From a luxury Manhattan apartment, Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui (郭文貴) is plotting a “change of the regime” in Beijing and developing a new media platform with the aim of introducing democracy in the world’s most populous country.
The fugitive real-estate mogul settled in New York in April, on the 18th floor of a hotel facing Central Park, where he is waiting with his wife for a decision on his claim for US political asylum.
“I want to try and to have rule of law, I want to try and have democracy, freedom, that’s my ultimate goal... A change of the regime,” he said in an exclusive interview.
Photo: AFP
He has set a timeline of three years.
For several months, Guo has been flooding social networks with searing accusations of corruption against China’s rich and powerful.
Few Chinese tycoons choose dissent. However, Guo, whose property was seized and two brothers imprisoned since he fled from China in 2014, said his campaign has been brewing for 28 years.
Amid the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, “my little brother died in front of me... I was detained for 22 months,” he said.
It was in prison that he decided to “wrestle with this system under the [Chinese] Communist Party [CCP] that is inhumane, not democratic, unlawful.”
While some people have accused the businessman, who is not shy about publicizing his ostentatious lifestyle, of hypocrisy in his allegations of corruption among China’s political elite, Guo has denied accusations that he himself is also guilty of graft.
“Why would I do this? I don’t need the money, I have money,” he said.
“But I am a Buddhist, I want to be kind to other people... I want to change the evil regime,” said Guo, who gives his age as 47, despite uncertainty about his birth date due to the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution at the time.
“All the successful businessmen in China, there are only two fates for them: one is to flee the country, the other is waiting to be eliminated,” Guo said.
He chose to go on the offensive, posting unsubstantiated, yet politically sensitive allegations.
His Twitter account, which has nearly 480,000 followers, has been repeatedly blocked since the CCP’s 17th National Congress in October, he said.
Undeterred, Guo has been developing a new media platform that he intends to launch before the end of this month to expose the flaws of China’s communist regime.
Guo has developed a relationship in the US that seems unexpected — with Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former strategist who has called for Washington to wage “economic war” with China.
“He is one of the best international political experts I have ever seen. Mr Bannon is one of the very few Westerners who really understands Asia,” Guo said.
Guo said he has met 10 times with Bannon, the one-time Goldman Sachs investment banker and head of influential ultraconservative outlet Breitbart News, and that they have discussed his new platform, which he did not describe in detail.
“I have money, you know this, lots of money prepared for this,” Guo said of the project.
Guo confirmed Wall Street Journal reports that he had been visited by Chinese government agents in his apartment in May.
He said the agents had one objective: “They are here to silence me... They want me to stop talking about the corrupt officials in the Chinese government.”
“There are more than 100 hours of conversation I have on tape,” he said. “For them, it was too big a threat.”
Guo said he thinks “very highly” of Trump and is a member of the US leader’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
However, he is critical of Trump’s policies toward China.
“He is too focused on his own advantages, his own strengths,” Guo said. “Politics is different from business.”
As for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Guo called him “the most human, most emotional person out of all the [Chinese] officials.”
He partly hopes that Xi would steer China to a Singapore-style governance model with “a kind of rule-of-law society under one party rule that is friendly to the Western world.”
In the meantime, Guo keeps in touch with his elderly parents in Beijing and checks on his properties around the world via dozens of cameras that he monitors from his tablet.
Even if he is successful in dismantling the Chinese political structure, Guo, who boasts of constructing “among the most beautiful modern buildings” in China, pledges that he has no ambition of becoming a “Chinese Trump.”
“I like freedom, I like to travel, I like to enjoy life,” he said. “I’d rather die than be a politician.”
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