[But the kin of senior party officials are a special case: They rarely attend state schools but congregate instead at top-tier — and very expensive — private colleges, a stark rejection of the egalitarian ideals that brought the Communist Party to power in 1949. Of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the supreme decision-making body of a Communist Party steeped in anti-American rhetoric, at least five have children or grandchildren who have studied or are studying in the United States .]
By Andrew Higgins and Maureen Fan
CAMBRIDGE ,
Mass. — When scholars gathered at Harvard last
month to discuss the political tumult convulsing China ’s ruling Communist Party, a demure female
undergraduate with a direct stake in the outcome was listening intently from
the top row of the lecture hall. She was the daughter of Xi Jinping, China ’s vice president and heir apparent for
the party’s top job.
Xi’s daughter, Xi Mingze,
enrolled at Harvard University in 2010, under what people who know her
there say was a fake name, joining a long line of Chinese “princelings,” as the
offspring of senior party officials are known, who have come to the United States to study.
In some ways, the rush to U.S. campuses by the party’s “red nobility”
simply reflects China ’s national infatuation with American
education. China has more students
at U.S. colleges than in any
other foreign country. They numbered 157,558 in the 2010-11 academic year,
according to data compiled by the Institute of International Education — up nearly fourfold in 15 years.
But the kin of senior party
officials are a special case: They rarely attend state schools but congregate
instead at top-tier — and very expensive — private colleges, a stark rejection
of the egalitarian ideals that brought the Communist Party to power in 1949. Of
the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the supreme
decision-making body of a Communist Party steeped in anti-American rhetoric, at
least five have children or grandchildren who have studied or are studying in
the United States .
Helping to foster growing perceptions
that the party is corrupt is a big, unanswered question raised by the foreign
studies of its leaders’ children: Who pays their bills? Harvard, which costs
hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and living expenses over four
years, refuses to discuss the funding or admission of individual students.
Grandchildren of two of the
party’s last three top leaders — Zhao Ziyang, who was purged and placed under
house arrest for opposing the military assault on Tiananmen Square protesters
in June 1989, and his successor, Jiang Zemin — studied at Harvard.
The only prominent princeling
to address the question of funding publicly is Bo Guagua, a graduate student at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His father is the now-disgraced former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, who, like Xi Jinping, is the son of an early revolutionary
leader who fought alongside Mao Zedong.
Bo Guagua did not attend the
seminar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, which focused on his family’s
travails. But in a statement sent a few days later to Harvard’s student-run newspaper,
the Crimson, he responded to allegations of ill-
gotten wealth. He said he had never used his family name to make money and,
contrary to media reports, had never driven a Ferrari. Funding for his overseas
studies, he said, came entirely from unspecified “scholarships earned
independently, and my mother’s generosity from the savings she earned from her
years as a successful lawyer and writer.”
His mother, Gu Kailai, is in
detention somewhere in China on suspicion of involvement in the death
of Neil Heywood, a Briton who served as a business adviser to the Bo family.
After what Chinese authorities say was a falling-out over money, Heywood was
found dead, apparently poisoned, in a Chongqing hotel room in November.
Bo Guagua “is very worried
about what might happen to his mother,” said Ezra F. Vogel, a Harvard professor
who said he had received a visit from a “very anxious” Bo last week. Bo’s image
as a wild playboy, Vogel added, is “greatly exaggerated.”
In China ’s “dog-eat-dog” political culture, Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar told the Fairbank Center seminar, the family is both “a
wealth-generating unit” and a “form of general protection.” As a result, he
added, “you have a party that is seen as deeply corrupt.”
Before his ouster, Bo Xilai had
an official annual salary of less than $20,000. But his son attended Harrow
School, an exclusive private academy in London with annual fees of about
$16,000; then Oxford, which, for overseas students, costs more than $25,000 a
year just in tuition; and the Kennedy School, which, according to its own estimates, requires about $70,000 a year to cover
tuition and living expenses.
‘Top of the food chain’
“This is about haves and
have-nots,” said Hong Huang, the stepdaughter of Mao’s foreign minister Qiao
Guanhua and a member of an earlier generation of American-educated princelings.
“China ’s old-boy network . . . is no different from America ’s old-boy network,” said Hong, who went
to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie , N.Y. , and whose mother served as Mao’s English
teacher.
“There is something about
elitism that says if you are born in the right family, you have to go to the
right school to perpetuate the glory of the family. Going to an elite college
is a natural extension of that,” said Hong, now a Beijing-based style guru and
publisher. Among her ventures is iLook, an edgy fashion
and lifestyle magazinethat offers tips on how to enjoy what a 2010 cover
story proclaimed as China ’s “Gilded
Age.”
Noting that the Communist Party
has drifted far from its early ideological moorings, Hong said she sees no
contradiction between the desire for an Ivy League education and the current
principles of the ruling party and its leaders: “What part of China is communist, and what part of Harvard is
against elitist authoritarianism?”
Hong’s stepfather, Qiao, was
purged as foreign minister in 1976 and his ministerial post passed to Mao’s
former interpreter, Huang Hua, whose son, Huang Bin, also went to Harvard. At
the time, China ’s education system lay in ruins, wrecked
by the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and Mao’s vicious campaigns against
intellectuals, who were reviled as the “stinking ninth category.”
Today, Chinese universities
have not only recovered but become so fiercely competitive that getting into
them is difficult even for well-connected princelings. Even so, top American
universities still carry more cachet among many in China ’s political and business elite, in part
because they are so expensive. A degree from Harvard or the equivalent ranks as
“the ultimate status symbol” for China’s elite, said Orville Schell, a Harvard
graduate and director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
in New York.
