The Billionaire Gadfly in Exile Who Stared Down Beijing
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ALEXANDRA STEVENSONMay 31, 2017
郭文贵，逼迫中国做出让步的流亡者
《纽约时报》 傅才德, 艾莎 2017年5月31日
The biggest political story in China this year isn’t in Beijing. It isn’t even in China. It’s centered in a $68 million apartment overlooking Central Park in Manhattan.
That’s where Guo Wengui, a billionaire in self-imposed exile, has hurled political grenades at the Chinese Communist Party for months, accusing senior leaders of graft using Twitter as his loudspeaker. He escalated his attack by claiming that members of the family of China’s second most powerful official, who oversees the country’s anticorruption effort, secretly own a large stake in a major Chinese conglomerate.
The Chinese government responded by unleashing the state-controlled media to enumerate Mr. Guo’s alleged frauds, and asking Interpol to put out a global warrant for his arrest.
But then something unexpected happened. China stood down. The state media campaign against him tapered off. In mid-May, Mr. Guo announced on Twitter that his wife and daughter — previously barred from leaving China — had been allowed to visit him in New York.
“We need to root out some of the robbers of this country,” Mr. Guo, referring to China, told two New York Times reporters this month at his apartment. To emphasize the point, he wrote it out in Chinese in a notebook. “We are against using corruption to root out corruption.”
Mr. Guo’s allegations are unproved, and some of his claims have been outlandish and easily debunked. Yet amid his barrage of charges about China’s powerful and wealthy are claims that have turned out to be accurate. And the government’s treatment of Mr. Guo, whose former political patron was one of China’s highest-ranking intelligence officials, suggests that he may be taken seriously, perhaps even supported, by some officials in Beijing.
Mr. Guo’s most recent claims have reverberated across China and fed unease on Wall Street about doing business there. The assertions, if substantiated, could upend politics in China, the world’s second-biggest economy, possibly driving a wedge between President Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan, the anticorruption czar.
Mr. Wang, the focus of Mr. Guo’s allegations, has close ties to Wall Street, with enormous influence over China’s financial sector. Mr. Guo’s assertions come just months before a Communist Party meeting that will decide whether Mr. Wang, recently the focus of speculation that he may become China’s next prime minister, will remain on the party’s elite Politburo Standing Committee.
Mr. Guo’s Twitter broadsides have continued, and his ability to stare down the world’s most powerful authoritarian nation has underscored the mystery, in China and abroad, about how he acquired his billions, what he knows and who, if anyone, is backing him.
His ambitions, like his personality, are big and sometimes baffling. He says he has a plan to exorcise graft from the party, bring rule of law to China, and put ties with America on a stable track by ending decades of Chinese skullduggery on trade. At other times, he explains his corruption allegations as an act of vengeance for a long-ago death. He could, though, just be a man feeling pressure, his assets frozen in China and bad investments and lawsuits chipping away at his fortune.
No one better represents the marriage of the Party and money than Mr. Guo, known as Miles Kwok outside China, who parlayed relationships with some of China’s most powerful officials to help build a global portfolio including hotels, office buildings and securities brokerages.
Show Mr. Guo a spreadsheet listing the shareholders of the giant Chinese company, HNA, which has been buying up businesses in the West, and he’ll rattle off the names of the prominent families who he claims really control their stakes. Ask him to map out family trees for those names, the key to tracking ill-gotten wealth in China, and he’ll do it from memory, down to the sisters, the cousins and the aunts.
“The allegations with regard to HNA simply aren’t true,” a spokesperson for HNA said.
“关于海航的指控是不真实的，”海航的一位发言人说。
Over a decade ago, the Chinese Communist Party welcomed businessmen into its ranks. In turn, those tycoons helped make the sons and daughters of the revolution rich while helping the country show spectacular growth rates. Now, armed with information, one of them has strayed.
“These people have power and influence and knowledge,” said William C. Kirby, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Many of them are easily controlled. But others go off the reservation.”
“这些人掌握着权力、影响力和知识，”哈佛大学商学院(Harvard Business School)的教授柯伟林(William C. Kirby)说。“其中很多人容易控制。但其他人会走到笼外去。”
Mr. Guo has gone farther than anyone else. When the party retaliated against him, the state-controlled Beijing News reported that he was suspected of obtaining a “fraudulent loan” worth 3.2 billion yuan ($466 million) from one state-owned bank. Another publication, Caixin, referring to documents from Mr. Wang’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said that Mr. Guo had arranged for $299 million of client’s funds at a securities firm he controlled to be illegally transferred out of the brokerage.
