the production cost was 2 yuan per unit. 

The result of all this ferocious competition is that the profit margin keeps getting slimmer and slimmer, and those who suffer most are ordinary workers, who often see no increase in their salary even as their work hours are extended.
Now I need to take two other roads – the road of innovation and the road of nostalgia. 

Innovation first. 

Given the speed at which new technologies become dominant, you sometimes feel that there is no gap at all between new and old. 

Take mobile payments: in the space of just a few years, Alibaba’s Alipay mobile app and Tencent’s WeChat Pay app have been loaded on to practically every smartphone in the country. 

From big shopping malls to little corner shops – any place where a transaction can be made will have the scannable QR codes for these two payment platforms displayed in a prominent location. 

People just need to take their phone out of their pocket, do a quick scan and the payment is made. Even Chinese beggars have to keep up with the times: sometimes they too have a QR code handy, and they will ask passersby to scan it and use the mobile payment platform to dispense some spare change.
I recently went for more than a year without using cash or a credit card, because it is just so convenient to pay by phone instead. 

This July, though, when my English translator came to Beijing and my wife and I took him out for dinner, I went to scan the restaurant’s QR code but the transaction failed to go through. 

Instead of trying a second time, I suddenly felt an urge to pay in cash. 

When I pulled some banknotes out of my pocket, handed them to the cashier and received change in return, I felt a pleasant tingle of novelty.
This novelty is all the more remarkable given that just 30 years ago, when Chinese people went on business trips, they would worry so much about their money being stolen that they would hide cash in their underpants, the safest place for it. 

They would have a little pocket sewn on the inside, with a button for extra security. 

When a bill needed to be paid they would reach a hand into their underwear, grope around a bit, and pull out the requisite five-mao or one-yuan note, distinguishable by feel because one was smaller than the other. 

Women would withdraw to a secluded spot to retrieve their cash, but some men would have no such inhibitions and would rummage about in their underpants quite unabashedly.
When I turn to the road of nostalgia, I think of how my home county of Haiyan has transformed. When I was a boy, Haiyan had a total population of 300,000, with only 8,000 living in the county town itself. 

Now, the county has a population of 380,000, of whom 100,000 live in the county seat. 

Urbanisation has created a lot of problems, one of them being what happens after farmers move to cities. 

Local governments have expropriated large swathes of agricultural land to enable an enormous urban expansion program: some of the land is allocated to industry in order to attract investment, build factories and boost government revenues, but most of it is sold off at a high price to real-estate developers. 

The result is that high-rise apartment buildings now sprout in profusion where once only crops grew. After their land and houses in the countryside are expropriated, farmers “move upstairs” into housing blocks that the local government has provided in compensation. 

In wealthy counties, some farmers may be awarded up to three or four apartments, in which case they will live in one and rent out the other two or three; others may receive a large cash settlement.
But the questions then become: how do they adjust to city life? 

Now disconnected from the form of labour to which they were accustomed, what new jobs are there for them to do? 

Some drive taxis and some open little shops, but others just loaf around, playing mahjong all day, and others take to gambling and lose everything they have. 

Every time a community of dispossessed farmers settles into a new housing project, gambling operations will follow them there, because some of the residents will be flush with cash after the government payouts. 

In China, it is forbidden to open gambling establishments, but this doesn’t stop unlicensed operators from cramming their gambling accessories into a few large suitcases and lugging them around these new neighbourhoods, where they will talk their way into the homes of resettled farmers. 

The gambling outfits play hide-and-seek with the police, setting up shop here today, shifting to a new spot tomorrow.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district, 2013. 

What is the situation back where the farmers came from – the houses in the countryside now expropriated but yet to be demolished? 

Peasants often have dogs to protect the home and guard the property. 

When peasants move to the cities, they no longer need guard dogs, so they leave them behind. 

