Eric Dai never swims in the large pool in the middle courtyard of his home in Parkland, Florida. 

Pointing at the fence just behind the pool, which marks the perimeter of his property, he explains that it would be easy for an intruder to climb over it and attack him defenseless in the water. Despite the two guards who patrol his property and the dozens of white security cameras watching over his every move, the risk is too great. 

Dai doesn’t like to eat at restaurants either. When he is forced to eat out — by his kids, for example — he doesn’t email or text anyone where he is going beforehand. He only makes plans verbally and in person. He has also given up hiking, previously his favorite pastime, due to safety concerns. 

“I worry about someone being sent out there to kill me,” he says.

Mostly confined to his $5 million, 7-acre property in south Florida, he has tried to pursue other interests. The 47-year-old businessman recently built a chicken coop and a vegetable garden with neat rows of lettuce and cucumbers, for example. And he devotes a lot of time to caring for his six kids. In November, he spent hours helping his eldest daughter prepare for a math competition. She won.

Dai’s all-encompassing fear stems from an ongoing dispute with a large Chinese semiconductor company called Nations Technologies. Nearly a decade ago, Nations agreed to invest with Dai’s firm, a successful Shenzhen-based healthcare hedge fund called Khan Funds, which had $1 billion in assets under management. In 2015, when Dai permanently moved to the U.S. on a business visa, the two companies agreed to expand their partnership. But the relationship went south, Dai says, when Luo Zhaoxue, the chairman of Nations, urged Dai to invest in U.S. semiconductor companies and revealed he was part of a larger, state-backed effort to acquire technology for China’s military.

Dai, whose Chinese name is Dai Xuefeng, says he reported Luo to the FBI in 2017. And last year, he filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) court case against Nations in U.S. court. Ever since, he has feared for his life. He has applied for asylum in the U.S., which would also help protect his family and remaining employees, because he insists that Luo and the Chinese government are working to retaliate against him. 

Nations, however, tells a very different story: The company claims that Dai absconded with roughly $70 million dollars from their partnership and fled to the United States. Nations has sued him in Chinese court and one of its affiliates has sued him in Singapore court. In a statement to The Wire, Nations said “To distract attention from his unlawful acts, Dai has engaged in a pattern of making false and malicious allegations and filing baseless lawsuits, most specifically in the United States. [Nations] rejects these allegations for what they are: a total fabrication and without any merit or supported by any credible evidence.”

Luo, who has since left the company, similarly denies Dai’s claims. “In an effort to avoid legal accountability for his conduct, Mr. Dai has concocted out of thin air a fairy tale to defame me,” Luo said in a statement to The Wire. “I have never engaged in any effort to steal technology from the United States or anywhere else; I have never asked Mr. Dai to do so; and I have never threatened Mr. Dai or his family.” 

The FBI declined to comment for this story. Many of the details in Dai’s saga are hazy and nearly impossible to prove. Although he denies stealing the $70 million, for instance, he is unable to provide concrete evidence to support that claim, and much of his evidence against Luo relies on audiotapes he secretly recorded, which can’t definitively be identified as Luo. His paranoia also seems to have permeated every aspect of his life, making him prone to conspiracy theories — about the origins of Covid-19, for example, or the motives of his wife, who he is now separated from. 

But with all of its gray zones and compounding personal tragedies, Dai’s story embodies some of the most challenging aspects of the U.S.-China relationship — most notably, the blurring lines between legitimate business and national security concerns, and the outsized role private individuals can play in geopolitical games. 

… China looks at the diaspora as a resource to be tapped. It is hard for westerners to understand how much pressure the Chinese government can bring to bear on its citizens.

Anna Puglisi, senior fellow at Georgetown’s CSET

The Wire was unable to verify any claims Dai has made about efforts by the Chinese government or Nations to harass or threaten him in the United States. But Dai’s fear of state actors reaching beyond China’s shores is not unfounded. Through a program called Operation Fox Hunt, for example, China has stepped up its effort to repatriate Chinese nationals wanted abroad. Chinese state agents have targeted dissidents living overseas and lured individuals back to China under fabricated auspices. The goal, experts say, is to stamp out criticisms and make coercion efforts easier since individuals feel like they can’t escape the long arm of the Chinese state.

Operation Fox Hunt “has been a tool for the Chinese Communist Party to harass and intimidate Chinese citizens in the U.S. and other places,” says Teng Biao, a prominent Chinese dissident and lawyer who lives in the United States. “For a long time, the U.S. government has not realized the harm of transnational repression. We don’t feel safe, even though we are living in a free country.”

