What you need to know about China’s most wanted man

By Zheping Huang

Can't stop won't stop.

The Chinese government can’t seem to do anything about its most wanted man, who now lives in exile in the US.
Guo Wengui is not the first businessperson to have fled China, perhaps with secret information about the ruling elite. 

Previous fugitives, however, have either decided to stay silent and keep their whereabouts secret (paywall), or have been forcefully taken back to China before they can kick up too much of a fuss.
Guo is an outlier. 

Equipped with masterful social media skills, and protected by bodyguards (link in Chinese) in his Manhattan penthouse, Guo has been making serious accusations of corruption against China’s former and current officials. 

One of them, Wang Qishan, is widely considered the second-most powerful man in the nation.
The episode offers a good example of how the intricate ties between China’s rich and powerful can risk turning into a liability. 

If Guo is to be believed, China’s ruling Communist Party may be far more corrupt than the party is ready to ever publicly admit.

Who the heck is he?
Guo, also known as Miles Kwok, is a Chinese property tycoon who has been living overseas for more than two years. 

At the height of his career, Guo had a net worth of $2.6 billion, ranking 74th among China’s richest in 2014, according to the Hurun Report. 

One of his most well-known properties is the Pangu Plaza, a torch-shaped building close to Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

The 50-year-old billionaire first came to the spotlight during a corporate feud in late 2014. 

At the time Guo sought to acquire a large stake in Founder Securities, China’s sixth-largest brokerage, but squabbled over the terms with his former business partner Li You, who was the head of Founder’s state-owned parent.
The aborted business deal ended badly for both sides. 

In January 2015, Li was arrested by police on alleged corruption charges, and soon afterwards, Ma Jian, a former deputy spy chief who is reportedly a close ally to Guo, was also investigated for corruption.
In March 2015, Chinese financial news outlet Caixin published an investigative report (link in Chinese) detailing how Guo developed close ties with high-ranking Chinese officials including Ma to further his business interests. 

The report also revealed that in 2006 Guo secretly recorded a sex tape of a Beijing deputy mayor for not approving the Pangu project initially.
Guo denied that report and launched a personal attack on Caixin’s influential editor-in-chief Hu Shuli. 

In response, Caixin sued Guo for defamation.

What does he allege?
Since then, Guo has stayed quiet for the most part as he shuttled between Europe and the US—until recently. 

In the last few months he has taken to Twitter enthusiastically and granted several interviews with US-based publications, accusing former and current Chinese Communist Party officials of corruption.
“Striving for China’s true rule of law!” he says in his Twitter bio. 

“This is just the beginning!”
One of his latest allegations of corruption is against Wang Qishan, China’s top graft-buster who’s known to be a close ally of Xi Jinping. 

In a live interview with the Voice of America (VOA) last week, Guo claimed that deputy national police chief Fu Zhenhua, on behalf of Xi, had demanded he look into Wang’s nephew’s investment in Hainan Airlines—a very busy acquirer of travel-related assets around the world in the last few years. 

Guo said that Fu had made threats against his family to force him to cooperate. 

Guo said Fu told him that “Chairman Xi just uses (Wang), but doesn’t trust him.”
Guo also went after Wang’s predecessor, He Guoqiang, the former top disciplinary official before Xi came to office in 2012. 

In a March interview with Mirror Media Group, a Chinese-language news outlet based in Long Island, Guo claimed that He’s son He Jintao was the behind-the-scenes backer of Guo’s business rival Li You, the second-biggest shareholder in Founder Securities, who is now in jail.
The New York Times, citing corporate records and an interview with He’s relative, reported (paywall) that the He family did appear to control a stake in Founder through a series of shell companies.
Guo claims his assets in China were seized, and that his family members and former employees are being detained. 

He says he owns 11 passports, including ones from the European Union and the US, and that he hasn’t used any Chinese identification for more than two decades.

What does the Chinese government say?
China has asked Interpol, the international police organization, to issue a “red notice” to seek Guo’s arrest. 

Countries do not have to honor a red notice, which is not an international arrest warrant. 

In November, Interpol appointed a Chinese security official as its new chief.
Chinese authorities did not give reasons for the notice, which was issued just before Guo’s VOA interview. 

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported, citing unidentified sources, that Guo is accused of giving about $9 million in bribes to Ma, the disgraced former spy-master.
Guo said in the VOA interview that he was in regular contact with FBI agents, and was not worried about being arrested.
VOA said Chinese officials had expressed concerns about Guo’s interview. 

The Chinese foreign ministry has threatened not to renew VOA’s correspondents’ visas in China in response to the interview. 

