Indicted tycoon Guo Wengui was a Mar a Lago member Bannon called the "Donald Trump of Beijing"

[pnwmom]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/how-a-tycoon-linked-to-chinese-intelligence-became-a-darling-of-trump-republicans

How a Tycoon Linked to Chinese Intelligence Became a Darling of Trump Republicans
Guo Wengui has been trailed by scandals involving corruption and espionage. What is he really after?



Donald Trump became the Republican Presidential front-runner that summer, and Guo’s instincts proved well suited to the emerging era; he had already joined Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, and he wasn’t shy about praising his own business acumen . . .

SNIP

For nearly a decade, he had maintained a secret partnership with one of China’s most powerful spymasters, an intelligence officer named Ma Jian, who had recently been arrested by his own government. Caixin, a Chinese investigative news organization, reported that Ma and Guo had used surveillance, blackmail, and political influence to amass fortunes and evade scrutiny.

Guo denied any wrongdoing; he told a Hong Kong newspaper that he and Ma were just friends, who had met through work and bonded over a shared appreciation for architecture. But, two years later, he changed his story dramatically. He acknowledged that he had been a longtime “affiliate” of China’s all-pervasive Ministry of State Security. The agency, he said, had tasked him with “handling things for them” and connecting with “sensitive figures” abroad, travelling on eleven different passports and employing the code name Wu Nan.

Even more startling, he subsequently declared himself an enemy of the Chinese Communist Party—a position almost unheard-of among China’s élite. He applied for political asylum in the United States, and founded a media network, which broadcast incendiary criticisms of the C.C.P. and enthusiastic support for Trump. His businesses reportedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump advisers, including Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and the attorney L. Lin Wood, who joined efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As Guo’s neighbors at the Sherry-Netherland watched in confusion, he established himself as an election denier, a vaccine skeptic, and a right-wing provocateur, with a degree of influence that is virtually unique among foreign citizens on American soil.