Dai’s claims that a Chinese company would seek to illicitly acquire advanced semiconductor technology is also backed up by a string of recent examples, including Chinese firms allegedly stealing IP from ASML, the Dutch lithography company, and Micron Technology, the U.S. semiconductor giant. Indeed, preventing these types of schemes is one of the U.S. government’s top priorities, but identifying them can be tricky, given the volume of legitimate business exchange that occurs between the U.S. and China in the semiconductor industry and the obfuscating tactics that the bad actors employ. Recruiting private businessmen, for example, is very common.

“It seems crazy that private citizens or students are asked to participate in these elaborate schemes. It seems like one-offs,” says Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and a former national counterintelligence officer for East Asia. “But China looks at the diaspora as a resource to be tapped. It is hard for westerners to understand how much pressure the Chinese government can bring to bear on its citizens.” 

Dai sees that pressure everywhere he looks, and he is desperate for someone —the FBI, U.S. Congress, or just a visiting reporter — to understand. When his fence was damaged in Florida this month, he sent me photos, saying he suspected it was the work of the Chinese government. When his sister’s New York house was broken into in December — with nothing stolen — he saw it as a warning, showing me the surveillance tape to prove how ominous it was. And in early January, when he hit a small branch on the highway, resulting in significant damage to his car, he reenacted the whole ordeal so I would see the sophisticated assassination attempt he had survived. 

“It is better for you to faraway that,” he texted me once, in response to a question trying to nail down a particular detail about the alleged technology theft scheme. “The enemy will kill you if you know more.”

Against this backdrop, Dai sees himself as an accidental and lonely fighter caught up in a much broader battle between China and the United States. As he said with intense conviction the first time we spoke, and repeated many times after, “We are in World War III.”

‘CHINA’S WARREN BUFFETT’

In 2009, when Sophie Xu graduated with a master’s degree from Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, she had two job offers to consider. One was at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the massive state-owned multinational bank. And the other was as an analyst for Khan Funds.

The choice, she says, was obvious. The two options presented “totally different views of the world.” Choosing ICBC meant her “life would stay underneath the mountains.” But if she followed Dai, who she describes as honest and wise, she would view the world from “the top of the mountain.” 

It can be difficult to see this version of Eric Dai in the man who is afraid to go for a swim in his own backyard. But in the 2010s, Dai was an up-and-comer in Shenzhen’s booming finance scene. A dentist by training, Dai had a reputation for being level-headed, and he established Khan Funds in 2006 to invest in advanced, research-focused Chinese healthcare companies. Chinese media profiles from that time tout his impressive medical background and financial success, and even call him China’s “Medical Warren Buffett.” 

Asked by one reporter to describe an example of an investment failure, Dai said that his firm hadn’t had any failures, “because we never follow market hype…There is no secret to investing. The important thing is to have a rational, objective, good attitude, as well as professional knowledge and cooperation with team members. Be calm when others panic, and be clear-headed when others are greedy.”

Khan Funds — which Dai named after the Mongol warrior leader, Genghis Khan — grew to have over 50 employees. Dai started running in elite circles, and new money seemed to be walking through the door every day.

In May 2014, Huang Baoxin, then an anti-corruption official at the country’s central propaganda department, introduced Dai to Luo Zhaoxue, the chairman of Nations.¹Huang is now a senior vice president at Ping An. The Shenzhen-listed semiconductor firm was founded in 2000 out of “Project 909” — a Chinese state program to boost domestic chip technology — and has since grown to have a $1.3 billion market capitalization.

Nations first invested 200 million RMB ($29 million) into one of Dai’s funds in 2014, and Dai recalls Luo as something of the perfect partner: easy to work with and seemingly uninterested in meddling in Dai’s investment decisions.

Nations’ investment coincided with Dai’s move to the United States. He had grown increasingly frustrated with the Chinese government’s control over its stock markets and yearned for opportunities with U.S. healthcare companies. 

Dai says Luo knew about this plan. In 2015, Nations and Khan Funds set up a private equity fund — with a Nations subsidiary as the only limited partner and a Khan Funds subsidiary as the general partner — aimed at acquiring a U.S. biomedical company. Nations invested a total of 500 RMB ($73 million) into the private equity fund.

