U.S. intelligence agencies are preparing a report for Congress that will set out new details about the wealth of China’s Communist Party leaders, including the Party’s general secretary and the country’s president, Xi Jinping. The report was disclosed on June 24 by Bill Gertz, the national security columnist for The Washington Times, who cited the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is due before the end of 2026 and is required under the fiscal 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act, signed into law last December as part of the annual defense bill. “I can confirm ODNI is actively working on the report, as required by the FY26 IAA,” a spokeswoman for the office said.
The report must detail the wealth of Xi Jinping and the Party’s inner circle
The report is meant to expose what U.S. investigators describe as billions of dollars in concealed wealth held by senior Communist Party figures, money they say is routed through intermediaries and held by family members to disguise how rich the leadership is. By law it must name the personal fortunes, financial holdings, and business interests of Xi and the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the small body that rules China as a collective dictatorship. It must also document the hidden wealth of the wider Politburo, the Party’s twenty-five most senior leaders, and provide evidence of the physical and financial assets they own or control, including extensive real estate held inside China and around the world, among it the neighboring territories of Hong Kong and Macau.
The law requires intelligence analysts to identify every financial agent, business associate, or other entity used to conceal ownership of this wealth, and to treat an earlier assessment as a baseline. That earlier report, released publicly in March 2025 under the title “Wealth and Corruption Activities of the Chinese Communist Party Leadership,” is the starting point the new study must build on with more specific findings. The new report must be unclassified and posted on the office’s website, though a fuller version may carry a classified annex.
The work falls jointly to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is leaving the post on June 30, along with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The legislators who pushed for the first report were Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, and Rubio, then a senator from Florida.
A first report in 2025 said Xi had amassed more than $1 billion through relatives
The March 2025 report found that Xi had built up more than $1 billion in assets through his relatives, and that as many as 65 percent of officials across China take in unofficial income through bribery or graft. Critics faulted that report for soft-pedaling the scale of the top leaders’ concealed fortunes, dwelling on corruption in general rather than on the hidden money and holdings themselves.
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According to the Washington Times, Paul Berkowitz, a China specialist who spent thirty-one years working on Asia policy as a congressional aide, said Rubio and Ogles pressed for the report precisely to expose the leadership’s concealed wealth. They understood, he said, that this wealth is the Party’s Achilles’ heel, and they wanted to strike at that weakness. The Party draws its legitimacy from casting itself as a humble servant of the people, Berkowitz said, and it knows that if ordinary Chinese learned how rich their leaders truly are, the damage would be severe.
The timing is uncomfortable for Xi, who has built his rule around an anti-corruption campaign that has investigated millions of Party members and that many analysts read as a tool for purging rivals as much as a cleanup.
The news drew an eager reaction from Chinese internet users
For many Chinese, learning how much wealth Xi and the rest of the leadership have accumulated is the news they have most wanted to hear, a desire sharpened by the country’s deepening economic troubles. When President Trump signed the defense bill containing the requirement in December 2025, the reaction across Chinese-language social media was immediate, and word of it reached inside mainland China despite the Party’s censorship.
Commenters greeted the prospect as a long-awaited scandal. One wrote that it was more thrilling than firecrackers at the Lunar New Year; another said the whole nation should finally learn where the people’s blood and sweat had gone. Many described the move as a weapon, more devastating than any conventional arm, a way of winning without firing a shot, a strike at the snake’s vital point.
Others reached for the ironic nickname Chinese internet users have given Trump, “Build-the-Country Trump,” the idea being that his pressure on the Party ends up serving the Chinese people, and urged him to keep his word and publish the findings. A recurring demand was that the report appear in simplified Chinese, so that readers on the mainland could see for themselves which of their leaders, as one put it, had sold out the country.
