Who crossed the red line here? We’d argue that it was some of your colleagues and their kids in opting for industrial-scale greed — combined with the new technology to expose it. That technology is not going away, so the excesses and corruption better. The Times and Bloomberg did your leadership a huge service in exposing this. It was a warning heart attack. The No. 1 cause of death of Chinese regimes in history is greed and corruption.

If you throw all our correspondents out of China, I can tell you exactly what will happen: They will set up offices in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea and do nothing other than comb through financial records from afar, without the balancing alternative to travel in China, meet and hear from Chinese people face to face, and write with nuance about other issues. Also, it will force us to evict your journalists. We will not let you enjoy our openness while you blind us.

President Xi, you are right that exposure of huge, high-level asset grabs poses an existential threat to your party’s rule. But you’re wrong if you blame those exposing these excesses rather than those perpetrating them.

When China was taking off in the 1980s and 1990s, it could get away with maintaining open markets with a closed political system. I don’t believe that will be possible in this century, certainly not to the degree of the past. Over the last 10 years, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. The net effect is that in more and more countries — including China — wealth is getting concentrated at the top, but, at the same time, more power to speak and organize is being distributed at the bottom and more power to see — transparency — is being injected everywhere.

CHINA has more than 300 million micro-bloggers on your Twitter equivalent, Weibo, half of China is now on the Internet and China has 1 billion cellphones in use, many with cameras. There is no way in such a world that the focus on corruption and financial excesses can just stay localized. See dictionary for: Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square and Edward Snowden. They are all stories of what happens when wealth gets concentrated at the top, power gets distributed at the bottom and transparency gets injected everywhere.

Beijing ought to be concerned about what the general public will do if the secretive, back-room dealing that has enriched some elites — which every day more Chinese can see and discuss among themselves — remains a forbidden topic for public discussion and reform, and therefore mass protest becomes the only option to address it.

President Xi, for your sake and the sake of stability in China, please don’t make the mistake of blaming the messengers. The Great Chinese Firewall you need to construct can’t be against the truth. It has to be against corruption.

Sincerely yours,

A Friend of China.