There are those who caricature the Alice Guo issue as an exercise in racial discrimination against nationals of the People’s Republic of China. The exaggeration is so detached from ground reality.
On the contrary, the evidence in the senate hearings thus far is eloquently unraveling Guo Hua Ping’s circumventions of the law. It started with a lie. Let’s review her lies.
First she said she was Alice Leal Guo, born in the Philippines to a father who remains a national of the People’s Republic of China and named Jian Zhong Guo, and to a Filipina mother named Amelia Leal, her father’s household help, who she claimed had a child out of wedlock with him. She was an only child, she said. “I had no friends. I had no playmates. I grew up hidden in our farm.”
Her first lie was immediately demolished, thanks to the impressive sleuthing of two senators, Risa Hontiveros and Sherwin Gatchalian. They uncovered travel documents from the Bureau of Immigration that she had travelled in various times with individuals named Sheila Leal Guo, Seimen Leal Guo and Wesley Leal Guo, who all had records as well at the Philippine Statistics Authority as children of an Amelia Leal. So there were other children born “out of wedlock”?
Yet she insisted on her only-child line. Asked if they were her siblings, her reply was “I will ask my father.” She said she does not know them. Father relayed the answer and said yes, they are her siblings. So that puts four children born out of wedlock from a common mother Amelia Leal. That she never knew them is now an embellished lie.
At that point, she had decidedly lost her game of marbles – and charades. This was a person who had no normal rational faculties and common sense. It became clear at that point — she was an automaton who obviously was programmed to receive dictations on what to lie.
Take note that this is an elected municipal mayor who lies big time. That alone is a warning signal of serious magnitude. There is no racism there. How many of our local government leaders lie? Practically all of them, but to lie on verifiable facts is an affront not just to the senate, but also on the law that she has sworn herself to as an elected official.
And then the fingerprints appeared from official records. The family had applied for special investors resident visas (SIRV) using their real Chinese names. She was Guo Hua Ping whose fingerprints matched with that of Alice Leal Guo. What was a national of the PROC doing in Philippine local government? This was the most unassailable evidence that she infiltrated local government in a highly malevolent manner – she was no natural-born Filipino citizen at all. If that is not infiltration, then device another name for it. Certainly it is not racism.
And how did the PROC embassy in Manila, when asked for comments, react? It did not respond, so it’s a “No comment.”
Since it is without doubt now that her real identity is established, media should stop referring to her by her fictitious name but only as Guo Hua Ping. Truth telling demands that. That is not racism.
And then there were her school records. She had gone to the same school as Sherwin Gatchalian’s, Grace Christian High School in Quezon City. For her enrolment, she presented her original birth certificate from Red China. The name was Guo Hua Ping, and so that was the name she was known in school.
Two classmates volunteered information. They never knew her in school as Alice Guo. She could not speak English or Filipino. She stood out, in fact, because here was a 13-year old enrolled in the basic grades (1 to 3). She was taller than everyone else. A class picture confirmed that. The classmates knew her as Guo Hua Ping.
And then the bombshell came – her 36 bank accounts and the billions of pesos it recorded in transactions. The companies registered under her name were not earning much in income. Yet billions of pesos were wired to her name from 2019 to 2024 and were traced to – no need to guess what country – the People’s Republic of China. The source of the information is watertight – the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), the premier financial intelligence authority of government that investigates suspicious transaction records from banks and money remittance companies.
Some of those billions went to various individuals and some companies, particularly in the construction of the POGO hub in Bamban, Tarlac. For the benefit of readers, here’s the definition of “money laundering” – the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses. And here’s a simpler definition – disguising financial assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them.
If these senate hearings happened under Rodrigo Duterte, AMLC would never have released its records of Alice Guo. Recall that Duterte forbade AMLC from revealing all the bank account records of the Duterte family exposed by then senator Antonio Trillanes. And then Duterte booted out Overall Deputy Ombudsman Melchor Arthur Carandang for saying publicly that Trillanes’s bank records of the Dutertes match those of the AMLC records.
In March 2020, the AMLC had already testified in the senate that dirty money was flowing in and out of Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators it analyzed, comprised of 59 Pagcor-licensed POGOs and their 218 service providers, 3 gaming laboratories, and 24 interactive gaming centers in the Cagayan Special Economic Zone in northern Luzon. How did Duterte respond? He said, “Under my oath of office as President of the Republic, as elected by you, ‘yang POGO na yan, malinis yan.” And there’s the context why we have Guo Hua Ping — the criminal mind of Duterte and his link to POGO. Were it not for him, there would have been no Guo Hua Ping elected municipal mayor.
And then there are her ties to criminals. Two of her business associates were Zhang Ruijin, convicted in Singapore for money laundering, and Lin Baoying, also convicted but at large. That is not racism.
Duterte himself coddled all kinds of suspicious Red Chinese connections under his government. Michael Yang, who was not even a Filipino citizen, was appointed as presidential adviser. In an interview with the former Davao Death Squad assassin Arturo Lascañas, he intimated that Yang was the top drug lord of Davao city and operated about three shabu laboratories in the city, all under the protection of Duterte. Now, information is coming out of the senate hearings that some of the POGO incorporators have links to Yang and the corruption-laden Pharmally pharmaceutical company.
The spread of POGOs has become a malignant metastasis. The unimaginable crimes they harbor are no peanuts — human trafficking, kidnapping, torture, illegal detention, and all kinds of scams under the sun, including hacking of websites. Duterte planted the tumor. His administration allowed POGOs in 2016 by putting them under the regulation of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor).
It is a valid issue to rally against crimes bred by POGOs. It is a valid issue to rally against Chinese espionage. Just as it is a valid issue to rally against subversion of our local government system by the People’s Republic of China from which imprimatur has arisen the impostor Guo Hua Ping.
The question begs: what does Red China think of us that we can be easily fooled by lies? A fascist hegemon that curtails freedom of thought and speech thinks it can impose its oppressive system on us and its foreign affairs that use lying as statecraft.
If we don’t rally, we fail in our love of country. This is about the dignity of every Filipino.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