“There is such a fascination
with brand names” in China that “just as they want to wear Hermes or
Ermenegildo Zegna, they also want to go to Harvard. They think this puts them
at the top of the food chain,” Schell said.
The attraction of a top-brand
university is so strong that some princelings flaunt even tenuous affiliations
with a big-name American college. Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former prime
minister and ex-Politburo member Li Peng, for example, has long boasted that
she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a “visiting
scholar at the Sloan Business School.” MIT says the only record it has of
attendance by a student with Li’s name was enrollment in a “non-degree short
course” open to executives who have “intellectual curiosity” and are ready to
spend $7,500 for just 15 days of classes.
Discipline case
The welfare of princelings
studying abroad can become a matter for the Chinese government.
During his final year at Oxford University in England , Bo Guagua ran into trouble because of
inattention to his studies. When the university initiated a disciplinary
process against him, the Chinese Embassy in London sent a three-person diplomatic delegation
to Oxford to discuss the matter with Bo’s tutor at Balliol College , according to an academic who was
involved in the episode and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be able
to speak candidly. The embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
The embassy trio pleaded on
Bo’s behalf, stressing that education is very important to the Chinese, the
academic said. The tutor replied that Bo should, in that case, learn to study
more and party less. The intervention by Chinese diplomats didn’t help Bo and,
in December 2008, he was “rusticated” for failing to produce academic work of
an adequate standard, an effective suspension that, under Oxford regulations, meant he lost his “right of
access” to all university facilities. Barred from college housing, Bo moved
into a pricey local hotel. He was, however, allowed to take a final examination
in 2010. Despite his banishment from classes, he performed well and received a
degree.
“He was a bright student,” said
the Oxford academic, who knew Bo Guagua at the time.
But “in Oxford , he was suddenly freer than anything he
had experienced before and, like a good many young people in similar circumstances,
it was like taking the cork out of a bottle of champagne.”
Most other princelings have
kept a far lower profile.
On the manicured, sun-drenched
grounds of Stanford University in Silicon Valley , Jasmine Li — whose grandfather, Jia
Qinglin, ranks fourth in the Politburo and has made speeches denouncing
“erroneous” Western ways — blends in seamlessly with fellow American
undergraduates.
Photographs have appeared
online showing her wearing a black-and-white Carolina Herrera gown at a Paris debutante ball in 2010, and she shares
with Bo Guagua a taste for horse riding. As a freshman last year, she rode
with the Stanford Equestrian team.
But her presence on campus is
low-key, like that of Xi’s daughter at Harvard, whom fellow students describe
as studious and discreet. Li rides a shiny red bicycle to and from classes, has
an American roommate and joined a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta. She often
studies after class in the sorority house’s high-ceilinged living room
alongside fellow members.
Reached at her sorority, Li
declined to comment on her time in the United States or her ambitions, saying, in unaccented
English, that she needed to consult first with her family in China .
‘Achilles’ heel for the
party’
The stampede to American
campuses has delivered a propaganda gift to critics of the Communist Party,
which drapes itself in the Chinese flag and regularly denounces those who
question its monopoly on power as traitorous American lackeys. A widespread
perception that members of the party elite exploit their access and clout to
stash their own children and also money overseas “is a big Achilles’ heel for
the party,” said Harvard’s MacFarquhar.
Bitter foes of the ruling party
such as the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong have reveled in spreading
sometimes unfounded rumors about privileged party children. New Tang Dynasty
TV, part of a media empire operated by Falun Gong, reported, for example, that
74.5 percent of the children of current and retired minister-level Chinese
officials have acquired either green cards or U.S. citizenship. The rate
for their grandchildren is 91 percent, said the TV station, citing an anonymous
Chinese blog posting that in turn cited supposed official U.S. statistics. No
government agency has issued any such statistics.
Though of dubious accuracy, the
report stirred a storm of outrage on the Internet, with Twitter-like micro-blogs
denouncing the hypocrisy of the party elite. Most of the comments were quickly
deleted by China ’s army of Internet censors. But a few
survived, with one complaining that officials “curse American imperialism and
capitalism all the time but their wives and children have already emigrated to
the U.S. to be [American] slaves.”
Symbol of excess
Similar fury greeted
photographs that showed Bo Guagua cavorting at parties with Western women at a
time when his father was promoting a neo-Maoist revival in Chongqing and urging the city’s 33 million
residents to reconnect with the austere values of the party’s early years.
Bo, a poster boy for princeling
excess, stopped attending classes this spring and last month moved out of a
serviced apartment building with a uniformed doorman near Harvard Yard. (Rents
there range from $2,300 to $3,000 a month.) People who know him at Harvard say
he had earlier split up with his girlfriend, fellow Harvard student Sabrina
Chen, the granddaughter of Chen Yun, a powerful party baron. Before his death
in 1995, Chen took a hard line against the “infiltration” of Western values
and, along with Bo Guagua’s grandfather, Bo Yibo, pressed for a military
crackdown against student protesters who gathered in Tiananmen Square around a plaster statute inspired by the
Statute of Liberty.
The cook at a fast-food eatery
near his Cambridge apartment building said Bo Guagua used to
come in regularly but didn’t make much of an impression. “He just ordered the
usual stuff, BLTs. Nothing special,” said the cook, who gave his name as
Mustafa.
Staff at Changsho, a Chinese
restaurant, however, remember a more extravagant customer. Late one evening,
for example, Bo came in alone, ordered four dishes and left after barely
touching the food. “He didn’t even ask for a doggie bag,” recalled a restaurant
worker, appalled at the waste.