One afternoon my wife, Sarabeth, who worked for a nonprofit education organization, received a call from a woman she knew professionally, the wife of a Chinese professor with close ties to the Party. They were a worldly couple—a child in the Ivy League and deep connections with senior leaders—and she asked Sarabeth for a chat at a nearby mall. At Starbucks, beside the Apple Store, the woman asked about my work as a journalist, and if I was friends with Michael Forsythe, a Bloomberg reporter who had published the details about Xi Jinping’s family fortune. She had a warning for Sarabeth to relay
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