Grifter Guo Wengui, the Donald Trump of Beijing

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Evan Osnos.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Joining me from the silvern splendor of Goldkorn Holler in the wilderness southwest of Nashville, Tennessee is Jīn Yùmǐ 金玉米, also sometimes known as Jeremy Goldkorn, who is taking a break from his scholarly exegesis of Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 report to co-host this program. Jeremy, you know you can actually use a simple search function for things like the frequency of mentions of words like guójiā ānquán 国家安全 and stuff like that. Sorry, also that my phone calls to you earlier interrupted your count and that you had to start over. Sorry, man.

Jeremy Goldkorn: Thank you, Kaiser.

Kaiser: But can you greet the people and introduce our guest?

Jeremy: Yeah. Well, hello people. So, where to begin, our guest is Evan Osnos, who’s an old friend of Kaiser and mine from our Beijing days. He is a writer for the New Yorker and an author of many books, including one which is very relevant to today’s show called Age of Ambition, about China and the go-go boom, boom, years that Kaiser and I like to refer to as the “Golden Age of Liberalism” under Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 and Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝. Evan is also the author of a book that helped me understand my newly adopted homeland called Wildlands, which is about how crazy and (beep) up America is. So, Evan Osnos, welcome to Sinica. It’s so good to talk to you again.

Evan Osnos: Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Kaiser. It’s great to be back on the pod. I have to tell you, Jeremy, there is a thing about writers. They say that we all just write the same book over and over again. You may change the setting or the characters, but the sort of basic underlying approach never really changes. I confess that’s true with me.

Jeremy: Well, yeah, I mean, one I think the central question of today’s show actually is, which is more (beep) up, America or China? Which is a question I’ve asked you previously in a different context, and we’ll get to it.

Kaiser: And you found a way to show that it’s both.

Evan: Dissertation in writing. I think so.

Kaiser: Hey, so we are going to be talking about Guō Wénguì 郭文贵 today. Evan wrote a profile of go in a… It’s something that really brings the two worlds that he discovered together, China and the United States. I’m pretty sure that most of the people listening to this show, maybe even all of you know who Guo Wengui is, and then also-

Jeremy: But let’s set it up anyway.

Kaiser: Well, wait, I want you to say something very important. He is not related to me, at least as far as I know.

Jeremy: That’s what you say, Kaiser. Let’s establish who he is. Who is Guo Wengui, Evan?

Evan: Well, if you’ve got some time, I’ll give you a 10,000-word answer, actually, which is what I’ve done in the New Yorker, but let’s do the abbreviated version.

Jeremy: That’s what I’m asking for.

Evan: The abbreviated version is, one of the things to know is that he hasn’t always been known to people as Guo Wengui. At other times he’s been known as Miles Kwok, or Miles Guo, or Guō Hàoyún 郭浩云, or Ho Wan Kwok. He’s used a number of different names, not only to communicate with people in the West, but also within China and Hong Kong. And that’s, I think, a useful piece of information because it captures the fact that this guy’s gone through multiple iterations and permutations over the last 40 years that are, in their own way, I think a little… They’re like, they tell a little miniature story of China, and ultimately China and America’s encounter. Anyway, that’s a fancy answer. The unfancy answer is he is a real estate developer who came up out of Henan and then made his way to Beijing, where I think anybody who was in Beijing in the years we were there would recognize the Pangu Plaza, which was the giant thing.

Jeremy: That is what… Yeah. Let’s talk about Pangu Plaza. What is the giant thing? So, this is a building just north, I believe, of the main Olympic buildings, including the water cube. And what is it, Evan?

Evan: Well, it is a series of high-rises. It’s got a set of sort of lower buildings and then one very tall building. And at the top is the shape of an Olympic torch. It is also sometimes described as resembling a dragon. And it is a self-designated seven-star hotel. What’s interesting is actually, just recently, I mean, this is not to skip ahead in our narrative, but it’s a useful… This is a little bit like the moment in the movie where you start in the present and then go into the past. But recently, the Pangu, which was seized and auctioned off from Guo Wengui, the tallest building, they’ve actually removed, they’ve decapitated the little flame that was at the top. It’s now been rendered like an ordinary high-rise in Beijing, which in some ways feels like a punctuation mark on this whole tail.

Kaiser: Yeah. A nice little bit of closure there. As you can probably already hear, we’re kind of doing an experiment today. We’re going completely unscripted. So, Evan, I actually only have one real question for you, which is essentially what, after all this time that you’ve spent reporting on this guy, all this time that you’ve spent talking to people who know him, what do you think is the deal with this guy? I mean, is there kind of like an Occam’s razor answer, cuts through all and says like, “Okay?” I mean, I got my theory, Jeremy’s got his theory. What do you got?

Evan: I can give you my theory sort of bottom-line upfront, and then we can go into the details that are interesting.

Kaiser: Let’s not bury the lede. Yeah.

Evan: I think, in the end, this is the story of a survival, and maybe even of a survivor, I should say, maybe even a survivalist in the… In a very recognizable way, I think that all of us who have spent a lot of time in China, particularly traveling around the hinterlands would recognize, I mean, he’s a guy who’s one of eight children from a little village, Haiyang village in Shandong Province, and not the prosperous part of Shandong. Eventually makes his way up through the rough and tumble years of the Henan kind of real estate. This is all during all of those kind of harrowing tales of Henan with blood selling and all this other stuff. It was just a rough place. It was a kind of prime evil capitalist experiment.

Jeremy: Gangster’s paradise.