Armed with capital, Dai applied for and eventually received an EB-1 visa for extraordinary ability²The law firm that handled Dai’s EB-1 case described his investment prowess as his ‘extraordinary ability’: “With the authorship of thousands of articles (which have millions of readers), a published book of those articles, hundreds of articles written about him (including those that compare him to Warren Buffet), the critical role he has played for the renowned company he established, the awards he won and remuneration he has earned all add up to a totality of the circumstances that can only lead to the conclusion that Dr. Dai is one of the world’s most foremost investment experts of our time.”, and he permanently moved to the U.S. with his wife and two daughters. For the American headquarters of Khan Funds, he rented office space in New York City, on the 83rd floor of One World Trade Center, where rent runs nearly $800,000 a year. It wasn’t long before he identified an attractive acquisition target: a San Diego-based clinical research company called ProSciento Inc³ProSciento used to be called Profil Institute for Clinical Research.. Khan Funds took the ProSciento executives on a tour to China, and drew up initial agreements for an investment deal. 

“I was very happy with that target,” Dai says. Pictures of the China tour show a younger, more care-free Dai along with the ProSciento executives eating at large banquet tables and wearing hard hats at factory tours. ProSciento declined to comment.

But according to Dai’s telling, Luo wasn’t interested in pursuing ProSciento. Instead, Luo started encouraging Dai to invest in the semiconductor space, including “the third largest semiconductor company in the world.” 

Dai says he didn’t have any interest in semiconductors so he never even asked which company Luo was referring to, but he later surmised Luo may have been talking about Micron Technologies, the Idaho-based company that specializes in memory and storage chips. Micron has long been a target for China: in 2015, Tsinghua Unigroup attempted a $23 billion takeover of the company, and in 2018, U.S. authorities busted another Chinese company’s scheme to steal Micron’s designs.

Dai says Luo also asked him to set up a semiconductor-focused fund and encouraged him to invest in Optimum Semiconductor Technologies, a New York-based company that is wholly owned by Wuxi Dsp Technologies Incorporated, a Chinese company that has collaboration agreements with Nations. (Dai alleges in his RICO complaint that Optimum was also part of Luo’s network, and points to the fact that both the CEO and Chairman of the company have participated in the Thousand Talents Program, the Chinese government’s overseas talent recruitment program. The company, through a lawyer, declined to comment.)

Dai says he set up the fund but never went through the licensing process or put any money into it. He was still hoping to stall when two of his closest deputies — Sophie Xu and another woman, Alice Zhang — were summoned to the Nations headquarters in Shenzhen one day in March, 2017. According to Xu and Zhang⁴The two women’s Chinese names are Zhang Junqi and Xu Xinmanni., Luo berated them for Khan’s failure to pursue semiconductor investments. They were scared and confused, and say that when they returned from the meeting, they warned Dai to start recording his conversations with Luo. 

The tapes, Dai says, prove that Luo’s investment recommendations were part of a wider plot to steal U.S. chip technology for China’s military. 

“They were worried that Mr. Luo will do some crazy things,” Dai explains. Dai says he was not too concerned — as long as he was making money for Nations, he thought, there was no reason for Luo to be angry.

Still, when Luo showed up in New York six months later, in September, 2017, Dai says he secretly recorded Luo over the course of four days. The tapes, Dai says, prove that Luo’s investment recommendations were part of a wider plot to steal U.S. chip technology for China’s military. 

The Wire has seen transcripts of the tapes but could not independently verify that they match the audio or that it is Luo in the conversations. 

According to the transcripts, the man Dai says is Luo admits to having a network of more than 100 Chinese-American engineers in the U.S. working on his behalf. The man is particularly focused on technology related to gallium nitride and gallium carbide semiconductors — chips that are used in military applications, such as missiles, partly because of their resistance to heat. 

The man also repeatedly references an engineer named Chen Yaping, who he says has been working painstakingly for him for 15 years to obtain these technologies and help fill “the domestic gap” back in China. He cites a military parade at Zhurihe, the PLA training base in Inner Mongolia, and says that the technology recently displayed there was all “obtained by my team and through such intermediate methods during the early stages.” 

Though Dai says he was shocked by these admissions, he had no reason to doubt the claims. Luo’s friendship with Huang — the former CCP official who is now an executive at Ping An — is a testament to Luo’s network, and Dai says Luo often bragged about his relationship with top officials in China. 

Luo told The Wire that he was a soldier in the PLA as a teenager but has not had any affiliation with the military since. He was a journalist in Chongqing, he says, before entering the business world and joining Nations, initially as an independent director, in 2009. 

