His conglomerate, Wanda Group, is best known in China for its signature Wanda Plazas, massive shopping complexes with cinemas, office towers, hotels and apartments. Since building the first one in the northeastern city of Changchun in 2002, he has opened more than 100 of them in at least 70 other Chinese cities, generating the revenue that now finances his ambitions abroad.
But there is an aspect of his relationship with the authorities that Mr. Wang never raises in interviews and that has gone unreported in the many accounts of his success published in China and abroad: Relatives of some of the nation's most powerful politicians and their business associates own significant stakes in his company.
An extensive review of corporate records filed with the government identified several such investments made from 2007 to 2011, when Wanda was privately held and rarely sold shares to outsiders.
[..I]dentifying Ms. Yang and other investors in Mr. Wang's real estate and entertainment empire was a complicated task. While the Chinese government has improved access to business records in recent years, shareholders often cloak their investments through layers of holding companies. And even when a name is disclosed, it can be meaningless without additional identifying information.
Ms. Yang, who acquired the stake in Wanda a few weeks after her 26th birthday in 2008, was included on a list of shareholders in documents filed by Dalian Wanda with the State Administration of Industry and Commerce. But her name is a common one, used by both men and women. There are about 42.7 million people in China with the surname Yang, more than the population of California.
It was only after locating a relative in her home village of Shigezhuang in the northern province of Hebei that her relationship with a senior Communist Party official became clear. She is the niece of Wang Zhaoguo, a member of the ruling Politburo and the vice chairman of the Chinese legislature from 2003 to 2013, according to Wang Zhao'an, a tanned and weathered cousin of the Chinese leader who serves as the village's party chief.
In 2012, Forsythe was part of a reporting team at Bloomberg that published an investigative report into the family wealth of President Xi Jinping. Bloomberg's website was blocked in China after the report's publication. For the Columbia Journalism Review, Howard French retraced the events leading up to the cancellation of the Wang Jianlin report and the dismissal of Forsythe.
Read more about Wang Jianlin via CDT, including a recent incident in which Wang used his pride in Chinese culture to defend crude comments from his son.