Just months after being pushed out of the White House, Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, met with a fugitive Chinese billionaire at a suite in the luxurious Hays-Adams Hotel in Washington.
Just months after being pushed out of the White House, Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, met with a fugitive Chinese billionaire at a suite in the luxurious Hays-Adams Hotel in Washington.
The billionaire, Guo Wengui, who is also known as Miles Kwok, was living in New York City and had landed on China’s most-wanted list, accused of bribery, fraud and money laundering. He was also a dissident and fierce critic of Beijing, seeking political asylum in the United States. And Bannon — increasingly obsessed with the emerging China threat — was eager to talk about the Communist Party, corruption and U.S. naval operations in the South China Sea.
Since their first discussion in October 2017, they have met dozens of times — in Dallas, on Guo’s yacht and, more often, at the billionaire’s $67.5 million apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, overlooking New York’s Central Park. The two shared a stage two weeks ago in Manhattan, at a news conference they organized to announce plans to set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption and aid people they deem victims of Chinese government persecution.
“We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party,” Guo said in an interview last week, referring to Bannon. “That’s why we’ve become partners.”It’s an unusual partnership between two political gadflies with a common, if overly grand, objective: bringing about the demise of the Chinese Communist Party.
One is an exiled businessman who claims to have evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government in China. The other is a former Goldman Sachs banker who delights in lobbing political grenades at what he calls the “party of Davos,” a band of global elites that he says has undermined America’s interests at home and abroad.
As tensions between the United States and China grow, the two men are hoping to stoke them even further, by effectively calling for the overthrow of Beijing’s leadership. Guo is dipping into his fortune, while Bannon has agreed to provide a strategy.
Bannon is, in effect, reprising the role of political provocateur he played before joining the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. Back then, he was running the conservative news site Breitbart and helping promote conspiracy theories through the publication of books like “Clinton Cash,” which aimed to destroy Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.
In an interview in his hotel room two weeks ago, Bannon, 65, said the new China-related fund he will head, without pay, 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 project, he says, is consistent with his populist and nationalist agenda. China’s reckless behavior, he contended, is endangering the global economy and sapping America’s strength.
“As a populist, this is outrageous,” Bannon said, noting that U.S. financial institutions have helped back the worrisome global buying sprees of Chinese companies, with cash raised from ordinary people, including government pension funds. “The elites in this country have to be held accountable. We have to get the facts on the table.”
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. Billions of dollars in assets he controlled have been frozen by Beijing. And Interpol, the global police organization, has issued a warrant seeking his arrest. He travels with a phalanx of security guards, saying he fears for his life.
The Chinese Embassy could not be reached for comment. But the Guo-Bannon alliance has alarmed some analysts, who view the two men as purveyors of conspiracy theories fueling anti-China sentiment.
“The problem with these types of reckless, loose-cannon accusations is that they undermine the ability of responsible analysts and policymakers to identify the genuine cases of Chinese wrongdoing and fashion realistic and effective policy responses,” said Michael Swaine, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
For Bannon, the new effort plays to a long-standing and complicated interest in China. As a young naval officer in the 1970s, he patrolled the South China Sea. He 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 helping elect Trump, Bannon counseled him to take a tough line on China and step up trade pressure on Beijing. Trump obliged by tapping Harvard-trained economist Peter Navarro, a longtime China critic known for his book “Death by China,” and Michael Pillsbury, a China hawk at the Hudson Institute, as top trade advisers.
It was during his time at the White House, Bannon says, that he first heard about Guo. The Chinese billionaire was living in New York, broadcasting allegations of high-level government corruption in China on Twitter and YouTube — some credible, some outlandish and still unproven. By then, he had also applied for political asylum.
Alarmed by his social media campaign and his public denunciations of the Communist Party, Beijing began pressing the Trump administration to extradite Guo. Chinese investigators said he has ties to Ma Jian, a former spy chief now imprisoned in China on charges of bribery and abuse of power.