And so you see poignant scenes in those empty, weed-infested farm compounds, as those abandoned dogs, all skin and bones, faithfully continue to perform sentry duty, now rushing from one end of the property to the other, standing on a high point and gazing off into the distance, their eyes burning with hope, longing for the past to return.
Wishing the past could return is a mood that is spreading through today’s society. 

Two patterns are typical. 

The more widespread of the two reflects the yearnings of the poor. 

China’s enhanced status as the world’s second largest economy has brought them few benefits; they continue to lead a life of grinding hardship. 

They cherish their memories of the past, for although they were poor then, the word “unemployed” was yet to exist. 

What’s more, in those days there was no moneyed class in a real sense: Mao’s monthly salary, for example, was just 404.8 yuan, compared to my parents’ joint income of 120 yuan. 

There was only a small gap between rich and poor, and social inequalities were limited.
A different form of nostalgia is prevalent among successful people who, having risen as high as they can possibly go, now find themselves in danger of tumbling off the cliff. 

Someone reported to me an exchange he had had with one of Shanghai’s ultra-rich, a man who had relied on bribery and other underhand methods to transform himself from a pauper into a millionaire. Realising he would soon be arrested and anticipating a long prison term, he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his huge, lofty, luxurious office and looked down at the construction workers far below, busy building the foundation of another skyscraper. 

How he wished he could be one of those workers, he said, for though their work was hard and their pay was low, they didn’t have to live in a state of such high anxiety. 

Faced with the prospect of losing everything they have gained, such people find themselves wishing their spectacular career hadn’t happened at all, wishing they could reclaim the past.
If the past were really to return – that past where you needed grain coupons to buy rice, oil coupons to buy cooking oil, cotton coupons to buy cloth, that past of dire material shortages, where the supply of goods was dictated by quotas – would those people who hanker for the past be happy? 

I doubt it.
As I see it, when the poor pine for the past, this is not a rational desire – it is simply a way of venting their feelings, the voicing of a frustration that is rooted in their discontent with current Chinese realities. 

And when that other, smaller group of people who have been successful in government or business realise they are going to spend the rest of their life behind bars and wish they could reclaim the past, this sentiment springs only from a wistful regret: “If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have got myself into this mess.”
I’m reminded of a joke that’s been doing the rounds. 

Here is what’s unfair about this society:
The pretty girl says: “I want a diamond ring!” She gets it.
The rich guy says: “I want a pretty girl!” He gets her.
I say: “I want a shower!” But there’s no water.
That last situation, I myself have experienced. 

In my early years, more often than not, water would cut off just as I was having a shower – sometimes at the precise moment when I had lathered myself in soap from head to toe. 

All I could do then was hammer on the pipe with my fists, at the same time raising my head so that the final few drops of water would rinse my eyes and save them from smarting; as for when the water would come on again, I could only wait patiently and hope heaven was on my side. 

Back then, nobody would have seen water stoppages at shower-time as a social injustice, because in those bygone days, there were no rich guys, and so pretty girls didn’t get diamond rings and rich guys didn’t get pretty girls.
It is often said that children represent the future. 

In closing, let me try to capture the changing outlook of three generations of Chinese boys as a way of mapping in simple terms China’s trajectory over the years. 

If you asked these boys what to look for in life, I think you would hear very different answers.
A boy growing up in the Cultural Revolution might well have said: “Revolution and struggle.”
A boy growing up in the early 1990s, as economic reforms entered their second decade, might well have said: “Career and love.”
Today’s boy might well say: “Money and girls.”

After Failed Talks With Kushner, More Trouble for a Chinese Tycoon

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Wu Xiaohui, the president and chief executive of the Anbang Insurance Group. Caixin Weekly magazine questioned whether Anbang was as financially robust as the company claimed. 

BEIJING — Wu Xiaohui, the Chinese tycoon who was in failed talks with President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to buy into a skyscraper project in Manhattan, is fighting allegations of financial chicanery and has threatened to sue a Chinese magazine that examined his company’s labyrinthine funding.
The Anbang Insurance Group, which Mr. Wu controls as president and chief executive, said on Sunday that it would take legal action against Caixin Media and its editor in chief, Hu Shuli, after Caixin Weekly magazine questioned whether Anbang was as financially robust as the company claimed.
“Anbang’s shareholder structure is like a maze,” Caixin said in an article published online on Saturday and in print on Monday. 

