[ben_w]

From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".

That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.

[victorbjorklund]

You don’t think president Xi:s family and friends cheated? Of course they have. Yet they don’t go to prison.

[ben_w]

I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.

Example of cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officials_implicated_by_the_an...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre...

Nevertheless, it would be interesting if someone could, you know, prove, and not merely allege, that Xi Jinping's family or friends cheated.

[ctchocula]

https://panamapapers.org/case-study-china

[ben_w]

Yup, that's the kind of thing I have in mind.

Even with the sub-heading "It's legal, and that's the problem."*, and even though this kind of cheating is broader than this reply chain from "There is no such thing as too big to fail in China", this is absolutely within bounds for what I asked for :)

* and the not-proof-read AI generated image, that never helps…

[victorbjorklund]

so you think that Xi:s family just lives on his official salary and he hasn't made any money more than that?

[ben_w]

That's not what I said.

There's ways to invest in stocks that are not cheating, for example.

Or, you know, they might have done what I myself am doing right now and be landlords. That's not cheating. Or at least, I don't think it is, I don't know what the Chinese government considers it to be, what with communism and all.

For this context: cheating is in the sense of "large bets where the cost of failure will be paid by the state and yet they get to keep the profits in the event of success": I think that if any of them have made such bets, those bets have paid off. I think that if any such bet had been made and failed, it would have been noticed by people outside China.

As I said:

  From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".

Key parts: "from the outside", and "appears".

In the event they make a bet and it fails and we spot it, that specific chain is what would make it cease to "appear" to be so "from the outside".