The Washington Free Beacon declared Guo a “leading Chinese dissident,” and Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, variously hailed him as the “Donald Trump of Beijing” and the “George Washington of the new China.” They started a media company together, and Guo awarded Bannon a million-dollar contract for “strategic consulting services.” When Bannon was arrested, in 2020, on fraud charges, he was aboard Guo’s superyacht, Lady May, off the coast of Connecticut. And, in America, Guo rebranded himself a critic of that very Communist Party, applied for asylum, gained membership at Mar-a-Lago, and secured protection from powerful conservatives who were staking out an emerging hard line against China. He fled China in 2014, after the downfall of his patron in the Communist Party, an enigmatic counterintelligence chief. He built a high-end property empire, symbolized by a dragon-shaped building complex in Beijing. Raised in the hinterlands of Shandong Province, Guo was a smooth-talking middle-school dropout who served time in jail before somehow finding his angles in the real-estate boom of the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands. Evan Osnos on how the Chinese tycoon became a darling of Trump Republicans.Įven the confirmed parts of Guo’s story have always been peculiar.
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