Kaiser: Well, in defense of my ancestral province, it has the population the size of the unified Germany, and it’s the physical size of the state of Missouri.

Jeremy: Your fellow province mates are thugs basically is what you’re saying, but yes.

Kaiser: My co-provincials are not thugs. They’re gentlemen and scholars, and they are the denizens of the venerable zhōngyuán 中原.

Evan: Henan is a really specific culture of that time. So, he gets his way out of there, makes his way to Beijing, figures out the system in Beijing, whatever that system is, whether it’s like, you got to have this kind of power on your side, you got to have this kind of muscle on your side. And eventually, because one of these deals goes haywire, off he goes to the United States. And what I think is kind of fascinating is he figured out our system of power and money and…

Jeremy: Plugged straight into Steve Bannon, basically.

Evan: Precisely right. Exactly. In some ways, whatever you think of him, you have to kind of sit back and kind of marvel at his capacity.

Jeremy: The chutzpah.

Evan: Right. Exactly.

Jeremy: I know it’s not fashionable anymore to use this word, but the balls, right, of this man, the chutzpah, the ability to come here and just go there with your yacht and be like, “I’m the guy.”

Evan: I’ve actually been really struck that he took, more or less, he took the toolbox that he developed in China about courting powerful people and figuring out how to flatter them and keep them happy, and then just imported that to the United States and discovered that we were quite amenable to that. Some of us.

Kaiser: Exactly.

Jeremy: But you know what’s so amazing about him is that like, I mean, this is a man of supremely bad taste. Pangu Plaza is like one of the most kitschy buildings ever built in the universe. And yet, he had Tony Blair. In your article, you report that Tony Blair said that he is a man of impeccable taste.

Evan: Quote unquote. You’re right.

Jeremy: Quote unquote. I mean, there’s something that he has some magic there.

Kaiser: I don’t know. I mean, it’s weird because you, me, we can all smell that kind of sketch on him from miles away, right? Miles.

Jeremy: Miles. Miles Kwok away.

Evan: You know what, I think there’s a… To my mind, one of the most interesting things that came out in this reporting was his experience with Orville Schell. And Orville-

Kaiser: Oh yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah.

Evan: Should I give just a short description of that?

Jeremy: Please.

Evan: I found that kind of fascinating. Because Orville, as many listeners would know, is a really seasoned China hand. He’s the head of the U.S.-China Center at the Asian Society. He’s a journalist, an author who’s been in and out of China for decades, really knows sort of the soft tissue of the place, can kind of read the moves. And he met Guo Wengui at one point in 2008, and Orville agreed to tell me the story for this piece, which was… I was very grateful that he did.

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s like, I’ve known you all these years, Orville, why have you never mentioned this to me.

Jeremy: The underground Ferrari.

Evan: It’s an amazing… So, what happened was in about 2008, right around the time of the Olympics, Orville, whose job is to know as many people involved in the U.S.-China relationship as he can, he was introduced to Guo, who was then calling himself Miles Kwok. And Kwok, aka Guo, invited him to dinner in the private dining room of his dacha up on the top of the Pangu. And he had this chef who prepared like organic cuisine. Guo is very particular about his food. They then went down to the basement to see this underground garage filled with Lamborghinis and Maseratis and fancy cars of every kind. And anybody who knows China will know that that is actually like a signal that you have a certain kind of backing because you’re able to get that stuff and keep that stuff, which is probably the more difficult act.

Then, at one point, Orville begins to run into visa trouble. He’s written a lot about human rights over the years. And Guo says, “Well, I can help you with that. I’m gonna fix it for you, but you have to talk to some people.” And so, Orville says, “Okay, who are these people?” And he says, “Let me introduce you.” So, he begins a series of meetings, all of them at these tea houses — like fancy, fancy tea houses around Beijing, in which it would always be two people, and they would never provide business cards.

Jeremy: It’s always two people.

Evan: Well, it’s always traveling in two, right? I learned-

Jeremy: It’s always two people.

Evan: I learned that in North Korea, you always travel in two because of that way, one can always mind the other. And they would have these long conversations about U.S.-China relations. And Orville concluded quite rapidly, because it’s not his first rodeo, that they were trying to flip him. That they were intelligence officials who were trying to gain his cooperation, and they were offering him things. And of course, he said, “Look,” he said, “I didn’t know anything. I don’t have any classified information. And besides, my job is to try to understand what’s going on in the Chinese kind of bureaucratic mind.” He’s like, “I learned more from those encounters than I ever had in 30 years of visits to China.” And he said, “But I also learned from that experience that Guo Wengui was extremely well situated with a man named Mǎ Jiàn 马建, who was the chief of counterintelligence at the Ministry of State Security. Guo was on the phone with him constantly, according to Orville.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. Damn it, Orville, why did you never share this story with me? Jeremy, was it two guys for you?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: It was like a really fancy-

Evan: Was it a pǔ’ěr 普洱 tea? What kind of tea was it?

Kaiser: Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy: I made them buy me very expensive single malt scotches actually. The Ministry of State Security is slightly in debt to an Irish barn, Jīnbǎo Jiē 金宝街.

Evan: They probably own the bar at Jinbao Jie. So, this is taken from one hand to another.

Kaiser: Basically, my take on this guy, I mean, this is all consistent, but I mean, I think like he’s a straight up grifter and utterly amoral pathological narcissist with delusions of grandeur. Does that sound like anyone else you know? Basically, I hate to admit that Steve Bannon with his, what did you call it? Distinctive assemblage of collared shirts? I love that phrase. That will be used Homeric epithet from now on, Steve Bannon with his distinctive assemblage of collared shirts. I basically-

Evan: By the way, that is the little bit of a sentence that inside the New Yorker, we had like multiple emails about, how’d you get to that one?

