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at the National Press Club in Washington, 10-5-2017:
“What the U.S. ought to do is take action instead of just talking to the Chinese kleptocracy,” Guo said through a translator at the event, two days after a previously scheduled appearance at a think tank in the same city was postponed due to what he called heavy pressure from the Chinese government.
“They are just a tiny group of Mafia, pure and simple,” said Guo, also known as Miles Kwok, who lives in a $68 million apartment in New York City. “I would like all the members of the Chinese Communist Party to wake up and say no to this ruling clique.” Guo said he was aware of multiple initiatives by that clique in China to increase the number of spies in the U.S. and “to weaken the United States, to bring about turmoil in the United States and to ... decimate the United States. These plans pose great threats to the American people and their property,” Guo said. He claimed those efforts are “100 times or even 1,000 times” as potentially damaging as the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks…the Party’s own head of anticorruption activities, Wang Qishan, has unclean hands--Guo claims that Wang’s family secretly controls one of the largest conglomerates in China, the New York Times has reported….
Guo told reporters that he was jailed in China for 22 months after the government’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square, whose efforts he supported with donations. At around the same time, Guo said, “due to some kind of a trade dispute” that his brother became involved with, police shot and killed his younger brother as his brother tried to shield Guo’s wife from their bullets.
“The crime they gave me was so-called anti-revolutionary, and then they change it to obstruction of justice and fraud. They said I engaged in fraud and stole somebody’s money,” Guo said. Years before, during the Cultural Revolution, Guo said his father was beaten badly after being sent into internal exile, “my brothers were injured physically ... and my mother had a nervous breakdown….My only single goal ... is to change China,” he said. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/exiled-chinese-billionaire-blasts-kleptocracy-running-china.html
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In a recent Washington Times article Mr. Guo described his revelations as an effort to “expose the leviathan Chinese Mafia state, the most corrupt, tyrannical and brutal state on earth, bar North Korea, a state some of whose leaders systematically have stolen trillions of dollars of the Chinese people’s wealth.” http://initiativesforchina.org/?p=2766
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12-4-18 In an interview in his hotel room two weeks ago Mr. Bannon, 65, said the new China-related fund he will head, without pay (& coordinating with funder Guo), will gather evidence, share it with authorities--in the United States and elsewhere--and publish it in the media. The fund also targets Wall Street banks and law firms, which he says are complicit in China’s misdeeds….“The elites in this country have to be held accountable. We have to get the facts on the table.”
Mr. Guo, 50, insists that the fund offers a way to strike back at Beijing. China has pressed the Trump administration to extradite him so that he can face a raft of charges in China--allegations he strongly denies….
Bannon also lived for a time in Shanghai where he ran a small online gaming company. In recent years he has come to view China as a military threat to the United States and a fierce economic rival that refuses to play by the rules. In recent years he has come to view China as a military threat to the United States, and a fierce economic rival that refuses to play by the rules….
As Mr. Bannon sharpened his critique of China’s rise he also began meeting privately with some of America’s leading experts on China to seek their counsel and outline his agenda. Few welcomed his strident remarks, according to people who attended some of the sessions. But more recently, analysts say, his positions have gotten a warmer reception.
“The tectonic plates are shifting,” says Orville H. Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “Many analysts would have totally rejected him two years ago. But people are more sympathetic now that engagement with China has been defrocked.”….
Rule of Law Fund is the $100 million effort that Mr. Guo is financing. ... Bannon has also joined Mr. Guo in targeting the HNA Group, the huge Chinese conglomerate that borrowed heavily and spent billions around the world, before debt and regulatory pressures forced the company to curb its global ambitions. Until Twitter suspended his account late last year Mr. Guo was waging an online war against HNA and its top executives….
At their joint news conference last week Mr. Bannon took the stage at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to say “Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of the best and brightest” in China have disappeared, been imprisoned or committed suicide under unusual circumstances and without due process. “Today is about recklessness and accountability,” he added, noting that American financial institutions have close ties to political elites in Beijing. “Who profited off this? Who looked the other way?” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/stephen-bannon-guo-wengui-china.html…
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7-4-18 The billionaire co-founder and chairman of China’s HNA Group died Tuesday in an accident while on a business trip in Provence in southern France, the company said today. Wang Jian was 57. Local French media reported that a Chinese tourist the same age as Wang died while trying to take a photo on some steps near a church.
HNA Group has its origins in the regional Hainan Airlines in 1990 but had grown to become an international conglomerate. HNA had been aggressively expanding via takeovers in the past three years, acquiring stakes in Swissport, Gategroup, Deutsche Bank (DB) and Hilton International (HLT) in a buying spree that led U.S. lawmakers to call for a probe into the ownership of HNA.
But amid swelling debt and increasing attention from regulatory bodies, HNA began to unload its investments, divesting $14 billion in assets this year and reducing its stake in Deutsche to 7.6%. https://fortune.com/2018/07/04/china-billionaire-hna-group-wang-jian-died/
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12-22-17 Lawmakers are calling for a deeper look into of HNA Group’s pending and past takeovers of American companies, which could result in repealing the approval of earlier deals. The Wall Street Journal says the call for probes follows recent allegations by U.S. firm Ness Technologies that the Chinese conglomerate provided “knowingly false, inconsistent, and misleading information” regarding ownership and ties to the Chinese government during an interagency panel review. According to the WSJ, Ness Technologies had been trying to sell a New Jersey-based software engineering subsidiary to a Beijing-based unit of HNA for $325 million.
A spokesperson for HNA disputed the allegations, telling the WSJ, “This baseless and extortionist lawsuit by Ness makes egregiously inaccurate and fanciful claims that HNA has ties to the Chinese government and willfully misled CFIUS.”
The complaint added fuel to the fire of some on Capitol Hill, who have grown increasingly uneasy about the confusing ownership structure of the Chinese conglomerate since a July announcement revealed that a charitable foundation owned more than half of the firm and company executives and board members owned most of the rest. Reuters this week reported that regulators in New Zealand blocked an HNA deal for similar worries. Last month, Swiss regulators announced that the group had failed to disclose that company executives held stakes in the conglomerate during HNA’s $1.5 billion takeover in 2016 of airline caterer Gategroup.
“If these allegations are true, the government should consider using its ability to suspend future HNA transactions or retroactively reopen previous HNA agreements,” Rep. Robert Pittenger (R., N.C.) said in a statement to the WSJ, referring to the Ness lawsuit. https://fortune.com/2017/12/22/hna-probe-us-china-takeover/
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2-17-19 The following is an abstract of Mr. Bannon’s remarks: I had a number of meetings with some of the powerful lawyers in New York City, talking about the Rule of Law Fund, talking about what we are going to accomplish, and talking about how we are going to use the Rule of Law to bring freedom to China and the Chinese people.
The reception among the legal community here is pretty amazing. People are very excited about what we are doing. They love the concept that China needs some sets of rules or law, that everyone should be judged equally....The only way in which CCP can withstand the rule of law is to make up lies. When you have the law, everybody is treated fairly.
I think one of the reasons that the Chinese people have been so successful in places like Hong Kong which has British common law, or the United States in the west …When the Chinese come here they flourish or they are exceptional, because they are hard working, smart and they create the opportunities… because you have a system built on the rule of law.
I think that’s why the CCP, in the suppression of the Chinese people, understands that if they have the rule of law, you are going to have the flourishing of the little guy, which is kind of the global thing I have been working on. If you have the set of rules for the little guy, all hundred names throughout the world, he’s going to bye-bye the old and flourish, particularly in China.
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