The code name was Wu Nan. The passports numbered eleven. A federal judge wrote, in an official court opinion, that the evidence did not permit the court to determine whether the man who used them was a dissident or a double agent.
That question — written by Judge Lewis J. Liman of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York — is where this article begins. What follows is the evidence the court had before it, and the evidence it did not. Read together, it documents something the court was not asked to determine: not the identity of one man, but the architecture of a system that produced him, deployed him, and will outlast him.1
I. The Network
The nodes are documented. Guo Wengui — also known as Miles Guo, Miles Kwok, Ho Wan Kwok, Guo Haoyun, and Wu Nan — sits at the center. Connected directly to him: Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, who signed a yearlong consulting contract with one of Guo's companies for one million dollars and co-founded GTV Media Group with him. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, whose businesses received payments from Guo's network. L. Lin Wood, who joined efforts to overturn the 2020 election and received funding from Guo's organizations. Peter Navarro, Trump's trade adviser, who accepted the title of "international ambassador" from Guo's self-declared New Federal State of China. Jason Miller, the former Trump spokesman, who became CEO of Gettr — a conservative social media platform funded by Guo. Wang Dinggang, a Guo collaborator whose YouTube channel carried the first known public mention of Hunter Biden's laptop.2
These are not associations in the loose sense of people who attended the same events. They are documented financial relationships, co-founded organizations, shared platforms, and coordinated operations — evidenced in contracts, court filings, recorded conversations, and the findings of analytics firms who studied the network's behavior at scale.3
The network's reach extended to hundreds of thousands of followers across at least 39 countries who invested more than one billion dollars in entities Guo controlled — GTV Media Group, the Himalaya Farm Alliance, G|CLUBS, the Himalaya Exchange. Federal prosecutors convicted Guo of defrauding them. But the network those followers formed — the chat groups, the social media accounts, the amplification infrastructure — did not exist only to raise money. It existed to move information.4
II. It Is Concerted
The analytics firm Graphika studied the network's behavior and found "a vast network of interrelated media entities which have disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns". The accounts were not acting independently. Chat groups within the network were also stocked with templates of pro-Trump messages that users were encouraged to distribute as if they were spontaneous personal opinions.5
The most documented example of coordinated action is the Hunter Biden laptop story. The first known public mention appeared on September 25, 2020 — six weeks before the presidential election — from a guest on Wang Dinggang's YouTube channel, one of Guo's direct collaborators. The guest claimed the material on the laptop had been "recorded by the CCP" and had "arrived mysteriously in America" to provide Beijing with leverage over Joe Biden. Guo's allies subsequently created and spread fabricated images related to the laptop, according to Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Bannon's podcast who later distanced himself from the operation.6
Three days before the 2020 election, Bannon met with Guo's supporters. A recording of that meeting, provided to Mother Jones, captured him praising their "editorial creativity over the pictures" and explaining the strategic logic: the laptop story had driven up Biden's negatives and kept the race close enough that Trump could claim victory regardless of the outcome. "That's our strategy," Bannon told them.7
After the election, the concerted action continued. A company controlled by Guo spent more than four hundred thousand dollars on the Million MAGA March in Washington. A hundred thousand dollars went to an organization headed by L. Lin Wood, who was suing to reverse Trump's loss in Georgia. On January 6, 2021, Guo's network live-streamed the siege of the United States Capitol and promoted comments hailing the attackers as patriots.8
III. It Is an Operation
To understand why the network functions the way it does, you have to go back to where the man at its center was made.