It said that Anbang’s meteoric growth and acquisitions raised suspicions of financial sleight of hand, including capital injections coming from companies linked to Mr. Wu.
“The left hand has been helping the right hand to inflate capital,” the article said.
Anbang hit back with its own incendiary accusations. 

Caixin is a widely respected economics weekly, and its findings echoed an extensive report on Anbang by The New York Times last year. 

But Anbang suggested on Sunday that Caixin had published its report after failing to squeeze advertising orders and other contributions from Anbang.

According to Anbang, Caixin falsely claimed that Mr. Wu had married three times and “made a series of smears and slanders against our company’s legitimate business activities.” 

The marriage allegation appeared to refer to a report in Caixin in 2015.
Caixin responded to Anbang’s threat to sue with its own threat of litigation. 

On its website on Monday, Caixin said the suggestion that it took on Anbang out of vengefulness was “an attempt at framing with no basis in facts.”
“We strongly condemn the slander in the Anbang statement and reserve the right to take legal recourse,” Caixin said. 

A director of communications at Caixin, Ma Ling, declined to answer questions and referred to the online statement.
Caixin’s latest report on Anbang has been part of a burst of unwelcome attention for the company and Mr. Wu, which has thrown into doubt his business acumen and his reputation for political invulnerability.
“The level of detail that is provided in the article is, I think, relatively unique for any type of story of a Chinese company in Chinese media,” Christopher Balding, an associate professor at the Peking University HSBC Business School in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, said by telephone.
A lawsuit would pit a company that has recently appeared politically vulnerable against a magazine that has proved skilled at navigating censorship to report on corruption and financial shenanigans in China.
The controversy over Anbang has come while the Chinese Communist Party government under Xi Jinping is seeking stability ahead of a leadership turnover later this year. 

But Xi also vowed in late April to rid China’s banks, insurers and other financial companies of excessive risk. 

Last month, Xiang Junbo, the chief regulator of Chinese insurers, including Anbang, was put under investigation by party anticorruption investigators.
The questions raised by the article, and by the possibility of a lawsuit, may test whether the desire for stability will outweigh the government’s vows to take on nettlesome financial issues.
“Anbang is definitely a little bit more extreme and more aggressive than other Chinese insurance companies,” Mr. Balding said. 

“But at the same time, if you look at the finances of the insurance industry at large, and at individual insurance companies, their revenue and building and things like that were exploding by just astounding rates in the past few years.”

The headquarters of Anbang in Beijing. Its meteoric growth and acquisitions have raised suspicions of financial sleight of hand, Caixin Weekly magazine said.

Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman who fled abroad, has added to the recent jitters in Beijing by publicizing allegations of corruption reaching into the party elite. 

Mr. Guo has also clashed with Caixin.
Mr. Wu’s family and personal ties are at the heart of the growing questions about Anbang, which he co-founded in 2004.
He has been a member by marriage of China’s political and business aristocracy: He married a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, the Communist patriarch who oversaw China’s market reforms in the 1980s. 

Mr. Wu also came close to sealing a partnership with American political royalty through Mr. Kushner, the New York developer who is a son-in-law and adviser of Mr. Trump.
Anbang was in talks with Mr. Kushner’s family company to pay $400 million for a stake in a flagship skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. 

Anbang bought the Waldorf Astoria hotel, a popular venue on the New York social calendar, in 2014 as part of a spree of acquisitions.
But the deal with Mr. Kushner’s company foundered in March, in the wake of growing controversy about a presidential in-law doing business with a Chinese conglomerate with many ties to Beijing’s political elite. 

Mr. Kushner has also become an influential White House adviser to Mr. Trump, including on China policy.
Anbang’s international luster had already dulled after it withdrew an application last year to buy an Iowa insurer, Fidelity & Guaranty Life, and also shelved a $14 billion bid to buy Starwood Hotels and Resorts. 

