IT IS BETTER TO GET RICH:

Four years after Zeng Wei's purchase - which remains the most egregious confirmed example of Communist Party princelings flaunting their wealth - China's leaders are again grappling with the predicament of being unable or unwilling to control the privileges that flow towards their relatives. The reformist advocacy of the Premier, Wen Jiabao, has long been discounted because of his wife and son's aggressive use of family status to pursue private business opportunities. And now the purged Politburo member Bo Xilai also stands exposed to allegations of great hypocrisy, as foreign journalists pore over his family's financial dealings.

While Bo Xilai was reviving Maoist nostalgia on his official's salary of about $US1600 per month, in a country where per capita income is ranked 121st in the world, his son was renting a presidential-style suite at Oxford and driving a Porsche in the United States. Bo Xilai's elder brother adopted an alias to control $US10 million worth of shares at the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of a state-owned bank. Two sisters of Bo's wife control business interests worth $US126 million, according to what a Bloomberg investigation could identify. And his wife, Gu Kailai, is accused of murdering an English friend, Neil Heywood, after they fell out over money.

Zeng Qinghong, Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are all immensely capable individuals, engaging and at ease in any company. Zeng and Bo, who were born into the heart of the communist aristocracy, are far more interested in accumulating personal power and defending the regime than acquiring the trappings of personal wealth. In today's China, however, where ''politics is in command'' and capital comes at the cost of a future favour for those who have the right connections, even simple-living and apparently idealistic leaders have found it difficult to deny their families access to the power and largesse that naturally flows their way.

Of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, at least six have children who have profited handsomely from their family status. Since the tragedy of Tiananmen, leaders have collectively failed to find a way of limiting each other's family privileges without fracturing solidarity. It is becoming a regime-threatening vulnerability. [...]

The blurring of state and private interests that took place with the early princelings in the 1980s looks trifling compared with the melding of politics and business today.

Some of China's most respected public intellectuals are warning society and economy are being held hostage to the wealth-maximising requirements of the political elite.

Such warnings are being echoed privately in business circles, too, where entrepreneurs are enthralled by the prospects of short-term profits but increasingly uncertain about their personal or financial security.

The private wealth of the party's princelings is usually well concealed, including through the use of multiple identities. But they provide bridges between politics and the market. Many are joining or establishing investment vehicles and inserted themselves as agents to lubricate or clog the arteries of private sector wealth. Stock exchanges double as vehicles for converting family political capital into cash, which can be re-converted into political power. State-owned enterprises can allocate massive contracts in their favour and entrepreneurs split their profits with them in exchange for regulatory protection.

In investment banking and private equity circles, the best known princeling entrepreneurs are Winston Wen, son of the Premier, Wen Jiabao; Li Tong, daughter of the propaganda chief; and Wilson Feng, whose father-in-law heads the National People's Congress and has overall responsibility for state-owned enterprises. Further from the relative transparency of stockmarket transactions, however, other children of China's top nine leaders are said to be aggressively pursuing opportunities, according to Chinese business people who have encountered them.

They include Jia Jianguo, son of the head of the party's ''united front'' work (involved in one of Beijing's most controversial developments, at Dongzhimen railway station); He Jintao, son of the party's anti-corruption chief and former Organisation Department head (facilitated a complicated restructuring of the Guangdong Investment Trust and Investment Corporation, which left creditors frustrated); and Zhou Bin, son of oil tsar and security chief Zhou Yongkang (contracting with China's big oil companies).

The business operations of all six princelings relate to the portfolios of their fathers (or father-in-law, in the case of Wu Bangguo).

China's army of censors and propaganda officials ensure the private dealings of cadre children never make it into mainstream Chinese media. Nevertheless, even China's official mouthpieces acknowledge the public's growing discontent when it suits them, as they did shortly after the purge of Bo Xilai. ''The spouses and children of some cadres have taken advantage of their power to seek personal gains, disregarding the law, thus stirring public outcry,'' said Xinhua on April 14.

The hypocrisy of Communist Party leaders using socialist ideals to justify their dictatorship, while allowing their children to make millions, is not just alienating ordinary citizens. It is splitting princelings themselves right down the middle. Many who purport to uphold egalitarian ideals believe the recent crop of leaders have betrayed and may yet destroy the Communist Party their parents spilled their blood for. These descendants of revolutionary leaders reject the term ''princelings'' for its aristocratic connotations, and draw a boundary between themselves and younger children of ''mere bureaucrats'', such as those listed above.

''In recent years we've heard about the second generation bureaucrats (guanerdai) but we are not, we are the red successors (hongerdai),'' says Hu Muying, the daughter of Mao's long-time speech writer, Hu Qiaomu, who runs a large ''red successor'' organisation. ''My father's generation worked for the interest of the people, but officials today work to become officials, not serving the people but striving for their own power and interests while their children make huge profits from their parents' power.''

The Communist Party's ''red successors'' speak as if they would do anything to rid the nation of corruption. But their determination stops at the thresholds of the family home. 

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