Guo Wengui grew up in a farming village in Shandong Province, one of eight children, and dropped out of school at thirteen. In 1989 he was jailed for fraud in a local oil scheme — not, as he would later claim, for supporting the Tiananmen Square protesters. The conviction record makes no mention of political activism. He was detained a week before the crackdown in Beijing.9
Jail provided contacts. He emerged connected to a wealthy entrepreneur in Hong Kong and eventually made his way to Beijing, where the business scene ran on what Evan Osnos described in the New Yorker as "a quasi-legal symbiosis between entrepreneurs and Party officials." Builders needed land and protection. Officials wanted kickbacks. Those who learned to navigate between them were known as "white gloves" — they helped politicians make money while keeping their hands clean. A former white glove named Desmond Shum described the life: "We were like the fish that clean the teeth of crocodiles."10
Guo mastered the system and then weaponized it. When a powerful vice-mayor of Beijing named Liu Zhihua blocked a building permit Guo needed for land beside the upcoming Summer Olympic Games site, Guo obtained a surveillance tape of Liu with a mistress and delivered it to the government. Liu received a suspended death sentence. Guo got his permit. The tape had come from Ma Jian — the spymaster Guo had befriended, who had spent three decades rising to lead the counterintelligence department of China's Ministry of State Security. Ma was the man who hunted foreign moles and who collected files on his own comrades, cataloguing their weaknesses. A former diplomat described him as the man with a "safe full of papers."11
The Chinese security services have long cultivated what they call "commercial cadres" — businesspeople who share information, and sometimes profits, in return for protection. The principle, as one official described it, is to "use business to cultivate intelligence, so that intelligence and business thrive together." Guo was not simply a beneficiary of this system. He was one of its instruments. Operating as a cutout — a civilian who circulates without attracting official attention — he took several trips to meet with the Dalai Lama, conveying messages back and forth between the spiritual leader and Beijing. The CIA station chief in Beijing at the time, Randal Phillips, noted that the head of the Chinese military's clandestine service sometimes arranged meetings at Guo's hotel — a sign that intelligence officers considered it safe territory.12
When Guo's patron Ma Jian fell in 2015 — purged in the same anti-corruption campaign that was consuming his rivals — Guo received a warning and fled. He crossed to Hong Kong, then London, then New York. He paid sixty-eight million dollars in cash for a penthouse at the Sherry-Netherland on Fifth Avenue. He bought a forty-three million dollar superyacht. He joined Mar-a-Lago. He began talking to the FBI.13
The FBI ran him as a source. Guo provided information about Chinese leaders' private lives — who had girlfriends, who had boyfriends, which Party families profited from which companies. In one instance he provided information about Xi Jinping's daughter while she was attending college in the United States. A former Bureau official told Osnos: "Just going to Miles and asking him these questions will save you three or four months of analytical work." The CIA was less convinced. Analysts concluded he could not be trusted to keep secrets. The FBI stayed in contact regardless. The same former official explained: "He knows that he needs us to protect him. So he'll constantly give just enough."14
That gap — one agency running him as a source, another concluding he was untrustworthy — is not incidental. It is where operations find room to breathe. Institutional disagreement is protection. Every asset worth running understands this.
In June 2017, Chinese authorities moved to close the gap. They contacted Steve Wynn — then the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, whose casino operations in Macau depended on Chinese goodwill. Wynn spoke by phone with Sun Lijun, China's vice-minister of public security, who asked for help getting Guo returned to China. At a dinner in Washington, Wynn gave Trump's secretary a packet including the Interpol notice, press reports, and copies of Guo's passport. Elliott Broidy, the deputy RNC finance chair, texted that Sun was "extremely pleased and said that President Xi Jinping appreciates the assistance." In the Oval Office, Trump called out for the packet and said: "We should get this guy out of here." H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, studied the packet and concluded it would be inappropriate to act on the request.15
Bannon had been in the Oval Office during that discussion. Afterward, he retrieved the packet and put it in his own office to ensure Guo wasn't extradited. He then met Guo at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington and spent six hours with him. Bannon later described what he saw: "This guy knows details. He's not just throwing shit out there."16
Two years later, Guo acknowledged in his own words what he had been. He confirmed he had been a longtime "affiliate" of China's Ministry of State Security, tasked with "handling things for them" and connecting with "sensitive figures" abroad, traveling on eleven different passports under the code name Wu Nan.17
IV. Diversion Is Part of It
Guo produced a hip-hop track titled "The Hero" featuring himself astride a white horse, wielding a lightsaber in ritual combat, commanding backup dancers in front of luxury SUVs and a private jet. The chorus: "Take Down the C.C.P." He live-streamed from the deck of a superyacht. He announced a shadow government for China from New York Harbor, with planes trailing banners overhead and the Statue of Liberty in the background, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He sent supporters to protest outside the homes of Chinese dissidents in Texas, Virginia, and California — some of whom were beaten and kicked. He released a public letter to Communist Party leadership. He sold fifty-thousand-dollar passports from his government-in-exile.18
Each of these actions generated attention. Enormous amounts of it. Media coverage. Congressional hearings. FBI investigations. Competing theories about his true allegiances. The more outrageous the action, the more scrutiny it attracted — and the more that scrutiny was distributed across the question of who he was rather than what the network was doing.19
James Jesus Angleton, the longtime head of counterintelligence at the CIA, spent years hunting for Soviet moles in America and described his domain as a "wilderness of mirrors" — a space where ploys and misinformation make it impossible to determine who is working to confuse and split the West. The wilderness functions not by hiding the operation but by making it so visible, so entertaining, so outrageous that serious scrutiny feels paranoid. You cannot find the mole because the mole has made himself the most interesting person in the room.20
Guo described a secret CCP plan he called 3F: foment weakness, foment chaos, foment the destruction of America — through leaked documents, bribery, and blackmail. Osnos noted that this description precisely matches Guo's own documented patterns of behavior. He named the operation. The description fit.21
V. Performance Is Part of It
Each persona Guo adopted served a specific operational function. As a Beijing real estate developer and white glove, he gained proximity to the highest levels of Party power. As a cutout for the MSS, he gained access to foreign leaders and intelligence safe territory. As a "whistleblower" exposing CCP corruption, he gained credibility with American media and government officials who had reason to distrust Beijing. As an asylum seeker, he gained legal protection from extradition. As an anti-CCP dissident, he gained entry into Trump's inner circle and the American conservative movement. As a media entrepreneur, he built an amplification network spanning hundreds of thousands of followers across dozens of countries. As a fraud defendant, he gained a courtroom — and with it, the legal mechanism of graymail, the ability to threaten that his defense would require disclosing national security secrets the government did not want revealed.22
None of these identities required the others to be false. That is the operational genius — or the operational design. A man who is simultaneously all of these things cannot be cleanly categorized. He cannot be prosecuted as a spy without revealing what the intelligence services know. He cannot be dismissed as a fraud without appearing to protect the CCP he claims to oppose. He cannot be deported without appearing to do Beijing's bidding. Every institution that tries to act against him finds itself constrained by its own logic.
