A propaganda campaign against exiled businessman Guo Wengui

China has launched an “unusually sophisticated publicity war” against Guo Wengui 郭文贵, the billionaire residing in the U.S. making explosive allegations about corruption in the Chinese Communist Party, the South China Morning Post reported. In addition to a “red notice” from the international police organization Interpol at the request of the Chinese government, the campaign now includes a YouTube channel called “The truth about Guo Wengui” (郭文贵 真相), featuring video confessions of a man claiming to be disgraced top spy Ma Jian 马建, who makes his own bombshell accusations against Guo.

As SCMP summarizes, the man on video claims that Guo bribed him with more than 60 million yuan ($8.7 million) in gifts in exchange for “wiretapping the phone of one of Guo’s business rivals for a year, freezing a bank account, discouraging local police from investigating Guo and his company, deleting negative online media reports about Guo, and threatening a journalist from writing about the businessman.”

Other parts of the expansive propaganda campaign against Guo, Bill Bishop notes in his Sinocism newsletter, now include three pieces in the Beijing News on Guo’s alleged ties to a number of corrupt officials, plus a piece in Caixin that includes further claims of Guo and Ma’s collusion.

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