In April 2025, the kidnapping and murder of Filipino-Chinese businessman Guo Congyuan and his driver Armani Pabillo shocked the Filipino-Chinese community, revealing the persistent issue of kidnappings targeting the Chinese community in the Philippines. Guo's death is seen as a reflection of the long-standing infiltration of organized crime into the Chinese community.
This incident is not isolated. Since the Philippine government legalized online gambling in 2016, identity monitoring chaos, weak rule of law, bureaucratic fragmentation, and rampant corruption have made the Philippines an ideal haven for transnational capital and criminal networks.
On April 9, 2025, in Rodriguez town, Rizal province, about an hour's drive northeast of Manila, a local resident found two bodies wrapped in nylon bags in the bushes. The victims were only in their underwear, their faces wrapped in tape, and their bodies showed signs of strangulation and bloodstains. The police identified the bodies as Chinese businessman Guo Congyuan (also known as Anson Que or Anson Tan) and his driver Pabillo. Their last appearance was on March 29, when Guo left his office in Valenzuela City in a Lexus driven by Pabillo.
According to the Philippine police investigation, Guo originally planned to meet a Chinese woman at a house in Bulacan province on March 28, but the meeting was postponed to March 29. After this, both individuals went missing.
The Philippine Business Daily reported that on March 30, Guo's family received a WeChat message from the kidnappers demanding a ransom of 20 million US dollars. The family immediately reported to the Philippine National Police Anti-Kidnapping Group (AKG) and subsequently paid a total of about 210 million pesos (approximately 26 million RMB) in ransom in three installments. However, there was still no word from Guo until his body was discovered on April 9.
On April 18, police arrested two Filipino suspects, Richard Austria and Remat Cartaquesta, in Palawan. The next day, Chinese suspect David Tan Liao surrendered. The three were charged with "kidnapping for ransom resulting in death." According to the Department of Justice, Cartaquesta was responsible for guarding the victims, while David Tan Liao rented the crime scene house and was suspected of cleaning fingerprints at the scene.
There were five suspects at the crime scene, including two Chinese masterminds, Qioning Lin and Gong Wenli, who are still at large. The police stated that these two were present throughout Guo's confinement and planned the operation together with David Tan Liao. On May 17, Gong Wenli was arrested in a hotel on Boracay Island. She was disguised at the time of arrest, and there was also a Chinese "hairdresser" man trying to assist with the disguise.
The police allege that Gong Wenli lured Guo to the meeting under the pretext of buying a house and led the subsequent ransom negotiations. According to her confession, the ransom was converted into USDT cryptocurrency, most of which was withdrawn through the Huione Pay platform based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Huione Pay has been listed by the US Treasury as a high-risk entity, suspected of assisting criminal groups such as "pig butchering" in money laundering. As of May 11, the police had frozen some of the cryptocurrency assets, but about 1.4 million US dollars in ransom had already been successfully withdrawn from Cambodia. The police are still investigating the final recipients of these funds.
Guo's case is not an isolated incident. In January 2024, a German-Chinese and an Austrian-Chinese were invited to the Philippines for an "inspection" and were kidnapped upon arrival, with a ransom of about 1.3 million RMB paid, and both individuals are still missing. In June 2024, two Chinese who went to the Philippines to discuss medical equipment business were kidnapped and killed, with the mastermind being a Taiwanese woman, Chen Yuxuan, who was later arrested in South Korea.
Guo's identity is particularly noteworthy. Born in Yongchun, Fujian, he went to the Philippines to work at the age of 28 and, leveraging his experience in the steel industry, founded Ellison Steel Company in 1990, later venturing into real estate, mining, catering, and other fields. Although the media called him the "Steel King," the executive editor of the Philippine Business Daily, Cai Youming, believes that he was mainly engaged in trade rather than production, and the Filipino-Chinese community prefers to call him a "community leader."
The rapid progress of the case is also closely related to Guo's status as a community leader. An insider close to the Guo family stated that in the Philippines, kidnapping is not a public prosecution crime, and if the victim's family does not testify, it is difficult for the police to file a case. However, due to the high reward offered by the Guo family, along with high attention from the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines and Chinese police, as well as statements of concern from Philippine President Marcos, the police were prompted to act quickly.
In Cai Youming's view, kidnappings targeting Chinese have been common since the 1990s. He recalled, "Almost every other day, there was a kidnapping case involving Chinese, and Chinese parents strictly forbade their children from going out, requiring them to return home immediately after school." The kidnapping data disclosed by the police at that time also confirmed this: 30 cases were reported in the first half of 1992, but it is estimated that nearly 10 cases actually occurred each week, with 90% of the victims being of Chinese descent.
Philippine expert Dai Fan pointed out that at that time, although Chinese only accounted for 1% of the population, they controlled one-third of the large enterprises, naturally becoming high-profit targets for kidnappers.
The leader of the "Restore Public Order Movement" (MRPO), Hong Yuhua, stated that in the 1990s, Chinese victims of kidnapping cases often chose to settle privately and not report to the police, and kidnappers demanded ransoms quickly, accurately, and ruthlessly, forming a "perfect crime" cycle. The Chinese community in Manila adopted a closed living style at that time, closing shops and sending children abroad for education in the evening.
However, the root problem is far from being solved by individual caution. Hong Yuhua pointed out in a memoir article that after the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, the military and police system lost its privileges, grassroots income fell into poverty, and the police were gradually infiltrated by gangs. In 1992, then-President Ramos even fired the national police chief due to a police kidnapping scandal. Lawyer Cai Weilian joked, "The New York police respond in 7 minutes, London in 3 minutes, and the Philippines the fastest—when the kidnappers commit the crime, the police are already at the scene."
