served in the Royal Tank Regiment, graduated from
Oxford and worked as a journalist, then became a
Labour member of parliament before quitting
politics for academia, where he was the doyen of
scholars of modern Chinese history at Harvard.
Down the decades MacFarquhar astutely balanced
his dealings with the People’s Republic. He welcomed
a Tiananmen Square dissident leader, Wang Dan, to
Harvard, leading Wang to call him “my closest
teacher”. But he commanded such respect in China,
he was able to visit the country and even speak about
the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy at academic forums.
I met MacFarquhar in Hong Kong in 2015 and
asked him about Mingze, whom he recalled as
“studious and attentive, not venturing much in class
but taking copious notes”. She hid her personal
interest in the outcome of the power struggles her
father was engaged in at home from the students
around her in the lecture hall, but MacFarquhar knew
who she was — and she knew that he knew. While she
enjoyed the peace of academia, they both knew that
the stakes were infinite for her father as he fought for
power with Bo Xilai and others. He won the top jobs
between autumn 2012 and spring 2013. MacFarquhar
felt that on occasion Mingze betrayed her wish to
escape the gilded cage awaiting her in Beijing.
On graduation in 2014 Mingze returned to China,
making her friends aware that she did so with a heavy
heart. By then her father reigned supreme and was
arresting and jailing his rivals on the pretext of a
campaign against corruption — a ruse as ancient in
Chinese politics as imperial rule itself.
Mingze was seen accompanying her parents in
2015 on a visit to the remote village where Xi’s career
began. After that she vanished. Word filtered out that
she was bored and restless. Then she appears to have
persuaded her father that her path lay overseas.
Perhaps he could not refuse her, since so many of
China’s rulers like to have their children educated at
western universities while they stifle academicfreedom at home. At the time of writing she was back
at Harvard studying for a postgraduate degree.
Anyone who feels understandable sympathy for
such a life might also want to consider the plight of a
young man, Niu Tengyu, who was sentenced to 14
years in prison last December for the alleged crime of
posting a photo of Mingze on a Chinese website (it
has since vanished). His mother says that Niu, 22,
was beaten and tortured by his interrogators and that
he was made “the fall guy” for other web users. In
China the families of the mighty are off limits, partly
because of the political risk they may create.XI’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
If Xi had an Achilles’ heel during his power struggles
before becoming supreme leader, it could have been
the propensity of his relatives for making money and
for foreign travel. The evidence of their wealth was
revealed in a 2012 investigation by the Bloomberg
news service. It found that Xi’s extended family held
investments worth $376 million across a range of
business interests including minerals, property and
mobile phone equipment. Among their assets was a
hillside villa in Hong Kong overlooking the sea, worth
an estimated $31 million but left empty for years with
the doorbell dangling from its wires. As China’s
wealth gap was widening amid popular anger about
corruption, the revelations could have been politically
damaging. But neither Xi nor his wife could be tied to
the money. Most of the wealth belonged to his elder
sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, her husband and their daughter;
the rest was held by a web of distant relations. The
Bloomberg investigators found that the investments
were obscured by multiple holding companies,
government restrictions on access to corporate
documents and online censorship. Their ownership
was traced by regulatory filings, sometimes using
different names, identity cards and addresses.
It turned out that as good Marxist-Leninists, the Xi
GETTY IMAGES dynasty had prepared for such a contradiction.
“The body
politic of
China is
terminally
sick, and
only a
political
transplant
can save
it. Xi’s
enemies
know this,
but he
does not”
China was responsible
for more than half of the
world’s coal consumption
in 2020. Along with India
at Cop26 it watered
down a commitment
to ending coal use and
fossil fuel subsidiesThe Sunday Times Magazine • 31