במודיעין האמריקני בוחנים את ההון של ראשי המשטר הסיני | דעה

China's leaders want to project power. Their hidden wealth could be their biggest weakness. A U.S. intelligence review is examining the fortunes of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and other top officials. What happens if those details come to light? We spoke with retired U.S. Marine Colonel Grant Newsham. He's a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. When it comes to sending a message or hurting China where it hurts, you actually wrote a whole substack piece about this, especially when it comes to hidden wealth, if you will, in China or the wealth of the leaders. The U.S. intel community or IC is investigating the wealth of CCP leader Xi Jinping, the other six standing Politburo members and the full 25-member Politburo. That report is due later this year. How big of a blow would that be when those numbers come out to the leadership of the CCP? What are your suggestions to either the intel community, Congress or even media to cover this? Well, potentially, it would really hurt the Chinese leadership because this is the one thing. It's their obscene wealth derived from by corrupt means that they can't blame on anyone else. They can't say, well, it's the foreigners. It's the Americans who are bullying China. But rather, we're the ones who got the money. No one else did it. And try explaining that to the 600 million plus Chinese who live on $5 a day or less. They may not be very happy about that. And actually, a friend of mine who really knows Chinese corruption, he said that actually may not make people angry so much as it does make them jealous at how successful these guys have been at stealing so much money. But I would suggest that that jealousy actually turns into anger before a certain point is reached. But the key thing here was to get good information and to keep getting it. This is such a vast target that you could probably spend the next five to 10 years, 24 seven, just going after Xi Jinping's wealth the way that it's hidden. So there's plenty of evidence to keep investigators busy for a long time. And now what you have to do is to expose it, not just in one report that gets announced and forgotten in a few days, but you expose it via Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, but every channel you can. So this is widely known in China and worldwide, and you have to keep hammering that. And this potentially could put the Chinese on the back foot in their cognitive warfare efforts against us, and may cause them to, as I say, back off a bit. In all the years I've been following China, the most angry I have seen their leadership is when, in 2012, Bloomberg and New York Times wrote an expose of the wealth of some of the top leaders, including Xi's family, and the Chinese were furious about this. And I've never seen anything like it. And more recently, there was actually a similar report as the current one that's being supposedly written, that was done by the intelligence community and the State Department. And it was ordered in 2003. It came out a year late, and it was really nine pages of gibberish. But when the report was going to be announced, it was going to be written. The Chinese embassy was calling around town in Washington, saying, don't do this. And it gives you a sense of just how sensitive an issue this is. But the key point is, what do you do with it once you get the information? Do you use it to, say, embarrass Xi Jinping, to build a groundswell of jealousy slash anger in China? Are you willing to do that? Or are you afraid of getting Xi Jinping angry, and thus he may not cooperate in another summit meeting? Well, if you're afraid of that, well, you're going to lose, and you're going to squander a really wonderful opportunity to, for once, sort of strike a blow for the good guys. And of course, the Chinese will complain. But all you have to say really is, well, we're just helping you get a handle on capital flight and money laundering that's poured out of China. You complain about corruption all the time. We're just helping you out with it.