The government’s most potent weapon was the release in April of a videotaped confession of Ma Jian,a former spymaster and political patron to Mr. Guo, who said he had accepted more than $8.7 million in gifts from Mr. Guo in exchange for favors, including frequent interventions with officials to short-circuit any obstacles to his property projects. “Guo Wengui, to ingratiate me, to thank me, and to maintain his relationship with me, gave me a huge amount of benefits,” Mr. Ma said in the video.
Mr. Guo’s presence in the United States poses a dilemma for the Trump administration, which is seeking China’s cooperation to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. In recent years Mr. Guo provided Washington with insights into Chinese politics through his visits with embassy officials in Beijing, according to one former senior administration official.
Mr. Guo, who is a member of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private Palm Beach club, is eager to get close to the powerful. On Tuesday, he wrote on Twitter that he flew to Washington for meetings at the Trump International Hotel. He contributed to charitable work by Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, who calls him a friend.
When the Times reporters visited Mr. Guo’s apartment at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in late April, he stepped away to take a phone call in another room, with the speakerphone on. His assistant explained that a top aide to Mr. Xi was on the line. The implication was obvious: Despite his unprecedented public tirades against some top officials, Mr. Guo was communicating with the one who matters most.
As with many of Mr. Guo’s claims, it wasn’t possible to confirm who was on the other end of the call, but the episode was fully in keeping with Mr. Guo’s showman personality. That flair for the dramatic is typical of him, said one longtime acquaintance who has been present when he takes calls from Mr. Ma, the former intelligence official.
Many Chinese dissidents and journalists working outside of the state media umbrella cast Mr. Guo as a hero for his outspoken criticism. Some who know him, though, say that he can be ruthless. A Beijing vice mayor who once stood in his way to securing property rights for an elaborate plaza at the 2008 Olympic Games park was ousted and given a suspended death sentence for bribery after Mr. Guo obtained a tape showing the official having sex with a mistress.
Mr. Guo also takes aim at news organizations that write unflattering stories about him. In 2015, Caixin wrote a lengthy investigative story about his business and political connections. In response, Mr. Guo accused its editor of having an affair and a child with his former business partner, even publishing what he claimed was the child’s national identity card number. Caixin is suing Mr. Guo for libel.
His public attacks against the leadership of the country he fled two years ago began in January. Using Twitter, and in a televised interview last month on Voice of America, Mr. Guo said a top police official, at the behest of President Xi, had asked him several years ago to look into Mr. Wang’s family finances.
两年前，他逃离中国。他对中国领导人的公开攻击始于1月。通过Twitter和上月在美国之音(Voice of America)上的一个电视采访，郭文贵说几年前，中国警界的一名最高官员按习近平的吩咐，让他调查王岐山的家庭财务情况。
When the Chinese government eased up on its barrage against Mr. Guo, the about-face suggested that that the Communist Party’s top leadership may not agree on how to deal with him, according to Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies finance and politics in China. “If the party were unified in opposing Guo Wengui, his family would have had much harsher treatment,” he said.
加州大学圣迭戈分校(University of California, San Diego)研究中国金融和政治的教授史宗瀚(Victor Shih)认为，当中国政府减少了对郭文贵的攻击，这种态度的大转变表明，在如何处理郭文贵的问题上，其最高领导层可能存在分歧。“如果党内一致反对郭文贵，对他家人的处理应该会严厉得多，”他说。
Seeking Revenge
寻求复仇
Away from his homeland, Mr. Guo still enjoys the high life. On Twitter, where his profile page portrays him as a male version of the Mockingjay from the “Hunger Games” series, he showed off his new private Airbus jet. When giving a tour of his 18th-floor New York apartment —shared with a Bichon Frise puppy — he pointed out the Lalique crystal chandelier, Louis XVI furniture and an ancient Chinese watercolor painting. The monthly maintenance fees alone for the apartment are $58,000.
Mr. Guo boasts of multiple residences around the world, including in Beijing, London, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. His oceanside home there, with sweeping views of Repulse Bay, sits on two lots which Mr. Guo’s son bought for $880 million Hong Kong dollars ($113 million) in 2011, according to property records.
His lakeside property in Beijing is modeled on a traditional one-story courtyard home but is far more elaborate, with multiple levels, a cavernous closet with hundreds of identical suits, and a pool in a complex of more than 86,000 square feet. One real estate agent in Beijing estimated its value at about $230 million.