Jeremy: Did you have to fact check that?

Evan: Actually, we did have… A fact-checker spent some kind of heroic time examining a video to try to understand, in one particular video, how many shirts Steve was wearing.

Jeremy: Actually, I’m sorry to interrupt your flow, Kaiser, but I think it’s a good time to answer this.

Kaiser: Let me finish my thought, though. Let me finish my thought, though.

Jeremy: Ah, okay.

Kaiser: Is that Steve Bannon was right when he described him as the Donald Trump of Beijing.

Evan: Yeah. And he’s not the only one who told me that. I mean, I was fascinated by the number of people who, from various different points, I mean, Steve Bannon is saying this from a position of great affection for both of them. He described Guo… And Bannon even concluded that years ago. It’s fascinating. Bannon had spent time in China partly when he was running an online gaming company and was in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And he, at that point, heard about the Pangu. And by his telling, he says, “That’s when I realized that he was the Donald Trump of Beijing.” It was even before Guo joined Mar-a-Lago, and eventually presented this full array of instincts that are quite Trumpy.

Jeremy: It was Pángǔ Dàshà 盘古大厦 that convinced him, was it?

Evan: Well, I mean, Pangu Dasha is pretty much… I mean, it’s the-

Jeremy: It’s the Trump Tower of Beijing.

Evan: It really is. It really is. And so, anyway, I think, but actually, and a lot of the people, though, who are in these various battles, and there are many with Guo, they too say he’s really Trumpian. And I think that’s something… What’s fascinating about that from my perspective, is to see that this is an international character that is a thing. I’m sure there’s somewhere, walking around in Dagestan right now, the Donald Trump of Dagestan and the Donald Trump of the Amazon, I just don’t know them, but it might be a fun conference.

Kaiser: Well, that one got elected. He was Bolsonaro.

Evan: Right. Good point, good point.

Jeremy: I mean, my first media job in Beijing was with a guy running a magazine who was very Trumpian. It’s a way to get things done. The chutzpah, you just (beep) tell people whatever you want to happen, and it can happen if you’re convincing enough. Steve Jobs called it a reality distortion field, or Walter Isaacson did, I’m not sure who coined the phrase.

Evan: There is a way of yeah, essentially kind of willing and alternate reality into being. And that can be obviously very destructive. It can also be for the person at the center of it. You can run that string out for quite a long time.

Jeremy: You can if you’ve got the energy. So, speaking of energy-

Kaiser: It doesn’t work for me. I mean, I’ve actually tried to implement this playbook. I bought like a thousand copies of Michelle Obama’s memoir. It didn’t do anything for me.

Evan: Is that what’s tacked up on the wall is acoustic tile in the-

Kaiser: Yeah, that’s what it is. I pulped them and turned them into-

Jeremy: Evan, the New Yorker is famous for its fact checking. So, how the (beep) did the New Yorker fact check this piece?

Kaiser: Jeremy, man, you’re going to make me beep so-

Evan: Well-

Jeremy: Let me do that again then. Evan, the New Yorker is famous for fact-checking, how did they fact-check this? And in fact, how did you do your own reporting? Because this, I mean, you have some incredible stories there. You must have given Orville Schell a couple of whiskeys or something. But I mean, that maybe was the easiest. How did you source this information?

Evan: This is a challenging piece. This is, to put it mildly, but what’s… First on the fact-checking, I think, and I have to say I love the fact-checking process at the New Yorker. It really is like an amazing ancient Jesuitical creed that, like, just this way. At first, it begins with this idea that things can be ascertained. That you really can by asking enough people, by being clear, by coming back, coming back, coming back, you can actually clarify something. And so, there were-

Jeremy: Pretty naive view of the world, I suppose, in some way.

Evan: I mean, the reason why this story is hard is, in this piece, I talk about this concept called the wilderness of mirrors, which was an idea that was…

Kaiser: James Jesus Angleton. Yeah.

Evan: Who was the head of CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974.

Kaiser: America’s own Ma Jian. Yeah.

Evan: Right. And he took that idea from an old T. S. Elliot poem. And there’s this whole idea of ambiguity as being essential to the business of counterintelligence. It’s all about, how do you ever judge somebody’s motives? How do you ever know if they’re bona fide or mala fide? Are they a defector that they say they are, or are they still working for somebody? And you put that then in the context of fact checking, which is this very black and white, we can clarify.

And it is a bit of an awkward encounter. But in this case, we had three fact-checkers who worked on this piece who will remain nameless because I don’t want to get anybody else involved in this that is not publicly described. But I’m a great admirer and very grateful for the work that they do because it’s just incredible. So, how do you fact check? Well, one thing you do is you go based on available public records. And there’s often more than you might think. Oftentimes, there’s a huge mountain of legal filings in this story. On all sides, Guo, as I mentioned in the piece, is involved in a lot of litigation. He is sort of offered, he’s been deposed a number of times.

He’s offered his own story. People around him have given depositions under oath. There are a number of other people. And then there are other rungs of ways to… I mean, there’s just a lot of people who have encountered him from various governments inside China, outside China over the years. He’s been around a long time, and in these different modes, has had so many different meetings that I cast a very wide net. And it didn’t take too long to begin to find people who had experiences of him, with him, or against him.

