含有中共高层250万份离岸金融秘密文件的硬盘硬盘来了

The highlights of "Chinaleaks"

Reports by ICIJ and its partners revealing the secretive offshore holdings of China’s political and financial elite have generated a global wave of media coverage and an aggressive censorship campaign by Chinese authorities.

Last week, China Digital Times, a website that monitors censorship instructions, published details of a government directive to Chinese websites ordering that content related to China Leaks must
be “deleted without exception,” and warning them to block user IDs of
“those with an evil influence.” 

Yet only days after the government scrambled to censor the story, Chinese tax commissioner Wang Jun vowed that China would step up its participation in international efforts to
combat tax evasion and crack down on tax fraud within the nation. 

The moves came in response to exposés published by ICIJ and more than
a dozen media partners around the world, who probed various aspects of
China’s hidden offshore wealth. A selection of front page stories from
across the globe can be viewed here. These are some of the highlights:

• 
          In Switzerland, Le Matin examined how Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse helped relatives of
  China’s elite establish offshore holdings. Their clients included Wen
  Yunsong, also known as Winston Wen, the son of former Premier Wen
  Jiabao. You can read the stories here (in French, German and Spanish).
  

• 
         In France, correspondents from Le Monde travelled to the British Virgin Islands, the home of most of the
  offshore companies revealed in the reports. During a visit to a
  high-school class on finance, students were taught that the BVI had been
  caught unprepared by a powerful recent hurricane that recently battered its shores: the hurricane known as ICIJ.
  

• 
        In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post published a detailed exposé of  undeclared offshore accounts by two members of the Hong Kong government’s Commission on Poverty.
  

• 
         In Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung probed the role of powerful banks including Deutsche Bank, UBS and Credit
  Suisse in helping Chinese elites set up offshore accounts. (Here’s a story about the reports in English.) Süddeutsche also
  produced a PDF version of their story in Chinese that could be
  distributed in China once the internet was blocked, and reported more
  than 7,600 downloads of the document in the first few days.
  

• 
        In Southeast Asia, ICIJ partners in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines all published China Leaks exposés. CommonWealth Magazine in Taiwan revealed that more than a dozen billionaire owners of some of Taiwan’s largest
  corporations had offshore holdings. The Korea Center for Investigative
  Journalism, whose Offshore Leaks reporting earlier this year prompted
  the family of former dictator Chun Doo-Hwan to pay more than $150
  million in fines for looting assets, published print and television reports on the revelations (in Korean).
  

• 
      In the UK and the U.S., The Guardian published reports on China Leaks and covered the sweeping censorship campaign by the Chinese government
  that followed. A propaganda directive by Chinese authorities ordered
  websites and services in China to “immediately find and remove the foreign media report “China’s Secret Offshore Tax Havens” and that “related images and accusatory comments about leaders and the
  system [of government] must be deleted without exception.”  The
  directive also called on the sites to block the user IDs of “those with
  an evil influence.”
  

• 
       In Spain, El País examined how the Chinese elite’s offshore holdings have contributed to growing inequality in the nominally Communist country. China’s Gini coefficient, a leading
  measure of economic inequality, recently surpassed that of Europe and
  the United States. The stories were part of 19 pages in print, including
  consecutive front page stories, that El Pais devoted to China Leaks.
  

In addition to reports by ICIJ’s partners, the story was picked up by
leading media outlets around the world. The international reports and
responses generated by China Leaks include:

• 
        A lengthy report in the New York Times that detailed ICIJ’s findings. ICIJ partnered with the Times on a recent Offshore Leaks story that examined offshore trusts in the Cook Islands used to stash wealth beyond the reach of United States law.
  

• 
       The New Yorker published an examination of ICIJ’s reporting, and noted that its collaborative approach posed a
  broad challenge to the Chinese government’s efforts to control the
  foreign press.
  

• 
        The Agence France-Press published a story about ICIJ in the wake of Chinaleaks that called the report a “new coup” for the
  organization. The story described ICIJ as “a powerful strike force” for
  international investigative journalism.
  

• 
         Monitoring
  of China’s popular social network Sina Weibo showed that ICIJ’s
  interactive graphic showing Chinese princelings with offshore holdings
  was a popular image among users before it was targeted by censors. Once
  authorities began targeting the report, the acronym “ICIJ” was promptly
  censored from Weibo.
  

• 
      Additional media outlets that have covered the China Leaks revelations include the Associated Press, Fox News, the Financial Times, CNN, Agence France‑Presse, MSNBC and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, among numerous others.
  

A roundup of official reactions to the overall Offshore Leaks project can be seen here.