VOA abruptly ended the interview early, and later said in a statement that it was due to a “miscommunication.”
Meanwhile, China is publicly going after Guo. 

After the VOA interview, Ma, who has not gone on trial yet, appeared for the first time after his arrest in a 20-minute video on YouTube to confess that he had misused his power to help Guo gain business interests in return for gifts including cash and properties.
The Beijing News reported (link in Chinese), citing unidentified government sources, that two executives of Guo’s Beijing-based companies were arrested last week for bribery and fraud charges. The newspaper also revealed that Xiang Junbo—China’s insurance regulator who was recently arrested—helped Guo get loans that Guo later misappropriated to buy a Hong Kong property in 2014, when Xiang was still working at Agricultural Bank of China, one of the nation’s big-four state banks.
So he must be a big deal.
Guo’s fight against the party establishment comes on the eve of its major leadership reshuffle this fall, when Xi is slated to start his second five-year term.
In the past five years, Xi has netted thousands of allegedly corrupt officials in a seemingly never-ending, ruthless anti-graft campaign steered by his powerful ally Wang. 

Speculation is mounting that Xi is likely to break an unwritten rule on retirement age in the party to let 68-year-old Wang seek a second term. 

Guo’s claims against Wang would seriously damage the legitimacy of Xi’s anti-corruption efforts.
The Chinese Communist Party also hates uncertainty, and Guo’s very public crusade against it is exactly what the party does not need, especially ahead of major events. 

Guo said that in the next few weeks he plans (link in Chinese) to hold a tell-all press conference on China’s anti-corruption campaign, and said he has information on four specific officials including Wang Qishan.
At least for now, no one appears to be able to stop Guo from speaking out from his Manhattan home.

Can anyone stop him?
For a few brief moments, it seemed that Guo may have been silenced.
Twitter briefly suspended Guo’s account today (April 27). 

Almost all of his 103,000 followers had disappeared when the account was back up and running, but those followers were later restored. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A similar episode happened to Guo’s Facebook account last week. 

The account was restored after Guo complained about his suspension from Facebook on Twitter. Facebook said that the suspension was a mistake (paywall) due to the company’s automated systems, without elaborating.

Axis of Evil: The New Gestapo

Interpol Is Helping Enforce China’s Political Purges

Beijing is happy to take advantage of an international red notice system that is notoriously easy to abuse — and is now overseen by a Chinese official.
By Bethany Allen-ebrahimian

The New Gestapo

In November 2016, Interpol, the international police body, received its first Chinese president, Meng Hongwei. 

This wasn’t strange: China is a member in good standing of the organization, and Meng, who had previously served as vice minister of public security in Beijing, was duly elected by its general assembly. 

But Meng’s ascension also aroused suspicion because of China’s own record on blurring police work and politics — a pattern that will carry over into Interpol’s work.
Those simmering suspicions bubbled over this week. 

After a Chinese billionaire based abroad threatened to reveal high-level corruption in his home country, Beijing rapidly requested and was granted an Interpol red notice against him — that is, an official request for his arrest and extradition issued by the intergovernmental organization that facilitates police cooperation among its 190 member countries. 

The timing gives reason to believe that China’s motive is purely political and that Interpol is becoming an extension of the increasingly long reach of the Chinese state.
In March, Guo Wengui, a charismatic real estate tycoon who left China two years ago and now resides in the United States, gave two interviews to a U.S.-based Chinese-language media outlet in which he claimed that one of China’s most powerful families has enriched itself by leveraging political connections to gain holdings in large companies.
Guo said he had learned through business dealings that the family of He Guoqiang, a former member of the Politburo, the highest ruling body in China, controlled a large but hidden stake in one of China’s biggest brokerage firms, and threatened to reveal further details of the He family’s wealth. 

But his allegations went largely unnoticed until a New York Times investigation, published on April 15, traced the He family’s business holdings and backed up his claims.
Three days later, Interpol issued a red notice alleging that Guo had bribed a former top Chinese official who is now under investigation for corruption. 

Beijing reportedly requested the red notice, according to anonymous sources who spoke to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. 

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the news but took no responsibility, stating only, “We have learnt that the Interpol has issued a red notice on suspect Guo Wengui.”
Guo’s residence in the United States puts him out of the direct reach of the Chinese Communist Party — but not of harassment conducted through Interpol’s easily abusable system. 

Interpol red notices are essentially a data-sharing mechanism between police forces in its member countries, allowing law enforcement to communicate internationally about wanted criminals. 

