Princelings
| Princelings | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 太子黨 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 太子党 | ||||||||
| Literal meaning | Crown Prince Party | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Tàizǐdǎng |
| Wade–Giles | T'ai-tsu-tang |
The Princelings, also translated as the Party's Crown Princes, are the descendants of prominent and influential senior communist officials in the People's Republic of China. It is not a political party, but an informal, and often derogatory, categorization to signify those benefiting from nepotism and cronyism, by analogy with crown princes in hereditary monarchies. Many of its members hold high-level political and business positions in the upper echelons of power. However, there is no discernible political cohesion within the group, and as such they should not be compared to other informal groupings such as the Shanghai clique or the Tuanpai ("Youth League clique"), which resemble inter-party factions with some degree of affinity on policy issues.
The term was coined in the early 20th century, referring to the son of Yuan Shikai (a self-declared emperor) and his cronies. It was later used to describe the relatives of the top four nationalist families; Chiang Kai-shek's kin, Soong Mei-ling's kin, Chen Lifu's kin, and Kong Xiangxi's kin. After the 1950s, the term was used to describe Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, and his friends in Taiwan. Today's princelings include the children of the Eight Elders and other recent senior national and provincial leaders. Opportunities are available to princelings that are not available to common people. Using their powerful connections they have the opportunity to obtain profitable opportunities for themselves and for others. The more aggressive of the princelings have amassed fortunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. In late 2015 and early 2016 the term "Zhao family" from Lu Xun’s novella “The True Story of Ah Q,” went viral in China after it was used in an anonymous article “Barbarians at the Gate, Zhao Family Inside” to allude to princelings involvement in a business dispute.
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