Kaiser: Yeah. I know that you’ve talked to Hú Shūlì 胡舒立 before for stories. Did you reach out to the folks at Caixin, because I guess it was-

Evan: No, I didn’t. Yeah. But I mentioned in the piece their work because it’s been really some of the major pieces of journalism that had been done, appeared in Caixin. It’s worth my saying, Guo denies any wrongdoing, and I think this is important to apply across our conversation, Guo denies wrongdoing. He denies bribing people. He denies many of the things that Caixin reported, and there we are.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: I wonder if Hu Shuli denies having a love child by Wáng Qíshān王岐山.

Evan: Yeah. For people who don’t know, there’s a very kind of bitter backstory between Caixin and Hu Shuli and Guo Wengui. There’s litigation and so on, but that’s…

Jeremy: Just let’s tease out a bit. So, Caixin is probably the best independent or more or less independent media company in China Business Magazine run by a feisty lady named Hu Shuli. This feud between them is because they have reported some unsavory things about Guo Wengui, and Guo Wengui has alleged some, on his own media platforms in America, has alleged some unsavory things about Hu Shuli. Is that about right, Evan?

Evan: Yeah, I think, and then there’s litigation following that, but your description is right as far as I know it. As long as we’re talking about sources and methods, I want to give a shout out to Mother Jones Magazine, which has done some remarkable work on the subject of Guo Wengui. And in particular, they got access to some internal recordings that were done. I recommend anybody who’s interested in what I wrote should go and seek out pieces written by Dan Friedman, because there’s just…

Kaiser: Yeah, they’re really great.

Evan: There’s quite a tale there too.

Kaiser: Yeah, Dan Friedman’s done amazing work on that stuff. One of the things, though, that I don’t think came from Mother Jones or whatever it was, you found this letter that claims to be written by Guo in which he is sort of begging the powers that be in Beijing for a clear mission, saying that he will go to bat for them, and he’s going to promise not to cross any of Xi Jinping’s red lines, that he’s loyal to Xi. This is evidence that he may actually, you cite this as evidence, that he might be working for a proceeding pro-Xi Jinping clique, a faction inside of Beijing.

Evan: Yeah.

Kaiser: What do you make of that claim?

Evan: Well, what’s interesting is, so Guo would deny that he’s working for a clique inside Beijing, but he doesn’t deny writing the letter. In fact, he acknowledges writing the letter and, and he’s kind of talked about it, in a sense. So, he wrote this letter in which he said, “Assign me tasks, allow me to atone for my past mistakes.” He said, “I want to do good propaganda, in my own style of propaganda.” He said, “I will never cross the red lines,” which means essentially the bottom line, whatever, however he perceives that. I think, for a lot of folks, particularly dissidents in the United States who distrust his motives, they say this is about as clear as you could get of a roadmap for what was going on, what he was doing. He would say, “No, this was an effort on my part to try to negotiate for family members and employees who were arrested and to try to get assets unfrozen and to try to sort of break the impasse”.

And what we don’t know is what the result of that letter was. I haven’t seen, if it exists, I don’t know about it. I haven’t seen if he’s talked about getting any kind of response to that. But yeah, there are… So, one of the interesting, and this goes to Jeremy’s question about how you report a story like this, one of the things that’s happened over the course of this long process is that he has released a number of recordings of various people and conversations over the years, including, for instance, his own conversation with the Ministry of State Security and Public Security about when they sort of sent a team to New York, kind of a dramatic moment in the piece, they sent a team to try to bring him back. And he recorded it, edited it, released excerpts of it.

Then there are other recordings that have been released by sources unknown. The assumption is that some of that’s been released by the Chinese government, by members, by party organs and so on. But it’s this, it really is like operating in this almost kind of like postmodern world of intelligence and the internet, and everything is available to be recorded and released, and can be used as a tool of combat in this long saga. So, it’s quite unlike any other story I’ve ever really encountered, actually.

Kaiser: Evan, and you didn’t really write about the whole VOA kerfuffle.

Evan: Right. Yeah, we sort of had to pick our shots. At a certain point, there was like a limit to how much we could include, but basically, so, and the VOA thing I think, which was fairly well covered at the time was-

Jeremy: Just sorry to interrupt, Evan, but I think you’re prepping yourself to write a biography of Donald Trump after his death. This is prep work, right?

Evan: I don’t know. It seems to be a crowded shelf. That’s a crowded shelf. I think, so at the time, one of the very first moments that Guo became known to the public on a wide scale was that he had agreed to an interview with VOA. And there’s a lot of internal dispute about what exactly VOA agreed to do and planned to do. Some of the reporters involved said we had gotten permission to do this extraordinary three-hour interview with him.

Jeremy: That was Sasha Gong, right? Was the reporter who…

Kaiser: Yeah, Sasha Gong.

Evan: Right. And then she ended up working with Guo on some projects afterwards, but then having a big falling out, and has now been one of the people who is accusing him of wrongdoing and so on. Guo was gonna do this interview with VOA, and after an hour of the interview, the VOA said, “All right, that’s enough. If there’s more to do, we’ll put it out online.” That cutoff of the interview became, in Guo’s telling, a sign that somebody had gotten to VOA. It was maybe the CCP coming down on VOA and so on. Then Sasha Gong, who was the reporter, she left VOA and ended up… The reason why I mentioned all this, what’s interesting is that initial interview was one of the times that he talked and sort of actually provided useful explanation about his relationship to the Ministry of State Security in China, he described himself as a shēng yè guàkào 生业挂靠, commercial affiliate of the ministry. And I think there’s a way in which that-

Jeremy: I used to describe myself like that actually.