The notices are not legally binding and are enforced differently in different countries, or not enforced at all.
But some countries — Russia, the Central Asian nations, Turkey, Venezuela, and China — issue politically motivated red notices against dissidents, activists, and journalists. 

Issuing such warnings, even if they do not lead to arrest, can harm the reputation of the targets, turn routine financial matters into criminal actions, and make it harder to live an ordinary life. 

Interpol has previously refused to issue some red notices on the grounds that they involve purely political charges, such as the attempt by the Russian government to harass American-born whistleblower Bill Browder.
It’s no surprise that China is using every tool it can to go after Guo. 

High-level corruption is a sensitive topic in China, where Xi Jinping has led a sweeping anti-corruption campaign and political purge that has felled some of the country’s most powerful political elites, including former security czar Zhou Yongkang and former military chief Xu Caihou. 

The anti-corruption campaign has cemented Xi’s own power, sweeping away opponents and helping make Xi the most influential Chinese leader in decades.
He Guoqiang, however, has faced no official allegations of corruption; he was the top anti-graft official under former Chinese President Hu Jintao. 

And the Chinese Communist Party wants to be the only judge of its members’ purity. 

Charges of corruption originating outside the party against unauthorized targets are rarely tolerated. 

China experts and human rights watchdogs suspect that is the true reason for the Interpol red notice — to silence an embarrassing critic.
“The 19th Party Congress is only about six months away,” Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter and longtime observer of Chinese elite politics, commented on April 19. 

“Xi does not want to lose control of the narrative and any credible revelations of high-level infighting or corruption by the family of Wang Qishan” — another top official Guo mentioned in his interview — “could create enough noise to hinder Xi’s preferred personnel arrangements at the 19th Party Congress.”
In recent years, China has made use of red notices as it has expanded its anti-graft campaign beyond its borders. 

In 2015, China hailed the issuance of 100 red notices against economic fugitives, largely as part of its “Sky Net” operation, which seeks to repatriate and punish corrupt Chinese officials and businesspeople who have fled abroad. 

Chinese media have repeatedly emphasized the power of the Chinese authorities to reach anywhere in the world, broadcasting scenes of fugitives, such as former official Yang Xiuzhu, being escorted by police through Beijing’s airport.
“Interpol’s red notice system is vulnerable to weaponization by abusive regimes in the guise of criminal prosecution of dissidents, journalists, human rights defenders, and others fleeing persecution,” said Rebecca Shaeffer, a senior legal and policy advisor at Fair Trials, a Brussels- and London-based advocacy organization that has closely followed Interpol red notices for years, in an interview with Foreign Policy.

Interpol has several organizational flaws that make it particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Like the police bodies from which it’s built, the opaque organization is often unwilling to divulge information publicly. 

Most red notices are not made public, and there is no public database to search the more than 100,000 notices in active circulation. 

The evidence backing up the allegations is also frequently kept private, making it difficult to verify whether or not an alert is justifiable. 

Until recent procedural reforms, it was difficult and time-consuming to get politically motivated red notices removed from circulation.
“What we can say is that the timing raises serious questions about the integrity of Interpol’s internal vetting procedures for issuing red notices,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia, in a phone interview with FP.
The vast majority of notices are not politically motivated. 

But those that are can be difficult to detect. 

“Most of the time, if someone is wanted for a legitimate red notice, people stay hidden. They know that it’s for a valid arrest warrant,” Michelle Estlund, a Florida-based lawyer who specializes in defending against Interpol red notices, told FP in a phone interview. 

“The people who come looking for assistance to deal directly with Interpol feel that the red notices issued against them are invalid.”
Estlund explained that it isn’t Interpol’s job to determine innocence or guilt when evaluating a request for a red notice. 

Rather, it determines whether or not the requesting country has followed appropriate laws and procedures to request the notice.
“The tricky part is for Interpol to know this information when they receive the red notice. It’s almost impossible for them to know that,” Estlund said. 

“There is a basic criteria that Interpol requires upon receipt of the application, and there is a review process in place, but for Interpol to review every application would be virtually impossible.”
In other words, the system is based in large part on trust — a trust that politically motivated red notices violate. 

“China and Russia have abused the trust on which the system rests,” Bequelin said. 

“Interpol does play a role in fighting international crime. If the system is broken and becomes perceived as a political tool, then it will hinder law enforcement efforts worldwide.”
But red notices are just one tool available to a Chinese state increasingly seeking to extend its influence over unruly citizens abroad — and they are highly effective, often resulting in frozen bank accounts and travel restrictions. 

