Ruthless, or a Hero?

Mr. Guo’s ambitions, like his personality, are big and sometimes baffling. He says he has a plan to exorcise graft from the party, bring rule of law to China and put ties with America on a stable track by ending decades of Chinese skulduggery on trade. At other times, he explains his corruption allegations as an act of vengeance for a long-ago death. He could just be a man feeling pressure, his assets frozen in China, and bad investments and lawsuits chipping away at his fortune.

No one better represents the marriage of the party and money than Mr. Guo, known as Miles Kwok outside China, who parlayed relationships with some of China’s most powerful officials to help build a global portfolio including hotels, office buildings and securities brokerage firms.

Show Mr. Guo a spreadsheet listing the shareholders of the giant Chinese company HNA, which has been buying up businesses in the West, and he’ll rattle off the names of the prominent families that he claims really control their stakes. Ask him to map out family trees for those names, the key to tracking ill-gotten wealth in China, and he’ll do it from memory, down to the sisters, the cousins and the aunts.

“The allegations with regard to HNA simply aren’t true,” a spokesperson for HNA said.

Over a decade ago, the Chinese Communist Party welcomed businessmen into its ranks. In turn, those tycoons helped make the sons and daughters of the revolution rich while helping the country show spectacular growth rates. Now, armed with information, one of them has strayed.

“These people have power and influence and knowledge,” said William C. Kirby, a professor at Harvard Business School. “Many of them are easily controlled. But others go off the reservation.”

Mr. Guo has gone farther than anyone else. When the party retaliated against him, the state-controlled Beijing News reported that he was suspected of obtaining a “fraudulent loan” worth 3.2 billion renminbi ($466 million) from one state-owned bank. Another publication, Caixin, referring to documents from Mr. Wang’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said that Mr. Guo had arranged for $299 million of client funds at a securities firm he controlled to be illegally transferred out of it.