Jian Guo’s life is peaceful: he lives in Dresden with his wife and teenage daughter in a condominium in the former GDR, and has a business importing lamps from China where he was born 43 years ago. Having arrived in the capital of Saxony as a student in 2002, Mr. Guo became a German citizen and also runs a consultancy company for intercultural communication between Germany and China. Then the leap: Guo, already a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), meets the lawyer Maximilian Krah and becomes his assistant in the European Parliament, where since 2019 his contact has been a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (Afd).
This ordinary existence is interrupted on the night of April 22, when Guo is arrested at home and his second life as a spy for the Chinese Ministry of State Security is discovered. This is the accusation made against Krah’s collaborator by the Federal Attorney General’s Office (GBA), which ordered his capture. He is the fourth alleged Chinese agent to be arrested in Germany in less than 24 hours.
On April 22, on a mandate from the GBA, the handcuffs were placed on both Herwig and Ina Fischer in Düsseldorf and Thomas Reichenbach in Bad Homburg. The couple had founded and ran the consultancy firm Innovative Dragon (Id), based in London and with offices in Düsseldorf and Shanghai. Id’s head of investor relations, Reichenbach was said to be head of the MSS spy cell which, having infiltrated German universities, managed to transmit information on technologies for military use to its contacts in Beijing. The biggest coup: the export of a laser to China, without authorization. All for “purely pecuniary” reasons, according to sources in the German security apparatus, with the three having been paid tens of thousands of euros for each report sent to Beijing.
In Guo’s case, the GBA’s activities included transmitting information relating to “parliamentary activities” to the MSS and spying on Chinese opponents in Germany. Industrial and scientific espionage, influence and control of dissent are the main activities of Beijing’s intelligence in Germany, where the MSS seems to find fertile ground also among politicians including perhaps Krah, leader of the AfD in the next European elections. Among the EU far-right figures suspected of having received funding from Russia to carry out propaganda activities in favor of the Kremlin, Krah also received payments from China, according to the website t-online.de. Concealed with various diversions, the money flows would reach Guo.
The goal: to form a triple political and economic alliance between Germany, China and Russia in order to counter the United States.