Others include threats, coercion, and kidnappings. 

In 2015, four booksellers in Hong Kong and one in Thailand went missing. 

All Chinese-born, the five men had published books containing information that Beijing deemed sensitive. 

They later turned up in custody on the Chinese mainland. 

Upon release, one described how he had been kidnapped and spirited over the border into the mainland without normal judicial procedure. 

The kidnappings have cast a chill over Hong Kong, once believed to be beyond the reach of Chinese political oppression.
As a result, Meng’s election further alarmed international human rights advocates, including Bequelin. 

“This is extraordinarily worrying given China’s longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad,” Bequelin said at the time. 

“Unlike most law enforcement agencies around the world, the Chinese police have a political mandate to protect the power of the Communist Party.”
The concern is that extralegal methods and political motivations are being merged within international rules and institutions and that, with a Chinese public security official in an influential position, Interpol’s bureaucratic incentives might tilt away from facilitating legitimate investigative work.
Estlund told FP that Meng’s election was concerning primarily due to the lack of sufficient rule of law or human rights protections in China. 

“I think that anytime the leadership of a law enforcement organization like Interpol comes from a country where there are significant human rights concerns — of course that is going to be a concern,” she said. 

“I would not say that that concern is limited only to this particular president. I would have a concern if the president hailed from any one of a variety of countries where there are routinely documented human rights violations.”
Chinese state-run media have suggested that Meng’s election will be a boon to the international expansion of China’s own anti-graft campaign. 

One November 2016 article in the party-affiliated Beijing Youth Daily hailed Interpol as the most effective platform for combating international crime and pursuing stolen goods and highlighted how well that fit with China’s own recent emphasis on fighting corruption and recovering assets lost through corruption. 

“Against this backdrop, a Chinese person has been elected as the head of Interpol,” continued the article, “which undoubtedly further reflects the recognition that Interpol and international society now give to China’s own rule of law.”

Another sign of Chinese influence over the international crime-fighting organization is the continued exclusion of Taiwan.

China claims sovereignty over the self-ruling island and has worked steadily to reduce its participation in international organizations where its membership might be seen as a sign of Taiwanese nationhood. 

Interpol rejected Taiwan’s bid to participate in the November 2016 general assembly in which Meng was elected.
But Shaeffer expressed less concern about direct Chinese influence over Interpol, telling FP that the position of Interpol president is largely ceremonial. 

“Meng Hongwei’s presidency of Interpol’s executive committee has brought attention to China’s history of using Interpol red notices to pursue dissidents, activists, and others who have fled its persecution over the years,” she said. 

“But presidents of Interpol don’t have the power to issue alerts. That role sits with Interpol’s secretariat, who are bound by Interpol’s rules and constitution, which were beefed up at the end of last year to prevent abuse.”
The problem, according to Shaeffer, is that any country already has the ability to issue politically motivated red notices if desired. 

“These rules must now be implemented and enforced to stop China from misusing this global crime-fighting tool,” she remarked.
Those rules have not yet seemed to protect Guo. 

But the red notice hasn’t silenced him. 

On April 19, he gave an interview to Voice of America in which he made further claims of corruption and misbehavior among several high-ranking Chinese officials and their relatives. 

Whether he’ll be able to keep making those claims — and what other techniques Beijing will bring to bear against him — is another question.

Rogue Nation

Greater Corruption in China? A Billionaire Has Evidence
By Michael Forsythe
Guo Wengui has criticized the effectiveness of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign.
It happens in Russia — occasionally.
An oligarch, made fabulously wealthy through the privatization of state assets, breaks ranks, becoming a critic of President Vladimir V. Putin.
China was different.
Its growing ranks of billionaires often owe their fortunes to the good graces of the Communist Party and its leading families.
But the firsthand knowledge that the country’s tycoons might have of the complex shareholding ties that serve to enrich the political elite had stayed secret.
That changed this year.
In two rambling interviews with a New York-based media company lasting more than four hours, Guo Wengui, a real estate magnate, described what he said was a ferocious struggle that culminated two years ago in the collapse of a business deal pitting him against relatives of a retired top Communist Party official, He Guoqiang.
Since then, Mr. Guo has lived abroad, and is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In going public with his charges, Mr. Guo demonstrated just how dangerous a loose-lipped billionaire can be to China’s Communist Party.
The party still strives to cultivate an image of selfless service to the nation, with state-run news media repeatedly emphasizing that no official is immune to Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive, now in its fifth year.
If Mr. Guo is to be believed, Xi, when he assumed leadership of the Communist Party in November 2012, may have faced a far more serious corruption problem than has been publicly disclosed, touching not only the departing chief of the country’s security forces but perhaps also the top official in charge of rooting out graft in the party’s own ranks, Mr. He.
Both were members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the elite body that wields supreme power in China.
“If you are Xi Jinping and you are deciding to go after corruption, can you take them on all at once?” asked Andrew Wedeman, a professor of political science at Georgia State University who studies corruption in Chinese politics.