Evan: Now you’re a Nashville shēng yè guàkào 生业挂靠. That was like a window. He talks a lot and it’s useful.

Kaiser: Do you know what happened to the remaining two hours of the interview that were never aired?

Evan: I don’t think that they did the other two hours. I don’t know is the answer. I think it’s possible that… I don’t think that they ended up actually doing them. That caused a big breach inside VOA. It was a big fight about who was dah, dah, dah? And then…

Jeremy: It was, and I remember people had various interpretations of it, and I remember thinking to myself, well, it does at least teach me that all media companies, including the New Yorker, are dysfunctional supremely. Because what other kind of person would actually do media for a profession? So, that’s just what happens.

Evan: The question is, does it attract people like us, or does it make us like this? What’s interesting about that period was that was this moment when it was really unclear exactly where Guo Wengui was going. Like, what did he represent? What was he trying to do? And so, I think, at the time, there were people who said, “Oh, this cutting off of the interview, if that’s what it was, that seems to be a sign that he’s got big truths to tell and that he’s offending…” But since then, a lot of the people who were defending him and on his side have broken with him, or he’s broken with them. As a lot of people will know, he has gone on a big campaign against many of the more prominent American dissidents, and that’s been a source-

Jeremy: Including actual harassment. Right.

Kaiser: I think Jeremy and I, we’ve been making light of him along the way here, but this is not, even though there’s a lot of comic gold in your piece on him, this is not a frivolous sort of purely funny piece because the guy is dangerous, right? I mean, he actually is dangerous.

Jeremy: Globally dangerous.

Kaiser: Telling a little story about, I mean, so at one point a couple years ago, a defector from his organization approached me. This person wanted to sort of spill everything that they knew about what was happening at his organization. I said, “Why are you calling me then? You really should make your first phone call either to the New York Times” — sorry New Yorker — “the New York Times… or to the district attorney of the Southern District of New York.” This is great. There was a lot of allegations of straight up criminality. But this person was in fear for their life and was really worried, and hinted at dark things that have happened to others who have defected. So, I mean, he’s obviously not harmless. Look what he did, this orchestrated campaign against Téng Biāo 滕彪 and against other human rights activists.

Jeremy: Teng Biao, who is a Chinese rights activist and lawyer, who is now in exile in the United States.

Evan: Yeah. One of the episodes in his saga is that he, at one point, in effect declared the dissidents in the United States to be traitors. It’s always this kind of puzzling question of traders to whom, and who’s he representing? His followers ended up staging these long protests in front of people’s houses for months, where they would stand in front of the house shouting with bullhorns and calling them spies. And in a couple of cases, it led to violence. And he later said, “I don’t condone violence against any individual.” I am struck by it. It’s a case in which it’s a little bit like the rules of a particularly rough subculture of the real estate business in Henan in the ’90s has kind of been transposed into American suburbs. And you’re like, “Oh, this is a bit of a funny culture clash because it’s fascinating.” But those are the techniques that we see, which is this collision of the use of force and power, and politics, and money, all mixed up in this brew. And I think all of us recognize that brew from the sort of bàofā hù 暴发户 period of making money in China.

Kaiser: Oh, sure.

Evan: And now you see it here.

Jeremy: It’s a perfect match for Trumpian America.

Evan: Right. 100%. I mean, I have to tell you, Jeremy, I mean, I think we may have talked about this briefly at one point when I was on the podcast a few years ago during the kind of Trump rise. I remember, in some ways, working in China in those years, it felt like pretty good preparation for understanding the Trump phenomenon.

Jeremy: Washington, D.C., the Trump. Yes, yeah.

Evan: Because he used propaganda, he used cult of personality. He was a demagogue. And then you didn’t graft onto that, the power of money and everything else.

Jeremy: And tsunamis of kitsch.

Evan: Right, exactly. Trump was not the first person to show me a golden toilet. That’s all I can say.

Kaiser: Evan, in the end, what parts of his claims to have been working with the MSS do you actually believe? I mean, clearly he was closely tied to Ma Jian. He doesn’t deny that, claims not to have bribed him, but what about things like little details he provides like that he took these trips to meet with, presumably in Dharamsala, with the Dai Lama as a sort of an interlocutor, a kind of an intermediary between Beijing and His Holiness…

Evan: Yeah, that’s accurate actually. I communicated with the Dai Lama’s office on this topic to make sure it was true. I mean, this goes to the question of how do you fact check? Well, I mean, I-

Jeremy: You call up the Dalai Lama, as one does.

Evan: And what the Dalai Lama’s folks have said is, “Look, yeah, we met with…” As they say, His Holiness met with this guy. There’s photos of it actually. But they didn’t know that he was operating on behalf of the Ministry of State Security. I think he’s also, at various points, I mean, Guo at one point came back from North Korea with a kind of Kim Jong-il haircut, and was telling everybody at dinner, was regaling everybody with stories of his time with Kim Jong-il, having had dinner and sort of gotten to know him and was very friendly with him. That I don’t know. That it’s impossible to know if that happened. But the track record is not… That part is quite well described. Actually, in the intelligence community, people tell me about that role of the cutout, the civilian who is enlisted by a service in order to make contacts that you don’t want to have officially on the books as government to government. The Dalai Lama and the ministry would be a prime example of that. By his own description, he had the code Wu Nan. He was operating as a cutout, and that does seem to be accurate.

