Guo Wengui has been trailed by scandals involving corruption and espionage. What is he really after?
Donald Trump became the Republican Presidential front-runner that summer, and Guo’s instincts proved well suited to the emerging era; he had already joined Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, and he wasn’t shy about praising his own business acumen (“I’m a genius at making money!”). He boasted of expensive tastes: handmade Louis Vuitton shoes, a rare variety of tea that he reportedly declared was worth a million dollars a kilo. Even before he was introduced to Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon had heard enough about Guo to pronounce him “the Donald Trump of Beijing.” (Years later, when federal agents went looking for Bannon in connection with an allegedly fraudulent scheme to raise money for a wall on the Mexican border, they found him aboard Guo’s yacht, in Long Island Sound.)
At the Sherry, though, Guo rapidly developed a reputation for peculiar habits. He seemed obsessed with the risk of intruders; he tried to block the fire exit in his penthouse, and residents complained that he stationed bodyguards in the lobby. In March, 2015, a spate of reports in the Chinese press offered an explanation for his anxiety: Guo—whom the reports referred to by his Mandarin name, Guo Wengui—was at the center of a burgeoning scandal involving corruption and espionage.
For nearly a decade, he had maintained a secret partnership with one of China’s most powerful spymasters, an intelligence officer named Ma Jian, who had recently been arrested by his own government. Caixin, a Chinese investigative news organization, reported that Ma and Guo had used surveillance, blackmail, and political influence to amass fortunes and evade scrutiny.
Through the decades, Washington has attracted no shortage of wealthy figures who learned to surf the rivalries in American politics. But how, exactly, a Chinese intelligence collaborator was reborn as a darling of Trump Republicans is a measure of the shifting folkways of conservative politics, and the extraordinary power that accrues to people with the wealth and savvy to command the technologies of influence.
In a federal court filing from 2019, a private intelligence firm in a business dispute with him claimed that he “was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People’s Republic of China.”