By Tom Fowdy
In 2014, change was afoot in China. The new administration of Xi Jinping initiated a historic anti-corruption effort within the country's ruling party. This effort was part of a structural shift which would reassert the party's authority over the nation, especially over its private sector, and row back the creeping liberalisation and structural stress endured in previous years amidst China's massive development and social transformation.
From a political point of view, this Anti-corruption effort involved bringing the country's wealthy classes under control and stopping excessive wealth from exerting malign political influence contrary to the hierarchical system of the party. Amidst the "casualties" from this effort was a faction linked to businessman Guo Wenghui, who was at the time China's 74thrichest person and had made significant wealth in the field of real estate.
By 2014, Guo left China, and by 2017, became an open dissident against the Communist Party at a time when US tensions with Beijing were deteriorating. Guo's dissident against the party was endorsed and platformed by the BBC, Voice of America, The New York Times, amongst others. At around the same time, China put out an Interpol notice calling for Guo's arrest, accusing him of fraud through his investment companies. The United States ignored this, and a personal appeal to Trump himself was also dismissed, with the President seeing him as diplomatic leverage.
In the years that followed, the Western media ecosystem depicted Guo as a dissident who was experiencing a campaign of state persecution by China. Organizations such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), then funded by the US State Department, amongst others, accused China of running state operations against him on social media through bot accounts, amongst other things. In the meantime, while in the United States, Guo grew close to the MAGA establishment and developed a partnership with Steve Bannon and created "GNews" or "GTV," an outlet which actively spread Anti-China misinformation, including related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and bigging up individuals such as Li-Meng Yan to spread conspiracies and bringing her into the US Conservative ecosystem.
As a part of this effort, Guo created many Anti-Communist Party "NGOs" and "non-profit" organisations, including the "Himalaya organization", "The new Federal State of China" amongst others. However, behind these elaborate attempts to try and bring about "regime change" in China was a more sinister purpose. Guo had utilised them as a front in order to siphon money from Chinese dissident activists, which was then fraudulently used for his own personal and financial gain, having of course positioned himself as a key dissident figure. This included raising nearly $1 billion dollars, which was then used "to fund Guo's lavish lifestyle, which included a 50,000 square foot mansion, a $1m Lamborghini, and a $37m yacht."
For doing this, Guo has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. But one might ask, how did he make it this far? The answer is obvious: In the US and Western understandings of China, there is genuinely a believe that someone who is legally persecuted by the state, when there is a political context, so to speak, is guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever, and should be heralded as a brave dissident and a hero. This is an ideological error which assumes that because China's legal system is part of the party structure, it means that nobody can seriously be accused in good faith and that any charges against them must be ramped up, opportunistic, or forced. Over the years, we have seen many examples of this happening, such as the two Michaels situation, which while undoubtedly a dynamic of the Meng Wanzhou arrest (also political) in 2018, was nonetheless dismissed as being falsified even when evidence of espionage emerged later in a Canadian court case. Similarly, the Western media frames those arrested under Hong Kong's national security law as victims, even though such crimes regarding the events of 2019-2020 would not be tolerated in their own countries, amongst many other examples.
As a result, Western media and governments were blindsided by the reality that, actually, Guo Wenghui was a conman who engaged in corrupt business practices, and once the system cracked down on it, he fled China. He positioned himself as a dissident not only to secure his own political survival and asylum within the US, which worked, and thus muddy the waters regarding accusations back him, but also to then engage in more fraudulent activities. It should be noted very clearly that not everyone who rails against China's Communist Party is a saint. In the West, democracy and freedom are seen as a political religion of sorts, which act as ideologically tinted glasses that prevent people from introspecting human nuance, as if nobody who ever uttered such holistic words could ever have malign intentions.
As a result, Guo is just one of many Anti-China causes people rallied behind only for it to… not age well…
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