In the summer of 2017, while presenting himself publicly as the CCP's most prominent dissident, Guo released a letter to Communist Party leaders offering to use his "influence and resources" on their behalf. He asked them to assign him "a clear, targeted task" so he could "atone for past mistakes and demonstrate patriotism and support for President Xi." He promised to "continue not to cross the red lines." He offered to serve as a "propagandist," employing his "own style of propaganda" to "safeguard our nation's interests and image."23
The letter was public. He wrote it and released it. It has not been widely reported. The performance continued regardless.
VI. Belief Is Part of It
No network functions without believers. The hundreds of thousands of people who gave Guo more than a billion dollars across 39 countries were not simply deceived. They were the mechanism. Without their belief — without their amplification, their donations, their social media accounts, their chat groups, their willingness to show up at the homes of dissidents and protest for hours — the network has no reach, no political weight, no influence. A federal prosecutor called them victims. Operationally, they were something more essential than that.24
Many of Guo's most devoted followers were Chinese diaspora — people who had left China, could not return, had no institutional standing in the West, no political voice, no lever on anything. And then a man appeared who spoke their language, named their enemy, promised that their sacrifice would be rewarded when the CCP fell, and demonstrated through his own visible defiance that resistance was possible. Giving him money was not simply gullibility. It was the most rational bet available: an investment in the only person who appeared to be fighting the fight they could not fight themselves.25
Even after the conviction — nine counts, a billion dollars in documented fraud, a seven-week trial — many of his followers did not abandon him. They could not afford to. Abandoning the belief means abandoning the bet. And the bet, for many, was everything they had.
This is what makes belief the most durable component of the operation. The network can be dismantled. The money can be seized. The code name can be retired. But the belief — the genuine, costly, survival-level belief of people who needed it to be true — that does not dissolve with a conviction. It waits for the next person who offers it the same thing.
Caught in a Web: Kompromat
The people who know the most are in jail. The people who know almost as much are not. That is not coincidence. That is leverage management.
Guo is in a Manhattan detention center, sentencing adjourned, the docket flooded with third-party filings the judge called an abuse of court access. Diddy is in a Brooklyn jail, a case full of names nobody wants said in open court. Both men accumulated what kompromat accumulates: the kind of knowledge about powerful people that makes powerful people need you silent. Both men are silent. The pardon went to Bannon — who had the audience, who performed loyalty publicly, who was useful. Not to the men who knew too much.
Bannon understood this before anyone named it. He watched Trump survive everything by knowing where the bodies were — not to use the information but so nobody could use it against him first. Then Bannon got as close as possible to the two men most likely to have files on Trump: Guo, with decades of MSS kompromat on American figures, and the access networks around him. Proximity was the strategy. The $1M contract. The yacht. The War Room episodes. Not loyalty. Intelligence collection. And then Bannon walked away pardoned, audience intact, information retained.
Guo's play now is the same play Trump ran: wait the system out. Stall the sentencing. Keep the case complicated. Remain too dangerous to deport to China, too knowledgeable to safely sentence in America. Play both collapsing systems against each other until one folds. It might even work. It only requires the game to continue long enough.
