Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility

Lying in a Beijing military hospital in 1990, General Wang Zhen told a visitor he felt betrayed. Decades after he risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, the ideals he held as one of Communist China’s founding fathers were being undermined by the capitalist ways of his children -- business leaders in finance, aviation and computers.

“Turtle eggs,” he said to the visiting well-wisher, using a slang term for bastards. “I don’t acknowledge them as my sons.”

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Billionaire Princelings Ruin a Chinese Vision

This week’s Bloomberg News expose on the so-called Eight Immortals is a case in point. Building on a June article tracing the accumulated wealth of the family of Xi Jinping, China’s next president, it described the vast fortunes being amassed by the offspring of the founding fathers who were instrumental in Mao Zedong’s rise to power in 1949. Mao changed the world by meeting U.S. President Richard Nixon, and Immortals such as Deng Xiaoping engineered the economic boom that has unfolded since then.

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China’s anti-corruption drive triggers frantic property dump among officials

Real estate agents in provinces such as Guangdong and Jiangsu have been frantically trying to push deals for a torrent of second-hand flats suddenly released on the market – many of which belong to government officials, the Oriental Morning Post reported on Monday.