Zhou Yongkang, the former head of the security forces, in court in 2015.
The former head of the security forces, Zhou Yongkang, was prosecuted on graft charges and is now serving a life sentence in prison. 

But there is no report that He or members of his family have been prosecuted. 

To Mr. Guo, that demonstrates the weakness of the corruption crackdown: Among the elite, the campaign touches only those who are already on the losing side of factional power struggles.
Mr. Guo explained in a March 8 videotaped interview with Mirror Media Group, a Chinese-language news company based on Long Island, how He’s son He Jintao was the “boss” of the second-largest shareholder in Founder Securities, a company in which Mr. Guo was seeking to acquire a large stake. 

He Jintao concealed his role through a proxy, according to Mr. Guo.
That deal soured when Mr. Guo tried, without success, to name directors to Founder Securities’ board and became locked in a dispute with his former business partner, Li You, who was the chief executive of the brokerage’s state-owned parent, according to a report by Caixin, a Chinese news company.
Mr. Guo, using turns of phrase that wouldn’t be out of place in “The Godfather” or “The Sopranos,” said He Jintao was working against him.
“To be honest, if I could publish evidence about you, He Jintao, I promise that in 24 hours, 10 million people will take to the streets and will eat you alive,” Mr. Guo told Mirror Media.
Mr. Guo, who also goes by the name Miles Kwok, did not offer any proof of wrongdoing by the He family. 

But for all his bluster, there is some documentation to support his assertion that the family had a financial stake in Founder Securities.
In 2015, New York Times reporters working in Beijing, Hong Kong and the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu mapped out the financial network of He Guoqiang’s family, examining shareholding records and verifying relationships by interviewing a member of the family. 

Those documents and interviews show that the family did appear to control, indirectly through a series of shell companies, a stake in Founder Securities, which has a joint venture in China with Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank.
He Guoqiang, left, with Xi Jinping, center, and Jia Qinglin, a top official, during the Communist Party Congress in 2012.

Founder Securities is one of China’s biggest brokerages, with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion. 

Unusual for a securities company, it is based in the south-central province of Hunan, He Guoqiang’s native province. 

Its second-biggest shareholder at the time of its 2011 initial public offering was a company called Lide Technology Development.
Until at least mid-2014, Chinese company records show, Lide was controlled by companies tied to the He family. 

A member of the family identified one of the ultimate shareholders, Zhang Xiuqin, as He Jintao’s maternal aunt. 

Lide owns stakes in property, medical and financial companies across China worth more than $600 million, corporate records show.
Credit Suisse Founder, the joint venture, was begun in 2008, the first full year that He Guoqiang was on the Politburo Standing Committee, and it allowed the Swiss bank entry, through the venture, to China’s domestic investment banking market. 

Founder Securities retained majority control, with a two-thirds stake.
According to Bloomberg data, the venture underwrote one of its first initial public offerings in August 2010 — of a company called Hangzhou Shunwang Technology. 

One of this company’s directors was Liao Ying, whose name and biography on the company’s prospectus match those of He Jintao’s wife.
Moreover, at the time of the I.P.O., Hangzhou Shunwang’s third-biggest shareholder, owning almost 10 percent, was a company controlled by the He family and ultimately owned by two of its business associates, according to a review of Chinese corporate records. 

Credit Suisse Founder was also an adviser for Founder Securities’ own I.P.O. in 2011.
A spokeswoman for Credit Suisse in Hong Kong had no comment. 

Founder Securities and Hangzhou Shunwang did not respond to questions submitted via fax and email. 

He Jintao did not respond to a request for an interview made through his Beijing-based company, Womei Investment.
With a flourish of bluster and in the third person, Mr. Guo expressed just how heated the conflict was with the younger Mr. He, telling him, via a video interview viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, that more disclosures could come should their business interests clash again.
“Guo Wengui is from the grass roots, born as a farmer and not afraid of death,” Mr. Guo said. 

“If you do it again, then I would have no choice and will fire a cannon to you. I don’t want to war against you, but He Jintao, you had better watch carefully what you say and what you do, including with your wealth — you’ll be responsible for it.”