Mr. Guo took Mr. Kirby, then a Harvard dean, on a two-hour tour of the property in 2004. The group was ushered into a private theater, the lights dimmed, and Strauss’s Radetsky’s March began to play as Mr. Guo made a videotaped introduction to a development he planned near the site of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. He and a Beijing vice mayor then asked Harvard to locate a campus on the complex, Mr. Kirby recalled.
At dinner, he pressed his case, all the while watching a Chinese soap opera on a tiny television screen. “It was, still to this day, the most bizarre evening I have ever spent in China,” Mr. Kirby said. (Harvard did not take up Mr. Guo’s offer.)
Mr. Guo says the motivation for his corruption allegations is simple: he claims the state shot one of his brothers in 1989 and he’s been plotting his revenge ever since. The circumstances of the death are murky, though, like much of Mr. Guo’s story.
Mr. Guo says that during the 1989 Tiananmen student protests, he was arrested for giving money to the student movement and jailed for two years. But an overseas Chinese website, citing court documents, says Mr. Guo had been arrested in a fraud involving oil sales and that his brother was killed when he and Mr. Guo attacked police.
He says he was born in May, 1970, one of 10 boys in a family with ties to the army from a small town in eastern China’s Shandong province. (Legal documents say he was born in February, 1967.) In prison, Mr. Guo, who only had a middle-school education, learned about Chinese history and other topics from educated inmates, he says.
After his release in 1991, Mr. Guo met a prominent businesswoman, who introduced him to wealthy investors. Soon after he built a hotel in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, which became a meeting spot for government officials.
Those contacts and later relationships with other officials, including Mr. Ma, the spy chief, helped Mr. Guo build up his empire. He later expanded into finance, acquiring a large stake in a securities brokerage. In 2014, the Hurun Report, which tracks the fortunes of China’s elite, estimated his wealth at $2.3 billion. But that same year, Mr. Guo’s ambition to take control of one of China’s biggest brokerages fell apart and he had a dispute with his business partner, who was later jailed.
Since then, he has lived abroad and his assets in China — he claims 120 billion yuan ($17.4 billion) in all — have been frozen. Mr. Guo is facing financial pressures.
One hedge fund in Hong Kong has alleged that he owes $88 million. The fund, Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund, recently sued him in New York, saying that he has racked up millions of dollars in interest in loans from 2008.
一家位于香港的对冲基金声称，郭文贵欠该基金8800万元。这家名为太盟亚洲机会基金(Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund)的公司最近在纽约起诉他，称他从2008年起已经累积拖欠了数百万美元的贷款利息。
Last year, he sued the Swiss bank UBS, arguing that he was misled in a series of transactions that resulted in a $500 million loss for him, but the suit was dismissed. Caixin published a story last week saying that Mr. Blair had introduced Mr. Guo to Abu Dhabi’s crown prince. Mr. Guo later used money from Abu Dhabi to finance a failed takeover of a Chinese securities firm which resulted in the the loss, Caixin reported. A representative for Mr. Blair did not address whether Mr. Blair had made introductions for Mr. Guo. Mr. Guo said the story was groundless.
One claim Mr. Guo made in March regarding the hidden wealth a prominent Chinese family could be substantiated by company documents, the Times reported in April. Going after Mr. Wang, though, is particularly risky.
The 68-year-old official has a reputation for being a problem-solver who has worked closely with American executives, including Henry M. Paulson, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs and treasury secretary. His many proteges are in influential positions throughout China’s government. Mr. Wang didn’t respond to faxed questions sent to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in Beijing. HNA declined to comment.
这位68岁的官员以擅长解决问题著称，曾与多位美国高管有过密切合作，其中包括前高盛(Goldman Sachs)首席执行官、前美国财政部长亨利·M·保尔森(Henry M. Paulson)。他的嫡系人物在中国政府内身居多个要职。王岐山没有回复传真到位于北京的中央纪律检查委员会的问题。海航集团拒绝置评。
“Wang Qishan has been the model of clean and competent, and all but untouchable,” said William Zarit, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. “Should his star fall, business and government players should be concerned about their own safety.”
There’s no sign that Mr. Guo is letting up. Before the Communist Party meets this fall to pick a slate of top leaders, Mr. Guo plans his most dramatic assault of all, a live event, perhaps from Lincoln Center, that will focus on Chinese corruption.
