He’s not an anomaly. During its researches into how Chinese authorities “monitor, intimidate and threaten political opponents” around the world, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that the CCP’s enlisting of people like Jian Guo, an “activist and businessman-turned-political aide,” to spy on Chinese nationals “is yet another tool in the Chinese government’s repression playbook….” (ICIJ, October 2, 2025).
After a German court determined that Guo (shown above, unblurred) had been spying for the People’s Republic of China for almost two decades, he was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison. The court found that Guo “sought to identify and expose Chinese political dissidents and leaked hundreds of European Parliament documents to China while he was working as an assistant to German politician Maximilian Krah.”
ICIJ previously reported that Guo, who moved to Germany as a student more than 20 years ago, had infiltrated local dissident communities and gained the trust of senior leaders of organizations critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Guo helped during dissident groups’ conferences, taking care of the logistics, picking up international guests at the airport and buying food for the event participants….
In interviews with ICIJ, activists who knew Guo described him as “low-key” and “quiet” with more senior activists and “aggressive” and “confident” with younger ones. In 2017, he was part of a delegation of Chinese democracy advocates who traveled from Europe to Dharamshala, India, to meet with representatives of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile and the Dalai Lama.
Guo is one of many Chinese nationals accused by Western authorities of working for China’s spy agencies and infiltrating anti-Communist Party groups around the world.
Is twenty years going to be about the amount of time that CCP spies are allowed to spy on Chinese dissidents and enemy governments before being detected and prosecuted?
Research by ISIJ and others should help speed things along. But knowledge does not always inspire action. Human rights activist Tienchi Martin-Liao, from Taiwan, told ISIJ that Guo “is only one example, there are lots of his comrades spread in the free Western society. It is almost an open secret that some certain men or women are double agents.”
Yet “lawmakers interviewed by ICIJ [in Europe] said that authorities’ responses to such threats remain inadequate.”
Postscripts
The UK’s Sky News, incidentally, refers to Guo in a story about his conviction only as “Jian G,” because his “full name has not been released in line with Germany’s privacy laws….” From which statement we may infer that, if the statement is accurate, Germany’s privacy laws protect the identity of convicted spies and that Sky News either feels that it must be guided by this absurdity or was unable to learn what the “G.” stands for. Like ICIJ, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle refers to a “Jian Guo” in its AFP-assisted print report on the case, not a “Jian G.” Neither ICIJ nor DW hint that “Guo” may not be the spy’s actual name.
Also incidentally, the Chinese Communist Party would appreciate it if everybody stopped talking about its spies. China’s foreign ministry asserts that reports about spying for China all consist of “hyping up with an aim to smear and oppress China. China firmly opposes the sensationalisation of the so-called ‘Chinese spy threat’ and urges…” etc. We often hear such things, but not also any explanation of how reporting on and opposition to CCP oppression could themselves be forms of oppression.
Also see:
ICIJ: “Inside China’s machinery of repression—and how it crushes dissent around the world”
“ICIJ and its media partners interviewed 105 people in 23 countries who, like Jiang, have been targeted by Chinese authorities in recent years for criticizing the government’s policies in public and in private….
“The probe shows how the failure to contain Chinese authoritarianism has enabled it to reach into intergovernmental institutions such as the United Nations and Interpol, the international police organization.”
ICIJ: “As President Xi Jinping traveled the world, police swept peaceful protesters off the streets”
“Within seconds, a French military officer grabbed Wu and stripped him of the sign. In a video he posted online, Wu can be heard shouting ‘Taiwan independence’ in Chinese as the officer attempts to subdue him.”
