Among Jeffrey Epstein’s sordid activities were his efforts to grease the connections between major financial figures in the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. He taught bankers at JPMorgan Chase how to abase themselves and provide the kinds of bribes needed to become buddies with CCP officials and gain access to the markets of the People’s Republic of China.
Crediting the work of an unnamed Chinese YouTuber who “spent days studying and digging through the Epstein files and uncovered a shocking set of connections between Epstein and the CCP,” Lei in a recent installment of Lei’s Real Talk gives her own understanding of the “backdoor connecting Western elites to Zhongnanhai” (February 15, 2026). (Zhongnanhai is a compound in Beijing for CCP leaders, and the word is often used to refer to the central government or its leadership.)
Epstein and Staley
One of Lei’s exhibits is email between Epstein and Jes Staley, at the time a JPMorgan executive. Staley was “the kind of guy who would stomp his foot and make the ground shake” on Wall Street. But in the email exchange with Epstein, “he sounds like a little student sitting in front of his master, soaking up every word….
“A man who built his power by blackmailing elites, a convicted sex predator, is instructing a banker who manages hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in assets on how power actually works inside the Chinese Communist Party.
“Epstein told Staley bluntly, ‘You arrogant Wall Street elites need to stop showing up in China waving thick legal contracts. That stuff is childish. Inside the red wall, contracts are just paper that can be tossed into a shredder at any time. There are only two real currencies, face and a sense of security.’
“Epstein explains that CCP officials don’t lack money. What they lack is a promise of survival, a guarantee that when political earthquakes hit and the system reshuffles, they and their families will still be safe. And this is the core of Epstein’s guanxi [business-facilitating social relationships] philosophy.
“If you want licenses in China, if you want financial permits, if you want to dominate the market, you can’t just be an investor. You have to turn yourself into part of their family’s interest network. And the price of becoming ‘one of us’ is this: Your bank becomes the CCP elite family’s private overseas safe, and their placement office for children and relatives.”
Epstein “even wrote psychological scripts for how Staley should behave in meetings in Beijing. Imagine a banking tycoon who bosses people around in a Manhattan skyscraper now being told to lower himself in Beijing until his posture is flatter than the carpet in the Great Hall of the People….
“Epstein understood the twisted psychology of CCP officials…a mix of deep collective inferiority and extreme personal arrogance…. He even went into detail about how to give bribes without looking like bribes.”
The bribes have to be subtle, like “a recommendation letter to a top private school for their children, a private introduction to Nobel Prize winners, or helping a family member ‘recover’ lost antiques at a New York auction….
“So under this carefully engineered psychological manipulation, Wall Street executives began to enter Zhongnanhai again and again, not just to talk business, but to build emotional connections, to perform something like a ritual offering of loyalty.”
Lobbyists, money launderers
This collusion led “to one final outcome. Wall Street abandoned its last bit of vigilance toward the CCP system, and instead became the authoritarian regime’s most loyal and most expensive lobbyist in the West….
“In the documents, Epstein tells the Wall Street tycoon very directly: target the senior officials and their families who love traveling to the West, loved Western lifestyles, and secretly want an escape hatch.
“So give them fancy titles like ‘advisor,’ pay them obscene salaries. But most importantly, let their kids get gilded inside JPMorgan’s global network. And this was the true prototype of what later became the scandalous sons-and-daughters hiring program [instituted by many other big banks in addition to JPMorgan]…. These children of the top CCP officials didn’t even work full time. Some of them just took the salary and didn’t even work there [at all].”
Epstein also gave the bankers advice on laundering CCP money.
Did all the dirty dealing and sucking up work? In 2016, the bank ended up paying a $264 million fine to the U.S. government for bribing CCP officials.
But:
“Nobody has done as well as JPMorgan Chase. Just look at the checklist. It’s the first fully foreign-owned futures company in China, as of 2020. It’s the first wholly foreign-owned securities company, approved in 2021…. It has a presence across multiple major Chinese cities…. While other foreign banks were forced to retreat because they just couldn’t get licenses, JPMorgan was sitting high up in Shanghai’s skyscrapers….
“So those schemes Epstein laid down back then, every favor, every backroom meeting, every sons-and- daughters placement, eventually turned into privilege and special treatment.”
These are just a few of the details of what Lei calls “a transnational power- harvesting machine.” How crucial Epstein was to its operation is hard to say. But the once-private documents of the Epstein files suggest that he was at least one of the top go-to guys in all the scheming by JPMorgan Chase.
Also see:
Lei’s Real Talk: “The Epstein Files: The West’s Back Door into Zhongnanhai”
“Buried inside newly released Epstein files are documents showing how Western elites quietly built access to China’s inner power circle…. From Wall Street’s China strategy and elite family-money networks to university pipelines and regime power games, the files expose a hidden system where money, influence, and power trade hands behind closed doors.”
Associated Press: “JPMorgan Chase to pay $264 million in Chinese bribery case” (November 17, 2016)
“JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $264.4 million in fines to federal authorities to settle criminal and civil charges that it hired friends and relatives of Chinese officials in order to gain access to banking deals in that country.”
