In hot pursuit of China's princelings

China's "princelings" - the offspring of senior Chinese officials who benefit from lavish privileges in education, employment and business - are coming under scrutiny as never before. Bo Xilai, the son of one of Mao Zedong's comrades and a supposed "immortal" of the revolution, was recently sentenced to life in prison after his conviction on charges of corruption and abuse of power.

Outside China, princelings are feeling the heat as well. Not long ago, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it was investigating JPMorgan Chase's hiring of princelings in Hong Kong, who apparently delivered lucrative underwriting deals for the bank.

China's princelings have been hot commodities for Western companies seeking to capitalise on their guanxi (connections) in order to secure multibillion-dollar transactions. The list of financial institutions that have engaged in such hiring practices reads like a who's who of investment banking.

Of course, it is premature to conclude that JPMorgan violated the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by employing children of Chinese officials who oversaw companies that retained the bank to underwrite their stock offerings. Nonetheless, the case highlights a broader trend: the wooing of China's princelings by prestigious Western educational institutions and businesses for the purpose of advancing their parochial interests in the burgeoning Chinese market.

The unseemly race to recruit princelings starts at the world's leading colleges and universities. Because China has no universities that rival the Ivy League or Oxford and Cambridge, senior Chinese officials prefer to send their children to these schools.

Given the opacity surrounding admission to these highly selective institutions (where the acceptance rate typically is as low as around 8 per cent), it is impossible to tell whether princelings get in on the basis of merit or family background. But it is notable that princelings are not found in the most prestigious doctoral programmes, where professors, not administrators, make admissions decisions. Likewise, MIT and Caltech, where only the truly gifted survive, have a dearth of princelings.

Indeed, the sheer number of princelings, including children of incumbent Chinese leaders, now attending Ivy League universities clearly points to the importance of family ties. President Xi Jinping's daughter, for example, studies at Harvard under an assumed name, and Bo Xilai's son has been a student at Oxford and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; he is now studying at Columbia Law School.