Calum MacLeod

USA TODAY

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reports that leaders%27 relatives use offshore tax havens

Xi Jinping has promised to crack down on corruption%2C but punishes critics

Police harass journalists%2C supporters near Beijing courthouse

BEIJING – A leading human rights advocate went on trial Wednesday for his role in anti-corruption protests that urged Chinese officials to disclose their assets.

The same day, an investigation of millions of leaked documents revealed that relatives of China's top leaders use offshore tax havens to conceal their wealth.

The two events illustrate that China's leader Xi Jinping is intent on crushing critics who help expose a major flaw in the Communist Party system, even at the risk of being accused by the Chinese public of silencing whistleblowers who expose crimes he vows to stop.

Xi, who also heads the party, has promised to crack down hard on China's endemic corruption, which is one of the people's major complaints.

But by punishing activists and ordinary civilians who call for action against corruption, analyst say he may bring about what the unelected regime fears most -- unrest among the public.

The swelling wealth, at home and abroad, of China's elites "may not be strictly illegal," but it is often tied to "conflict of interest and covert use of government power," said Minxin Pei, a political scientist at California's Claremont McKenna College, in the report put out by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

"If there is real transparency, then the Chinese people will have a much better idea of how corrupt the system is [and] how much wealth has been amassed by government officials through illegal means."

The consortium is a network of reporters in and outside China who collaborate on stories.

The months-long investigation by the ICIJ, a Washington-based group, includes work by journalists inside China whose identities are being hidden for their own safety. Reports of the probe will likely be heavily blocked in China to prevent the spread of potentially embarrassing information. The ICIJ website was blocked Wednesday.

Based on 2.5 million leaked confidential documents, the ICIJ report exposes close relatives of China's top leaders, who have held "secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist elite's wealth," it said. Those havens include the British Virgin Islands and "other offshore centers usually associated with hidden wealth."

Xi Jinping's brother-in-law, and the son and son-in-law of former premier Wen Jiabao, are among those who have hidden their riches abroad. The ICIJ cited nearly 22,000 offshore clients from mainland China and Hong Kong, and will release more details Thursday.

Relatives of at least five current or former members of the Party's Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, have incorporated companies in the British Virgin Islands or Cook Islands, according to ICIJ. Others include some of China's richest citizens and most prominent business people.

China's elites are "aggressively using offshore havens to hold assets, list companies in the world's stock exchanges, buy and sell real estate and conduct their business away from Beijing's red tape and capital controls," said the ICIJ.

Wednesday's trial of Xu Zhiyong is the first of a series this week targeting nine activists who tried to expose corruption and promote government transparency.

Legal scholar Xu, 40, founded the New Citizens' Movement, a social initiative and loose network of activists. He is charged with "assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place" for the meeting he held with like-minded individuals in Beijing.

Acquittals remain rare in China. The Communist Party controls the courts and usually forbids defendants from offering a full defense. Xu's lawyer anticipates that his client will get a five-year prison sentence.

Several supporters of Xu and his movement gathered near the Beijing courthouse where his closed-door trial began Wednesday. They unfurled a banner calling on officials to reveal their wealth and were quickly harassed by uniformed and plainclothes police as were several foreign journalists including television reporters from CNN and the BBC.

While international audiences can watch their coverage, and read here and elsewhere about Xu's trial, Chinese authorities effectively prevent domestic coverage in their state-run media. Censors even blacked out the BBC broadcast, which reaches a small audience in China.