Kaiser: Yeah. Damn, this guy is complicated. I mean, seriously.

Evan: That’s the way to put it, I think.

Kaiser: You must have had some anecdotes or little episodes that ended up on the cutting room floor, that didn’t make their way into the final edit. Can you share one or two of those with us?

Evan: Oh, man. I think I would love to save that for the sequel.

Kaiser: Without getting in trouble.

Evan: Look, I actually, I mean, I ended up accumulating everything I could on this topic. I actually put it slightly differently, which is that, I guess what I was kind of fascinated by in the end was what kind of role is this guy playing in U.S.-China relations right now? Is he actually exerting forces of his own, or is he just magnifying our own anxieties and neurosis, and is he a player?

Jeremy: And where do you come down on that question?

Evan: I think he is both exerting forces of his own. There’s no question that he is seeking to have an effect. I mean, just watch this video with him and Steve Bannon. This is one of the more surreal pieces of footage that’s ever been assembled by human hand, that he and Steve Bannon on a little boat in New York Harbor chanting…

Jeremy: I remember it well.

Evan: “Take down the CCP.” And you think to yourself, “What am I watching?”

Kaiser: With a love you man, and the kiss.

Evan: Yeah. Then Guo signs a document in blood. I mean, the whole thing is like, what am I experiencing here? But at the same time, there’s a way in which, and this is where Teng Biao in the story makes a really important point. He says that many of his friends in the dissident community really gravitated to Guo when he came out because they said, “Here’s a guy from the heights of power who actually knows the secrets. He knows how it all works, and he’s willing to talk.” And they went to him and they said, “Okay, we’re now here. We’re on your team.” And Teng Biao was not one of them. He was always very suspicious from the beginning. And he wrote an essay, one of the reasons why he ended up on Guo’s bad side, he wrote an essay in which he said, “Not every enemy of our enemy is our friend.”

He said, “Just because somebody purports to be an anti-Communist doesn’t mean we should embrace them.” He said, “It’s the same thing about Trump that we shouldn’t pretend that these folks are small-D democrats just because they’re opposed to the Communist Party’s form of authoritarianism. Many of them are in fact authoritarians of their own.” And I think that is the sort of the note that Teng leaves the peace on is he says that it’s a Faustian bargain to say, “I’m going to tie myself, lash myself to Trump, just because I think he’s gonna be tough on China, if you ignore the fact that Trump is himself quite a dedicated opponent of democracy.”

Kaiser: Right, right, right. Talk about some of these other characters who come up in the piece like Steve Wynn, who was trying to get the guy extradited. What was the deal with that?

Evan: Yeah, that was an interesting case. At one point when the Chinese government was more or less throwing everything they could to try to get Guo back from what it seems, one of the things that happened was that they made contact with Steve Wynn, who was the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, and, of course, also the proprietor of casinos in Macau. And at the time, his casinos were having a rough go. There would’ve been like new restrictions on the number of tables they could operate. And so, he had a series of conversations with a security figure in China in which this guy said, “We want you to try to get Guo back.” And Wynn said, “Well, I know the president and I’ll raise it with him.” And then you have this incredible scene, kind of surreal scene in which Wynn has dinner with Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, and says, “Here’s this person who China wants back, can you just go ahead and do that?”

I’m paraphrasing here. And then, in the Oval Office, they have a meeting in which Trump says, “Hey, I remember”, he says to his secretary, “Madeline, get that packet that Steve dropped off.”

Kaiser: That letter from Xi. That letter from Xi.

Evan: Yeah, that letter from Xi Jinping, which it wasn’t a letter from Xi Jinping, but it was a letter in effect saying, “We want this guy Guo back.” And there were people in the U.S. government who stopped this from happening, either because they liked Guo Wengui, or because they said, “Well, we’re not just extraditing people on the basis of a letter.” I should say, it’s very important to note here too, that Wynn has maintained throughout that what he thought he was doing was not acting as an agent of China, but acting as an agent of the United States. He thought I was doing something that was in the interest of the United States, getting rid of this purported…

Kaiser: Rapist.

Evan: Alleged criminal. Yeah. Alleged rapist, according to the Chinese charges.

Jeremy: Steve, what an upstanding citizen.

Evan: Well, the Justice Department brought a case, and it was like he was all about to go to trial recently, and then the case was thrown out. The description of all this comes right out of federal court filings by the Justice Department who had access to text messages and things like that.

Kaiser: This is insane.

Evan: I mean, in some ways this… I mean, I think this story really was like this, it was like the confluence of all of these elements that are of interest to people like the three of us, which is to say like, how does influence actually move around behind closed doors between American executives and Chinese leaders? How does all of this fit together? How does the intelligence community fit into this? How does the FBI and the CIA and the Ministry of State Security, how do they all play? And in weird ways, this guy’s life actually lays it all out there.

Jeremy: It’s almost like the entire universe is being run by Keystone cops.

Kaiser: Yeah. We can laugh, and all that stuff, and there’s something comical, but he has had a real impact on discourse on politics, especially in the diaspora community. I don’t know how many people I know. Especially sort of friends of my wife who happened to have moved here years ago are taken in by this. I mean, they really idolize the guy. They hang on his every word. They think that he knows something. Can you talk a little bit about that, about the impact that he’s had on…?