A lawyer representing Nations’ U.S. subsidiary in the RICO case told The Wire that Dai “has only recently provided our client with selective and very short excerpts of some audio recordings in a Chinese dialect…Mr. Dai has also provided what he purports to be English-language transcripts of those excerpts. Those transcripts provided by Mr Dai appear to have been created by him, and contain serious mistranslations of the audio recordings. To date, he has not produced anything that can certify the origin and authenticity of this recording.”

Dai maintains that Luo saw his work as a national service, and was angered by Dai’s unwillingness to help.

“I have to buy so many things for the country. I am shouldering the mission for the country,” the man says, according to the transcript. “However, every time you failed me. You should think about it! You still have family in China; your mother and sister are still in China!”

Dai says these references to his family were what pushed him over the edge. Immediately he told his mother and sister to leave China. They got on a flight to the U.S. — where they have been ever since — and he found himself a lawyer.

Four days after the lawyer dropped off Dai’s package at the FBI’s office in downtown Manhattan, he got a call back.

THE GUO WENGUI PROBLEM

In 2018, the Department of Justice revealed an indictment against seven men for conspiring to steal semiconductor technology from Wolfspeed, a U.S. semiconductor firm which has received extensive Department of Defense funding⁵Wolfspeed used to be named Cree.. In an elaborate scheme, the men approached Wolfspeed and posed as another U.S.-based firm interested in integrated circuit design. After accessing the design portal and successfully receiving manufactured chips, they sent the chips to China where they were given to Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC). CGTC is on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List, which prohibits the company from buying U.S. goods without a license. 

One of the men named in the indictment was Chen Yaping, who seems to be the same man repeatedly mentioned in Dai’s recordings. Chen, who the indictment identifies as a Chinese engineer working as the chief technology supervisor for a Chengdu-based semiconductor company, was allegedly responsible for depositing money and dispersing it to the individuals for their work. In 2021, one of the men, a U.S. citizen named Yi-Chi Shih, was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay over $600,000 in fines, but Chen, who remains in China, was never charged. Chen did not respond to The Wire’s request for comment.

Nations and Luo are not mentioned or implicated in the case at all, but company documents confirm that Nations did have collaboration with Chen. In August 2017 — just a month before Luo visited New York — Nations put out a statement describing a joint venture it was creating alongside Chen Yaping to produce integrated circuits in Chengdu. The statement says that Nations would invest 50 million RMB ($7 million), while Chen would provide the intellectual property. Nations pulled out of the joint venture in 2018.

The technology Chen assisted in stealing from Wolfspeed, according to court filings, was gallium nitride — one of the chemical compounds repeatedly mentioned in Dai’s transcripts. The technology also comes up in documents describing the joint venture that Nations and Chen were developing.

James Lewis, who directs the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, served as an expert witness for the Wolfspeed case. He says that gallium nitride technology “was on the Chinese wishlist” because it is crucial for missile technology. America’s Patriot missile, for example, is developed with gallium nitride. 

“It is a chip that the Chinese didn’t have, so they created an espionage scheme,” he says.

Nations told The Wire that it was unaware of the indictment involving Chen until 2022, when Dai brought it up in the Singapore lawsuit. Nations, the lawyer said, “has not and would not engage in any effort to unlawfully obtain technology in violation of any country’s laws, including the United States, and specifically did not ever do so with either Yaping Chen or Mr Dai.” Luo also said that he “had no knowledge of the U.S. criminal allegations against Mr. Chen Yaping during my tenure at Nations,” and “was only vaguely acquainted” with Chen before the joint venture.⁶Luo says he knew Chen because they are both from Chongqing. 

FBI officials on the case declined to comment on whether Dai’s audio recordings helped with the investigation that led to the 2018 indictment. But Dai says he met with agents 16 times over the course of two and a half years. In 2019, he says, an FBI agent even asked him to take part in a sting operation, but Dai refused to do so because he didn’t want to further endanger himself. It’s a decision he now says he regrets. (The Wire was unable to confirm the extent or nature of the communication between the FBI and Dai.)

Dai says he is disappointed that the FBI has not taken action against Luo or Nations. He believes he risked his life in order to expose an illegal Chinese scheme. As one Khan Funds lawyer describes it, Dai expected the FBI to take decisive action, but “it wasn’t like in the movies.”

It’s one reason he chose to file the RICO case against Nations, Luo Zhaoxue, Huang Baoxin (the Ping An executive)⁷Huang’s lawyer told The Wire that Dai’s “allegations against my clients lack merit and were made without any factual support,” but declined to comment further., and Optimum Semiconductor Technology in New York court last year. 