Inside the White House, there were disagreements over how to deal with Guo. Several Western businessmen, apparently eager to cozy up to Beijing, lobbied Trump to accede to China’s demands, according to people familiar with the talks.
The billionaire, Guo Wengui, who is also known as Miles Kwok, was living in New York City and had landed on China’s most-wanted list, accused of bribery, fraud and money laundering. He was also a dissident and fierce critic of Beijing, seeking political asylum in the United States. And Bannon — increasingly obsessed with the emerging China threat — was eager to talk about the Communist Party, corruption and U.S. naval operations in the South China Sea.
Since their first discussion in October 2017, they have met dozens of times — in Dallas, on Guo’s yacht and, more often, at the billionaire’s $67.5 million apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, overlooking New York’s Central Park. The two shared a stage two weeks ago in Manhattan, at a news conference they organized to announce plans to set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption and aid people they deem victims of Chinese government persecution.
“We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party,” Guo said in an interview last week, referring to Bannon. “That’s why we’ve become partners.”It’s an unusual partnership between two political gadflies with a common, if overly grand, objective: bringing about the demise of the Chinese Communist Party.
One is an exiled businessman who claims to have evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government in China. The other is a former Goldman Sachs banker who delights in lobbing political grenades at what he calls the “party of Davos,” a band of global elites that he says has undermined America’s interests at home and abroad.
As tensions between the United States and China grow, the two men are hoping to stoke them even further, by effectively calling for the overthrow of Beijing’s leadership. Guo is dipping into his fortune, while Bannon has agreed to provide a strategy.
Bannon is, in effect, reprising the role of political provocateur he played before joining the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. Back then, he was running the conservative news site Breitbart and helping promote conspiracy theories through the publication of books like “Clinton Cash,” which aimed to destroy Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.
In an interview in his hotel room two weeks ago, Bannon, 65, said the new China-related fund he will head, without pay, 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 project, he says, is consistent with his populist and nationalist agenda. China’s reckless behavior, he contended, is endangering the global economy and sapping America’s strength.
“As a populist, this is outrageous,” Bannon said, noting that U.S. financial institutions have helped back the worrisome global buying sprees of Chinese companies, with cash raised from ordinary people, including government pension funds. “The elites in this country have to be held accountable. We have to get the facts on the table.”
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. Billions of dollars in assets he controlled have been frozen by Beijing. And Interpol, the global police organization, has issued a warrant seeking his arrest. He travels with a phalanx of security guards, saying he fears for his life.
The Chinese Embassy could not be reached for comment. But the Guo-Bannon alliance has alarmed some analysts, who view the two men as purveyors of conspiracy theories fueling anti-China sentiment.
“The problem with these types of reckless, loose-cannon accusations is that they undermine the ability of responsible analysts and policymakers to identify the genuine cases of Chinese wrongdoing and fashion realistic and effective policy responses,” said Michael Swaine, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
For Bannon, the new effort plays to a long-standing and complicated interest in China. As a young naval officer in the 1970s, he patrolled the South China Sea. He 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 helping elect Trump, Bannon counseled him to take a tough line on China and step up trade pressure on Beijing. Trump obliged by tapping Harvard-trained economist Peter Navarro, a longtime China critic known for his book “Death by China,” and Michael Pillsbury, a China hawk at the Hudson Institute, as top trade advisers.
It was during his time at the White House, Bannon says, that he first heard about Guo. The Chinese billionaire was living in New York, broadcasting allegations of high-level government corruption in China on Twitter and YouTube — some credible, some outlandish and still unproven. By then, he had also applied for political asylum.
Alarmed by his social media campaign and his public denunciations of the Communist Party, Beijing began pressing the Trump administration to extradite Guo. Chinese investigators said he has ties to Ma Jian, a former spy chief now imprisoned in China on charges of bribery and abuse of power.
Inside the White House, there were disagreements over how to deal with Guo. Several Western businessmen, apparently eager to cozy up to Beijing, lobbied Trump to accede to China’s demands, according to people familiar with the talks.