Evan: Yeah. I mean, there was something poignant in the fact that he found an audience immediately when he came abroad among people, and there are many of them who are so determined, these are Chinese expatriates, have been trying so hard and with so little success to try to bring about a free or more open China, that when they finally got this person who seemed to have access to information, who really had operated at the most kind of elite cloistered level of all of this power. And here he was willing to talk. It was like, it was incredibly tempting. And they surged to him. I mean, just as a measure of how much support he developed, some of his organizations were able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from people in the form of “investment or donations” and things like that. It was all this complicated set of shares and cryptocurrencies.

And the SEC, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission eventually said, “None of this is legal.” And the companies were forced to disgorge over half a billion dollars in restitution and interest.

Jeremy: Sorry. Can I backtrack? So, Guo Wengui was running a cryptocurrency scam. Is that…

Kaiser: G-coin.

Evan: I should say, in the SEC-

Jeremy: Go ahead, explain.

Evan: In the SEC matter, he neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing, and neither did his companies. This was one of those classic SEC sort of settlements that is bizarre in the sense that it doesn’t say there was wrongdoing, but one side agrees to give up half a billion dollars.

Jeremy: And there was cryptocurrency issued for funds…

Evan: Correct. Yeah.

Jeremy: … Donated by like naive overseas Chinese people.

Evan: G-coin, G-dollar.

Jeremy: It was the G-coin. And I like the sound of that actually.

Evan: I think I see a pile of G-coin behind you in the room. Isn’t that…

Kaiser: That is.

Evan: What I think is interesting is like, it was a sign of how people were desperate really for something that could move the needle.

Jeremy: Well, it’s entirely understandable, I have to say. I mean, I feel like I would buy some G-coin if I thought somebody could move the needle in China. I think you and Kaiser, and I have met too many people like Guo Wengui in our lives to be tricked by that particular brand of charlatan.

Evan: The thing that he’s had an effect on to Guo, also this is something that Kaiser raised is, what impact has he had on the China debate? And I think that this is where Steve Bannon describes something that is very real, which is Bannon said that he’s watched as the center of gravity, and particularly in the Republican Party around China, has moved further and further to the right towards overt confrontation, towards essentially calling the Chinese ‘government illegitimate,’ which is just short of saying that people should rise up and overturn it. And there was a video Mike Pompeo put out recently in which he did that, speaking directly to the Chinese public. He said, “This government is not a legitimate representative of the Chinese people.” And Bannon, say what you will about Steve Bannon, but he is generally a pretty accurate analyst of his own party. And what he said was, “Trust me when I say that at the 2024 Presidential convention, one of the big debates in the party is going to be about how far do we go in terms of calling the Chinese government an illegitimate government?”

Kaiser: Christ. Yeah. I mean, you closed the piece with this, talking about how he has moved the Overton window.

Evan: Yeah.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Evan: That takes me down to the, I think he’s been an agent of consequence when it comes to this question of U.S.-China relations. One of the points I make in the story is it’s sometimes easy for us to be dismissive of these kinds of people. You look back at the parade of Trump-related figures and you say, this is like this island of misfit toys, and yet they have had this impact on America, on America’s place in the world, and on its relationships with places like China, and we ignore them at our peril.

Kaiser: So, if he’s done this, if he has shifted the Overton window, if he’s moved to the Republican Party, and certainly, and dragged the Democratic Party along with it to the right when it comes to China, then that seems to refute the idea that he was this very cleverly planted chaos agent who was supposed to do sort of in a Putin-esque way to sort of pull the epistemic floor out from under people and make them just like not believe that there is truth. Was he a chaos agent then?

Evan: Well, to paraphrase another great quote, perhaps too simple, a bit naïve. I think one of the things that people will tell you who work in the wilderness of mirrors, which is to say in the world of disinformation and complicated sort of strategy, is like everything may not be as simple as it appears. And it may not be that actually it’s just a question of, oh, okay, he’s pushed the party towards a more confrontational position. It may be that actually what’s going on is that the goal is to generate internal division within the Republican Party or within the China community. And I’m not ascribing motives to him that I can’t understand. I don’t do that. What I’m saying is that sometimes what appears to be a campaign in one direction may actually be something that’s pointing in a slightly different direction.

As one person said to me, a former national security official said, “You could make a circumstantial case that this guy is here just to screw us up, just to tie us in knots.” That’s the family-friendly version of what he said.”

Kaiser: Right. Thank you for not making me beep again.

Evan: Well, I know how much children will enjoy this conversation.

Kaiser: Yeah, right. This is a family-friendly podcast.

Jeremy: Yeah. My eight-year-old son is going to love this chat.

Kaiser: Evan, it was a delightful, delightful piece… Oh, you have more questions, all right.

Jeremy: Wait, wait, wait. Before you try to wrap it up, I have another question. How much money do you think Guo Wengui has currently? What do you estimate his net worth at right now?

Evan: That’s actually, it’s a super interesting question. It’s a hotly contested question actually, because when he applied to buy his apartment when he came to New York, according to the confidential documents he provided, he was the owner of a company with more than $4 billion, or roughly $4 billion in assets. But he’s now in bankruptcy here as a result of a whole set of-

Jeremy: I think you mentioned in your article that he paid in cash, like $68 million, was it? Was the number for that apartment, right?

Evan: Exactly. Yeah, he did. He paid no mortgage, $67.5 million. In his most recent financial filings, as part of the bankruptcy case and related litigation, he purports to own nothing. He purports to own no… He says, according to his lawyers, that he owns his clothing and his dog, which is a Pomeranian named Snow, and he has no apartment, he has no boat, the yacht are all… All of these things are owned, in fact, by family members or shell companies or other financial arrangements. To a certain cast of mind, I mean, this would be people who are his opponents, they’re describing this as the latest maneuver in this kind of chameleonic life that he’s had where he sort of seems to go from one thing to the next.