This also made Manila once known as the "kidnapping capital of the world" in the 1990s, even surpassing the turbulent southern island of Mindanao. In 1993, the murder of 15-year-old Chinese girl Xia Ling after being kidnapped led to a protest by 20,000 people in the Chinese community. The slogan "After Xia Ling, who's next?" became a mark of the era's scars.
Public pressure eventually prompted the government to take action. After 1999, the situation gradually eased, until the rise of online gambling brought a new round of underground economic prosperity. Today, history seems to be repeating itself.
The Guo case has once again shaken the Filipino-Chinese community. Although Philippine politicians and police have repeatedly promised to crack down on kidnapping crimes, in reality, the overseas Chinese community still generally opts for a "low-profile handling" due to the complex backgrounds of kidnappers and the involvement of local police systems, not wanting to intensify conflicts or trigger chain retaliations. A middle-aged Filipino-Chinese entrepreneur expressed helplessly, "If you really want to investigate thoroughly, it's likely to be your relatives, a police officer you know, or his friend who did it."
In recent years, many community leaders and senior media personnel have repeatedly called for reform of the Philippine police system, but to little avail. Instead, as China has intensified its crackdown on "gambling fraud gray industry" in recent years, more Chinese criminal groups have turned to the Philippines in search of protection. A Filipino-Chinese commented, "It used to be old Filipinos kidnapping Chinese, now it's Chinese deceiving Chinese, with Filipinos just helping with odd jobs and carrying bodies."
The police report shows that in the Guo case, the ransom exchange and withdrawal were completed by Filipino suspects, with Chinese suspects leading the planning and Filipinos responsible for offline execution and "taking the blame." This "Chinese-planned, Filipino-executed" model has become a certain complicit structure, where in case of trouble, suspects either flee to countries like Cambodia and Thailand or push the responsibility to lower-level Filipino workers. The convenience of cryptocurrency and online payment platforms makes the crime path more secretive and money laundering more efficient, further increasing the difficulty of investigation.
At the same time, local law enforcement in the Philippines generally lacks the technical capability to trace chain funds and has few resources to cooperate with cross-border law enforcement. In the Guo case, without the Chinese side providing wallet addresses, tracking technology, and intelligence support, the police would have had difficulty freezing the ransom accounts.
In June 2024, the cooperation between Chinese and Filipino police successfully repatriated a suspect who planned a large number of telecom fraud and kidnapping cases, "Yang Jianmin," also pushing the investigation of the Guo case to a key breakthrough. Filipino media reported that the Chinese police provided a list of major fraud-related accounts of Huione Pay in the Philippines this time, helping the Philippines identify more hidden Chinese criminal networks.
But the problem is far from over. In recent years, the problem of "black-gray intertwining" within the Chinese community in the Philippines has become increasingly severe: there are both whitelist companies doing legitimate business and those deeply involved in the underground flow of gray industry funds. Especially, online gambling and its surrounding industries (money laundering, virtual assets, recruitment, kidnapping for ransom) form a highly dependent structure, making "kidnapping" not only a tool of violent crime but also a means of control, punishment, and extortion.
The Guo case has also reawakened the overseas Chinese community. In April 2025, the Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce held a special meeting, calling on the government to quickly establish a special mechanism to combat kidnapping cases involving overseas Chinese and strengthen judicial cooperation on cross-border money laundering links. In May, the Philippine Star commented, "Within the Chinese community, kidnapping is not only an external threat but also a signal of comprehensive infiltration of internal corruption and organized crime."
As the security situation in the Philippines continues to decline and "black industry" groups deepen their penetration into communities, more and more Filipino-Chinese businessmen are caught in a dilemma: staying, fearing becoming a target; leaving, yet reluctant to give up years of business achievements. An interviewed community leader candidly said, "It's not that we don't love this country, it's just becoming more and more unfamiliar."
Currently, the Philippine Department of Justice has not publicly released the complete case file, and it is difficult for the outside world to confirm whether all involved individuals have been arrested. Guo's family has not made a public response, but several insiders revealed that his family is planning to seek higher-level judicial support and personal safety guarantees through diplomatic and legal channels.
At the level of China-Philippines relations, the case has also attracted high attention. According to diplomatic channels, China has expressed "high concern" to the Philippines and emphasized the need to crack down on transnational kidnapping crimes, especially those targeting Chinese citizens. China will also strengthen cooperation with the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), expanding intelligence sharing on cryptocurrency money laundering, gambling fund flows, and criminal hideouts.
However, the deep structural difficulties are not solvable in the short term. The long-standing "indistinguishable black and white" governance situation in the Philippines means that while the government takes a tough stance on one hand, local law enforcement may collude with criminal groups on the other. Especially in the context of Chinese gray industry funds, the "kidnapping-ransom-money laundering" forms a stable and highly profitable underground ecological chain, making it extremely costly and difficult to combat.
A scholar who has long studied the safety issues of the Chinese community in the Philippines pointed out, "The Guo case is not an isolated incident, but a result of the deep involvement of the entire Filipino-Chinese community, especially the gambling industry chain, in the black-gray structure. The problems behind this structure cannot be solved by simply arresting people."
Whether such cases will continue to occur in the future is not a question of "if" but "when." As the "gambling fraud gray industry" continues to seek new footholds, the Philippines is both a haven and a potential fire hazard. The choice of the Chinese community is at a crossroads.
