Grifter, chaos agent, or CCP spy? The New Yorker's Evan Osnos on Guo Wengui

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker, joins hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about his new piece on one of the most puzzling figures to come out of China: Guo Wengui, a.k.a. Miles Kwok, who took what he learned about dealing with power and money in China and applied those lessons to the U.S., insinuating himself with leading figures of the American right. Who is this mysterious man, and what is he really after? In an unscripted episode that will bring some listeners back to the grotty apartment in Beijing where Sinica recorded in its very early days, Evan, Kaiser, and Jeremy parse the mysteries of the strange phenomenon of Guo Wengui.

03:37 – Who is Guo Wengui?

10:07 – Orville Schell’s experience with Guo Wengui

14:48 – Steve Bannon’s comparison between Guo and Trump

17:40 – The process of fact-checking this piece

23:03 – Guo’s potential ties to the pro-Xi Jinping clique

26:02 – VOA’s interview with Guo

30:06 – Guo’s campaign against Teng Biao and other Chinese dissidents

33:57 – Guo’s role as an interlocutor on behalf of the MSS

39:00 – Steve Wynn’s efforts to extradite Guo

42:10 – Guo’s impact on the Chinese diaspora community

45:11 – Guo’s influence on US-China relations

A transcript of this interview is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: "President Trump's First Term," by Evan Osnos, a New Yorker article written in 2016 predicting what would happen to the U.S. if Donald Trump won in 2016. (Spoiler: he did. And Evan was right).

Evan: An audio tribute to legendary New Yorker editor John Bennet: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/johnbennet.php

Kaiser: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, a forgivably melodramatic historical fiction novel with an emphasis on architecture

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynica podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project.
0:15.7	Subscribe to access from the China Project to get access to not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original
0:22.8	writing on our website at theChinaproject.com. We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials,
0:28.7	great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts.
0:34.0	We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs,
0:38.3	from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region,
0:43.3	to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It's a feast
0:49.8	of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world.
0:55.1	We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
0:58.0	I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1:01.0	Joining me from the Sylvan Splendor of Goldcorn Holler in the wilderness southwest of Nashville,
1:05.3	Tennessee, is Jin Yu Mi, also sometimes known as Jeremy Goldcorn, who is taking a break from
1:10.5	his scholarly exegesis of
1:11.9	Xi Jinping's report to co-host this program. Jeremy, you know, you can actually use a simple search
1:17.0	function for things like the frequency of mentions of goods like, you know, Goja Anchen and stuff
1:21.0	like that. Sorry also that my phone calls to you earlier interrupted your count and that you had
1:26.1	to start over. Sorry, man.
1:30.8	Thank you, Kaiser.
1:33.3	Can you greet the people and introduce our guest?
1:34.9	Yeah, well, hello people.
1:36.5	So where to begin?
1:41.6	Our guest is Evan Osnoss, who is an old friend of Kaiser and mine from our Beijing days.
	...

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