Jeremy: Basically, we don’t know how much money he has, but he probably still has a (beep) ton of money hidden away in various places.

Evan: According to his statements, he’s penniless, but I will note that he’s taping videos currently from a gorgeous estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. I don’t know where that all comes down. To go back to our very earliest point, he’s a survivalist, which is more than a survivor. He’s somebody who is expert at figuring out how to carry on.

Kaiser: Yeah. What a fascinating piece it was, though, and thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Evan: My pleasure.

Kaiser: Definitely check it out. It’s the current tissue of the New Yorker and savor it. It really rewards close reading.

Evan: Thanks guys.

Kaiser: Jeremy, man, since we’re kicking it old school and just kind of extemporizing, can you extemporize as we move into recommendations and make a plug for what people could do to support the work we do.

Jeremy: Well, I think the main thing is like a lot of people who listen to the podcast don’t actually give a (beep) about the newsletter that we do or the website. A lot of people that listen to the podcast may not necessarily want to enjoy all the other adventures of The China Project, but there’s a very good reason for subscribing to us. You get ad-free early access versions of Sinica on Mondays if you are a subscriber. So, please subscribe.

Kaiser: That’s instead of Thursday. Wow. Yeah. I don’t know, man. You think that’s the real reason to subscribe? Okay.

Jeremy: I’m trying to kick up the marketing. We can change that. Evan doesn’t need to know the sausage making of this dirty, media business. We can figure that out later.

Kaiser: It’ll work.

Evan: I’m just a humble, simple writer. I know not your fancy ways.

Jeremy: You’re lucky. All right. Recommendations. I am going to start with recommendations. And so, my recommendation is Evan’s article. I moved to the United States in 2015 after living in China for 20 years. I think it was sometime in 2015, must have been about this time of year, the fall, Evan published an article in the New Yorker about what would happen if Donald Trump became president. And it was the first time that I actually started to really worry about that possibility after reading that article. It gave me nightmares for months on end, but it was a most excellent introduction for me to what America was to become just after I moved to it. So, my recommendation is that article.

Kaiser: Yeah, there have been so many great Evan Osnos articles. I mean, your Joe Manchin piece I thought was just fantastic.

Evan: Thanks. Yeah. That story that Jeremy mentioned was, yeah, it was an act of what we would call speculative nonfiction and trying to anticipate, based on all reasonable clues, what it would actually be like.

Jeremy: It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever read, and then it came true.

Kaiser: Yeah. It was prescient. It was truly prescient.

Evan: I have a recommendation that is actually going to put a smile on your face. It’s so fun, which is, I was thinking about it in advance of our recording that there’s a new audio piece that’s just been put out. It’s in honor of my late great editor at the New Yorker, a guy named John Bennett, who is kind of a revered figure in our world. And there’s an audio, it’s a tribute to him, that has his voice and the voice of other writers like William Finnegan from the New Yorker, and Elizabeth Kolbert, and Nick Paumgarten, and you’ll have to hear me again. But the point of it is, you get these incredible lessons on how to be an editor and how to be editor. Anybody who’s a writer will sort of savor this. And I’ll just give you one example of a John Bennett-ism that he used to use, which is he said every writer is like a patient in a hospital wearing one of those gowns with a split down the back. And the editor’s job is to follow along and make sure that nobody can see their ass. He was a maestro. I commend everybody to hear this-

Jeremy: That is a wonderful line.

Evan: It was produced by the Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ll send the link.

Kaiser: Thanks. Do that. Yeah, fantastic. I’m going to recommend a novel that I finally got around to reading. I’d just been putting it off for a long time because, and weirdly, because I thought it would be sort of like too erudite and too full of theology and stuff. Turned out to have the opposite problem. It’s Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, which is really… I mean, it turns out it’s kind of a melodrama but a pretty compelling one with really fun characters. I mean, really evil villains and really noble good guys. And it’s not at all, I mean, there’s a lot of architecture which is good. I mean, the guy took an art history class or two, it seems, and knows all about flying buttresses and that. But it’s great. It turns out to be a really kind of rollicking good yarn.

Evan: I could use one of those right now, a good yarn.

Kaiser: Yeah, seriously, you might consider it.

Jeremy: I remember Ken Follett as… There was a Ken Follett’s novel in my high school library, which had a pornographic scene in it that was the talk of all my classmates. This was in the 1980s before the internet.

Kaiser: It might have been this, because there are a couple of highly pornographic scenes in this novel. And including some really, really disturbing ones. I mean, I should definitely put a trigger warning on here, because there is… No, don’t laugh, I mean, it’s terrible. I’m sure a lot of readers were just utterly shocked by it because it’s a violent, horrible rape.

Jeremy: I’m sorry, I’m going to laugh at trigger warnings.

Kaiser: Don’t laugh at that trigger warning, but no, it’s really good. Although good for very different reasons than I had anticipated. Anyway, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.

Jeremy: Nothing to do with pornographic aspects clearly.

Kaiser: No, no, no. Evan, man, thanks so much.

Jeremy: That was such fun, Evan.

Evan: Thanks guys. It was great to be with you on this topic or any topic.

Jeremy: Yeah. But this topic, wow. We could just talk to you for like 12 hours on this and have fun. Anyway, you have things to do.

Evan: See you back here, I hope.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: Yeah. Thanks a lot, man. Jeremy, as always.

Jeremy: Yes, Kaiser.

Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.