China Blocks Bloomberg News
Because of revealing some sensitive news, China blocked access to Bloomberg and Businessweek sites. The business and financial news agency published a report regarding the wealth of Xi Jinping, the country’s next president, and his family.
Currently, Xi Jinping is the China’s vice president and a strong candidate for the country’s next president.
The report indicates about the multimillion-dollar assets of some of the Vice President’s relatives. According to report, the relatives hold interests that include investments in different firms amounted to $376 million, an 18% indirect stake in a rare-earths company with $1.73 billion in assets and $20 million investment in a tech company.
“As Xi climbed the Communist Party ranks, his extended family expanded their business interests to include minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment, according to public documents compiled by Bloomberg,” said the story.
A representative from Bloomberg said that the company believed the Bloomberg site has been blocked in China because of a story that it revealed on Friday. He did not elaborate much about it.
Bloomberg mentioned in the report that no evidence was found against Xi, his wife, or their daughter, and there was no indication of any unlawful activity by Xi or his relatives.
In spite of this fact, Chinese authorities decided to block access to Bloomberg’s main website which clearly depicts the government’s policy to such exposure of wealth belonging to people linked to the country’s main leaders amid the growing gap between rich and poor and rampant official corruption.
According to a political scientist at University of Chicago center in Beijing, the government has always been very sensitive on the corruption issues and is very much conscious about how these types of reports may affect the public opinion.
This is not the first event that Government of China blocked access to a foreign website. The country strongly monitors all internet content that comes to its bandwidth, and several other western companies failed to penetrate what is called as the Great Firewall of China.