When agents raided his three residences in 2023, they recovered 29 cellphones. At his Manhattan apartment they found gold pins bearing the symbols of the Chinese Communist Party.30 Trump insiders told the New York Post they fear a pardon — not because of what Guo did to his followers, but because of what a pardon would do to the $1.3 billion forfeiture order: dissolve it. The victims would get nothing. Guo would get his fortune back. A president, the Post noted, can issue a pardon by merely saying the word, without any required review.31 Steve Bannon broadcasts four hours a day. His audience is still out there, still loyal, still listening. They have heard this story before. They just don't know it yet.32
VII. The Pattern Connects
The principle that intelligence and business should thrive together does not begin with Guo Wengui. It is structural and patient and older than anyone named in this article.
In 1954, at the instigation of Zhou Enlai — then a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo — three secret members of the Communist Party of Great Britain founded an organization called the 48 Group Club. From that foundation, the club developed what has been described as an unrivalled level of trust and intimacy with the top leadership of the CCP, and built itself into what its own record describes as the most powerful instrument of Beijing's influence and intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom, reaching into the highest ranks of British political, business, media, and university elites. The 48 Group Club was founded before Guo Wengui was born.26
In 2018, the Chinese government paid £255 million for the Royal Mint Court in London — a 5.5-acre site 200 meters from the Tower of London, sitting atop major communications infrastructure linking the City of London to Canary Wharf. The Metropolitan Police counterterrorism unit opposed it. MI5, GCHQ, and the Bank of England expressed concerns. US officials across successive administrations — including administrations whose own advisers had been in Guo's orbit, on his payroll, or doing business with Chinese interests of their own — warned it could function as a listening post for Chinese intelligence. The Tower Hamlets Borough Council unanimously rejected the application twice. Xi Jinping personally called Prime Minister Starmer to press for approval. Chinese authorities reportedly shut off the water at the British embassy in Beijing during negotiations. Scotland Yard withdrew its objections after reviewing a safety study funded by China.27
On January 20, 2026 — the morning Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, the morning Guo Wengui's sentencing was scheduled for 10:00 AM at the Southern District of New York, the morning Xi Jinping's security services intercepted General Zhang Youxia — Xi's sworn brother, second in command of the entire People's Liberation Army, a man whose family ties to Xi stretched back to their fathers — on his way to a Party meeting and detained him at a secret location — the British government approved the Royal Mint embassy.28
Four events. One day. Each one documented. Each one a different expression of the same patient architecture.
VIII. The Question the Court Left Open
In 2019, a private intelligence firm claimed in a federal court filing that Guo "was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People's Republic of China." Guo denied the accusation and won the case. The court left the question open. Judge Liman wrote that the evidence did not permit a determination. Others, he wrote, would have to determine who the true Guo is.
One former CIA analyst told Osnos that Guo's disclosures must be read not only for the people he chose to name, but for the people he did not name. A former national security official described what he observed: "You could make a circumstantial argument that this guy is here to fuck us up. Just tie us in knots."
Bannon, asked to account for all of it, said: "Whether he's working for a faction or he's hedging his bets, the stuff he's done and what he's galvanized is just relentless. He's done more than anybody to wake this country up to the threats of the CCP as a transnational criminal organization and an existential threat to America."
The sentencing scheduled for inauguration morning was adjourned. Whether a pardon would follow, the White House said, was not something it would disclose. In Beijing that morning, General Zhang Youxia was in custody at a secret location. In London that afternoon, the planning decision had been signed.
The judge's question remains open. The network remains. The belief remains. The architecture that produced Guo Wengui produced the 48 Group Club seventy years before him and will produce whatever comes next. The code name Wu Nan belonged to a man. The operating system it served belongs to no one.
The sentencing is still adjourned after some emails.29
Even Confucius is Confused
China didn't need to run Guo. It needed Guo to run. Every dollar he raised from the diaspora, every conservative ally he compromised, every actual dissident he silenced or discredited, every court filing now flooding Judge Liman's docket — all of it serves Beijing whether or not Beijing ordered it. That's the sophistication. Not control. Contribution. Xi performs Confucian rectitude while his generals are arrested for corruption; Trump performs liberation while his pardons sort the useful from the dangerous; Guo performs martyrdom from a Manhattan detention center, sentencing adjourned, the case perpetually complicated. None of them can let the performance slip — Xi because the anti-corruption campaign is his legitimacy, Trump because the truth-teller cannot be caught managing truth, Guo because the moment he stops being a persecuted dissident he becomes just a convicted fraudster. The confusion is not a mistake. It is the arrangement. And China, patient, Legalist beneath the Confucian costume, has been in the confusion business for fifty years. It doesn't need to win. It needs the game to continue. So far, everyone is cooperating.