BEIJING — One man is completing his ascent to the pinnacle of power. The other is in the midst of a searing public humiliation.
Xi Jinping, China’s new Communist Party secretary, will add the title of president at the end of the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress, which opens Tuesday. The corruption trial of his purged rival, Bo Xilai, is expected shortly after.
Even as their fates have diverged sharply, the stories of their famous and powerful families have dominated Chinese political chatter for the last year. They have focused scrutiny on the country’s “princelings,” the sons and daughters of party or government officials, fostering a potent form of resentment in Chinese society.
Including Xi, six of the seven men tapped in November for the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest ruling body in the Communist Party and thus China, are the sons of such officials.
The phenomenon is not confined to China. The close relatives of past leaders have risen to the top in Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Singapore and both Koreas. But the phenomenon is more jarring in a communist country, where equal opportunity is the bedrock of the ruling ideology.
The fact that there are no free elections leaves the party elders vulnerable to accusations that they have merely perpetuated China’s dynastic traditions by handing down power within a “red nobility.” The privileges of birth extend to every sector of the economy, be it oil, electric power, insurance or even diamonds.
“It isn’t so much corruption as a system of official privilege,” said Ding Xueliang, a professor of sociology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Originally from the mainland, Ding recalls that when he worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought, many of his colleagues were children of officials who either changed their names or kept quiet about their connections. “After several months, you would learn, oh, her father was X, Y or Z.”
