China: A New World Order

He's a leader like no other,

commander of a formidable military,

president of a rising superpower.

This series tells the story

of Chinese President Xi Jinping's six-year rule.

He heads an economy that is now crucial to all of us.

Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.

China was clearly going to be the great source of growth

in the global economy, and we want a part of that.

For years, world leaders have sought to work with him

to solve some of the most pressing issues of our time.

When we work together,

it's good for the United States, it's good for China,

and it is good for the world.

But in the West, there's growing anxiety about how President Xi's

China is extending its power.

Now, media reports have suggested that the Chinese Communist Party

has been working covertly to interfere with the decisions

of elected representatives.

I think Australia is, in many ways, the canary in the coal mine.

We're exposing the faces and names behind the keyboards in Shanghai

used to steal from American businesses.

Inside China, his Communist government

has become increasingly intolerant of criticism and dissent.

Evidence is now emerging of monstrous crimes against humanity.

It's a message to the people.

We have power to finish you. We have power.

And in Hong Kong, he's now facing

the biggest-ever challenge to his authority.

We don't want Hong Kong to become China. We want our freedom.

Xi Jinping has transformed his country.

He could be president for the rest of his life.

So, what does that mean for China and the rest of the world?

Xi Jinping has taken China down a much more assertive route

and that, of course, is making the rest of the world wonder

what's in store.

If we don't speak out, if we don't condemn China

for that kind of behaviour, nobody else will.

The result of the vote is...

..the Games of the XXIX Olympiad in 2008

are awarded to the city of Beijing.

SHOUTING

Beijing! Welcome to Beijing!

Thank you! Thank you!

In 2001, after decades of isolation, the world's largest

communist country won the right to host the world's greatest games.

The Beijing Olympics was essentially the coming-out party for China.

That was the marker to show that China

really is now modern and rich and powerful.

The man put in charge was little-known in the West.

Xi Jinping was in the running to be China's next president.

Now, if the Beijing Olympics were to be a failure,

a spectacular embarrassment to the party state,

then it could raise the question

whether Xi Jinping was the right person to be the leader of China.

APPLAUSE

These are the Games where nothing is being left to chance,

where fortunes have been spent on chasing perfection.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The stadium has erupted,

there's no other word for it,

and there are thousands upon thousands of red flags being waved

right up to the upper levels of this vast Bird's Nest.

CHEERING

A spectacular jet of flames lighting the torch tower -

that sight tells us that the Games of the XXIX Olympiad are open.

The Beijing Olympics was a tremendous success

as far as the Chinese government was concerned.

It projected China's image in the way that the party wanted.

Xi Jinping became the head of China's ruling Communist Party,

and, in 2013, he got the job he dreamed of.

Xi Jinping took the stage.

China's new president spoke of his Chinese dream.

The Chinese people were very excited because President Xi presented

to the country a strong, confident

man with vision about where China's going.

CAR HORNS HONK

President Xi took charge of an economy

that had grown faster than any other in history.

But, as the economy had boomed,

so had something else that Xi refused to tolerate.

Corruption in the Communist Party.

Yuan Dong was a securities trader in Beijing.

In 2001 to 2012, China's economy quadrupled,

so incredible rates of growth throughout those years,

and so I think Xi Jinping knew that this kind of enrichment

was also a sea of temptation,

and that party officials were losing sight of the fact

that they were part of a political organisation,

and started to believe that they were really businessmen.

If President Xi didn't fix the corruption issues,

there would have been no legitimacy

of the Communist Party going forward.

That was how important it was.

President Xi launched a crackdown.

By the end of 2013, more than 30,000 party officials were investigated

and punished for violating what's called the Eight Provisions

to ban extravagance and formalism.

The campaign was hugely popular.

But Dong thought the party should go further.

He joined a campaign group - the New Citizens' Movement.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

What Dong didn't know is that,

months earlier, journalists at Bloomberg in Beijing

had begun asking questions about Xi's family wealth.

We started investigating Xi's family in May 2012.

We thought that China's leaders need to be scrutinised.

Chinese reporters cannot write stories like this

because the Chinese media is very much controlled by the state.

And we found laid out in a report -

I think it was on page 61 -

all these assets owned by Xi Jinping's sister and brother-in-law,

and from there, we just built out that story.

It took weeks of painstaking work.

Some assets appeared to have been carefully hidden.

Powerful influential people will put the names of their holdings

in obscure people that are only marginally related to them.

This allows them to, you know, keep their distance from it.

They traced no assets to Xi personally, and found no evidence

he had intervened to advance his relatives' business transactions.

While we didn't find any assets for his immediate family,

we did find a lot of assets from his older sister, another sister,

and their husbands and their kids as well.

They found evidence that Xi's family had assets

worth more than $380 million.

A lot of these assets had the markings of assets

that were acquired through family influence.

Real estate, stakes in state-connected companies.

It quickly became obvious that, um,

this was going to be very serious.

Within minutes of publishing the story, Bloomberg's website

was blocked in China, and has never been opened again.

The party sent a very clear message.

"You are not to write about these stories.

"These stories are off limits."

The Chinese people saying this is very, very much politically biased

will have some other senior party member,

leaders or former leaders,

who have direct involvement into corruption.

Why Bloomberg or some Western medias do not expose those,

but why just focus on Xi Jinping?

In a police cell in Beijing, anti-corruption protester Yuan Dong

knew nothing about the Bloomberg investigation.

More than a dozen members of the New Citizens' Movement were arrested.

For some in the West, it was the first clear indication

of how President Xi was going to rule China.

This was a group of people who were

conducting very small-scale peaceful activism,

and literally were saying the same things on the streets

that party leaders were saying in closed-door meetings.

That was the moment when we knew that Xi Jinping

was going to be bad news for human rights.

CHEERING

But inside China, President Xi was more popular than ever.

The economy was doing well,

and Xi Jinping's leadership was riding high domestically.

If the Communist Party were to have genuine

free and open elections,

I would have very little doubt that Xi Jinping

would have been elected with a landslide.

The vehicle turns onto the pavement,

knocks down and kills two,

swerves through the crowd, before crashing in Tiananmen Square.

Then came Xi's first crisis as president -

a terror attack in the heart of Beijing

that left five dead and 38 injured.

To have the burning vehicle under that famous picture of Chairman Mao,

the flag of jihad flying in this square,

is really a failure of massive proportions

from Beijing's perspective.

But these weren't foreign jihadis.

They came from a province 1,500 miles away

in the far west of China.

Xinjiang is not a normal province in China.

Xinjiang is populated by the Uighurs,

but there are also other ethnic groups in there as well.

They are not Han Chinese, and they are Muslim,

so they are quite different.

A growing Han Chinese presence in Xinjiang, part of a government

drive to develop the region, had provoked separatist anger.

For years, there'd been sporadic violence.

A riot erupts. Protesters, mostly from the Muslim Uighur minority,

tore apart buses and cars with their bare hands.

Then they turned on local Han Chinese.

Few could believe the anger and violence directed towards them.

SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE

Xinjiang's Uighurs say they've been colonised by the Chinese.

Many want to separate from China.

Where other leaders had failed,

President Xi was determined to succeed.

His first visit to Xinjiang was a show of strength.

A clear message to the Uighurs they were part of China.

SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE

But Meripet wouldn't be able to ignore Xi Jinping for long.

On the final day of his visit,

there was another attack targeting Han Chinese.

Security forces moved quickly

to lock down what is a major railway station.

Attackers set off explosives,

and then slashed people with knives at a station exit.