Flight of the naked mandarins

For some upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party life in the West holds greater allure but it takes money to settle in the style to which they desire to become accustomed. Mark Gao , in Beijing, explores the sources and conduits of these officials’ overseas wealth.

Costly exit

A less than flattering catch-call has attached lately to China’s Communist Party elite: ‘Luoguan’, literally “naked officials”, refers to officials whose spouses and children have migrated to another country, spending Chinese money abroad, some of it dirty or transferred illicitly. The phrase was coined in 2008 by Zhou Feng’an, a senior Communist Party official in southerly Jiangsu province, to describe Pang Jiayu, a corrupt fellow senior cadre of the party. A leading official in coal-rich Shaanxi province, Pang was given 12 years in jail for taking bribes. Pang was sentenced in 2008, yet his wife and child had already emigrated - to Canada in 2002.