Before those deals foundered, American investors and regulators raised doubts about Anbang’s opaque ownership and its financial strength.
Now Caixin has laid out similar doubts for its readers. 

The Chinese news media had already raised questions about Anbang’s spending spree, but Caixin stepped into more sensitive territory by examining the group’s ownership and accounts in painstaking detail.
In 18 months from October 2014, Caixin estimated, Anbang had spent $16 billion on overseas acquisitions. 

But Caixin also said Anbang’s successive injections of capital, which have helped finance these deals, appeared to often involve companies linked to Mr. Wu’s relatives and associates, raising the possibility that they were not real injections by outside investors.
Anbang appeared to have “used circular injections of funding to magnify its capital,” the report said.
The Caixin report said those doubts were reinforced by Anbang’s complicated ownership. 

Many of those companies registered under obscure addresses, with little capital registered in their names, and often they were formed in clusters shortly before they bought into Anbang — findings that echo the Times report. 

The names, addresses and other details of dozens of people registered as holding shares suggested that they were Mr. Wu’s relatives and associates.
Until recent days, Anbang was mostly silent about the reports on Mr. Wu and the group’s finances, including internet-born rumors that he had been held as part of a criminal investigation. 

No Chinese officials have said anything to suggest that Mr. Wu was detained or under investigation.
But since late last week the company has fought back. 

Anbang issued a statement on Friday that it had sufficient cash flows; it told a Chinese newspaper that rumors that Mr. Wu was in detention were false; and Mr. Wu gave an interview to another Chinese newspaper, The Beijing News, that also seemed intended to squash the rumors.
Mr. Wu said in the interview that Anbang was especially enthusiastic about Xi’s plan to expand Chinese investment and construction abroad in a much-promoted plan called “One Belt, One Road.” Now investors and political analysts will watch to see whether Xi’s government takes sides in the dispute between Anbang and Caixin.
“Hu Shuli and Caixin have done an amazing job carving out a space for honest and incisive reporting in China’s heavily censored media,” Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies finance and politics in China, said by email. 

“Caixin will need all of its savvy to navigate the Anbang lawsuit though.”

The Chinese Connection

Woman Who Paid Trump $16 Million Cash for Apartment Has Ties to Chinese Military Intelligence
By Ben Mathis-lilley

Donald Trump, the Trump Park Avenue, and Angela Chen.

In late February, Mother Jones broke the news that Donald Trump had sold a $16 million Park Avenue penthouse to a woman named Angela Chen who runs a consulting firm that connects foreign clients with influential people in China. 

It's a shady transaction—the president, who sets America's policy toward China, getting paid millions in cash by a Chinese power broker—and it looks even shadier now that MoJo has documented Chen's work with, and personal ties to, a Chinese intelligence front group. 

Here's the gist:
Angela Chen, in addition to her work as a consultant/broker, chairs the United States wing of a nonprofit cultural-exchange group called the China Arts Foundation.
The China Arts Foundation was founded by a woman named Deng Rong. 

Deng Rong's father, Deng Xiaoping, was a contemporary of Mao's who succeeded him as the leader of China. 

Deng Rong is also a vice president of an outreach group called the China Association for International Friendly Contacts, or CAIFC, that has co-hosted events with the China Arts Foundation.
The China Association for International Friendly Contacts is widely considered to be a propaganda/intelligence wing of the Chinese army. 

In fact, individuals in both the Republican National Committee and the State Department have raised concerns about the group's financial overtures to former U.S. officials—the latter under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when Bill Clinton was considering giving a paid speech at an event co-sponsored by the CAIFC and Angela Chen's China Arts Foundation. (He apparently decided not to make the speech.)
So, Donald Trump just took $16 million cash from a woman with close ties to a foreign intelligence group that both Republicans and Democrats have suggested is involved in the inappropriate purchase of U.S. influence.