Alice Guo won the 2022 mayoral elections in Bamban, a rural town in the Philippines with a population of around 78,000 people that’s sandwiched between several key military bases. The independent candidate became a popular young mayor and rising political star, expressing support for the since-fractured alliance of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte.
Now, Guo is in police custody, accused of cybercrimes and being a Chinese spy whose mayoral campaign was allegedly organized by Chinese state officials. She has pled not guilty.
Alice Guo won the 2022 mayoral elections in Bamban, a rural town in the Philippines with a population of around 78,000 people that’s sandwiched between several key military bases. The independent candidate became a popular young mayor and rising political star, expressing support for the since-fractured alliance of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte.
Now, Guo is in police custody, accused of cybercrimes and being a Chinese spy whose mayoral campaign was allegedly organized by Chinese state officials. She has pled not guilty.
Her case has roiled the Philippines, where distrust of China has surged following a series of aggressive moves by Beijing in the South China Sea. Chinese ships have repeatedly confronted Philippine vessels on resupply missions in the disputed waters; in June, a Philippine navy sailor lost their thumb in a confrontation with axe-wielding members of the Chinese coast guard.
The tensions have stoked anti-Chinese sentiment in the Philippines and heightened scrutiny on domestic politicians—and members of the country’s large Chinese Filipino community—with potential ties to the Chinese government.
Guo was arrested in Indonesia in September. Following accusations of running illegal online gaming and scam centers, she fled the country and spent months as a fugitive, appearing in Malaysia and Singapore before turning up in Indonesia. The online gaming centers, often Chinese-run, have been accused of being fronts for human trafficking, financial scams, kidnappings, and murder.
In August, Guo was officially removed from her post as Bamban’s mayor. She initially said in October that she would file paperwork to run again in Bamban’s 2025 mayoral election, but backtracked the next day.
As Guo faced questioning from Philippine senators, Chinese businessman She Zhijiang claimed in an Al Jazeera documentary that Guo was a Chinese spy and an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
She, like Guo, is accused of running offshore scam centers and is currently detained in Thailand, but he says that both he and Guo had connections to the Chinese state. He also claimed that Guo once asked him for campaign funds while she was running for mayor.
Guo first came under scrutiny in March, when authorities raided a scam center in Bamban that ran “pig butchering” scams in which coerced workers were forced to pose as potential lovers for lonely people online before reeling them into fraudulent schemes. A Vietnamese man had escaped and notified authorities of the center, where hundreds of suspected human trafficking victims also conducted cryptocurrency scams.
Authorities said workers at the center had their passports confiscated and were physically harmed or deprived of sleep if they failed to meet their quotas.
Online gaming centers in the Philippines, much like their counterparts in Cambodia, have concerned regulators for years after numerous accounts of the centers being run by crime syndicates to cover for scam operations and other illegal activities. However, under the China-friendly former President Rodrigo Duterte, these casinos were given significant operational leeway.
That changed after Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president in 2022 and turned Manila away from Beijing and toward Washington. Marcos banned the online gaming centers in July, and the government is in the process of shutting down those that remain.
Guo’s case was sensational enough even before the espionage accusations, said Aries Arugay, chairperson of the political science department at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
“The investigations in Congress are revealing that there’s more than meets the eye than the simple narrative that it’s all about [online casinos],” Arugay said. “[They are] now pointing to a narrative that is much more dangerous and much more serious than before.”
Guo had already been accused of faking her Philippine citizenship in order to run for mayor. She held a Philippine passport that claimed she was born in 1986 in Tarlac, just outside Bamban. But in June, a Philippine senator revealed an alleged Chinese passport belonging to Guo, showing that she was born as Guo Hua Ping in 1990 in Fujian, China.
That revelation sparked further anger at corrupt Philippine authorities for handing out fake birth certificates to foreign nationals, who are also legally prohibited from owning majority stakes in businesses.
But the allegations made by She suggest that Chinese authorities are directly influencing politics in the Philippines by boosting pro-China candidates in elections.
Last month, Wang Fu Gui, She’s friend and former cellmate who spent five years in prison for credit card fraud before being found not guilty, corroborated She’s claims in a video interview with Philippine Sen. Risa Hontiveros, who has helmed many of the hearings probing Guo.
Wang said he had been entrusted with files belonging to She that showed Guo was “a spy, but not a special one,” who was beholden to Chinese authorities as they knew of her fake Filipina identity. Wang also alleged that Guo’s mayoral campaign had been funded by Chinese state security.
According to Wang, Chinese spying in the Philippines and its involvement in online gaming operations is “totally connected to the Belt and Road, which is also just part of a huge United Front and intelligence strategic plan for the whole world, including foreign colonization tactics.”
While it’s hard to connect the various dots, Hontiveros and other skeptics of Chinese influence in the Philippines have used the case to untangle Beijing’s role in swaying domestic politics.
The Philippines was a major partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative under Duterte, who controversially greenlit billions in infrastructure projects backed by Chinese loans. Guo apparently entered the country using a visa granted by the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority, a Philippine government-owned corporation that served as a powerhouse of Chinese investment during Duterte administration. But the Marcos administration has steered the country away from Chinese investment, coinciding with its turn toward the United States and a decrease of trust in Beijing among Filipinos.
“It’s playing to that particular concern of Filipinos [over] the escalating tensions in the West Philippine Sea and how increasingly China is being seen as a less trustworthy country,” said Cleve Arguelles, chief executive of WR Numero Research, referring to the local term for disputed waters in the South China Sea.
Both chambers of the Philippine Congress are set to continue hearings about Guo’s background in the months to come, along with probes into online gaming centers. These hearings have become politically expedient for Marcos and his political allies—along with Hontiveros, who is part of the opposition—to “see whether the case of Alice Guo and the connection to [online gaming] can actually be connected to the Duterte camp,” Arguelles said.
Duterte and Marcos formed a political alliance in 2022, when Marcos ran for president with Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, as his running mate. But their alliance has unraveled in spectacular fashion, and the Duterte family’s ties to Chinese business interests have become a frequent target of pro-Marcos politicians.
Ideally, these congressional hearings would focus on reforming the government bureaus that allegedly allowed Guo and others like her to gain Philippine citizenship and get involved with scam centers, Arguelles said.
But the hearings have had a decidedly political tenor, and critics have accused politicians of stoking anti-Chinese racism. In May, one senator defended herself after asking Guo to speak in the Philippine dialect of Hokkien during a hearing. Hontiveros has denied that there are anti-Chinese motives behind the hearings and has driven them toward investigating Duterte’s role.
“You can take the Alice Guo hearing into many different directions,” Arguelles said. “But it has decidedly taken that particular route of investigating how connected this is to Duterte.”
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