“Mr. Dai is a true American hero,” says Akiva Shapiro, a partner at Gibson Dunn, the law firm representing Dai in the RICO suit. “As alleged in the suit, he stood up to an espionage ring that sought to steal U.S. semiconductor technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China military and reported their activities to U.S. law enforcement. Mr. Dai is suffering the fate of countless other Chinese dissidents before him, who have faced retaliation and harassment simply for speaking out.”

Dai’s story of selfless sacrifice is complicated, however. Experts say that from the FBI’s perspective, Dai’s motives may not be clear. Is he a well-meaning immigrant who is trying to do right by his new country and expose an illegal scheme to steal critical military technology? Or is he an unscrupulous businessman who stole millions of dollars and is now exploiting the U.S.-China geopolitical tensions to escape culpability? 

If [his case] is about protecting his gains, ill gotten or legitimate, that is between him and his home country. If he doesn’t have something we’re interested in, he is just another guy in the country.

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who served as the director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, says that the FBI is likely trying to answer these questions while also determining what Dai still has that is of value to them. “That is the hard part for him,” Montoya says. “If [his case] is about protecting his gains, ill gotten or legitimate, that is between him and his home country. If he doesn’t have something we’re interested in, he is just another guy in the country.”

The U.S. also has to be extremely careful about viewing every Chinese individual as a potential threat, says Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Asian Law. Though the ongoing schemes to acquire U.S. semiconductor technology are “a wide ranging Chinese government effort” which can involve private businessmen or academics, the U.S. is a rule of law society, he says. “When the U.S. government gets it wrong, there is a heavy price to pay. Those mistakes are deeply damaging to the broader U.S. effort to take on cases like this.”

Nations and Luo, for their part, insist they represent legitimate business interests. They claim that Dai is using this story to distract from the fact that he stole $70 million — which, according to Nations, caused “huge damage” to the company and its shareholders.

In 2018, Nations sued Dai’s company in Chinese court and obtained a default judgment, which removed him as director of the partnership. The authorities in the city of Shenzhen, where Nations is based, also put out a warrant for his arrest, which froze his assets in China. In 2020, a Nations affiliate also sued Dai (along with Sophie Xu and Alice Zhang) in Singapore court, seeking to recover $34 million dollars — part of the money they allege he stole. That case is ongoing, but the court recently issued an injunction to freeze Dai’s assets globally.⁸Nations is also trying to domesticate a default judgement against Xu and Zhang, meaning that it would be enforced in the U.S. as well.

Nations also notes that Dai shows a pattern of being a serial litigant. In 2019, he filed a defamation case in New York against Alibaba, among others, for publishing articles about Dai’s alleged theft from Nations, which the judge dismissed, describing Dai’s “labyrinthian complaint” as “nothing more than [Dai’s] delusions.” Dai has changed lawyers in both the Singapore and U.S. proceedings, and in 2017, he was the subject of suit from a former U.S. employee, Robert Polite, who claimed Dai discriminated against him and misappropriated company funds. The case was later dismissed, and Polite did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts note that while whistleblower cases are often complex, Dai’s case is interesting for its echoes with Guo Wengui’s — another wealthy and idiosyncratic Chinese businessman who fled to the U.S. claiming to have sensitive information while facing charges in China. Guo had ties to the Chinese security apparatus and said he had secrets about the Chinese elite when he moved to the U.S. in 2014. It is still unclear what motivated him and whether his claims have any veracity. Some even speculate that Guo, who also goes by the name Miles Kwok, is a double agent — feeding tips to China as he used his money to buddy up to Steve Bannon, the former top aide to President Trump.

“Guo has turned out to be perhaps useful but not wholly reliable. [Dai] could fit this same mold, but he also could be totally legitimate,” says Paul Heer, a former East Asia analyst at the CIA, adding that parsing out individuals’ motivations may be harder in the current, treacherous state of U.S.-China relations. “There is growing tension and mistrust in the relationship, and people on either side may see personal benefit from exploiting that.”

Dai, for his part, is aware of this skepticism and seems eager to avoid any association with it. As I was preparing to leave his house in Florida, Dai brought Guo up unprompted. 

“I am not Miles Kwok,” he said firmly. “I am just an ordinary businessman.”

‘THE SIMPLE LIFE’

Dai doesn’t have much business these days, however. The gold Khan Funds plaque is still proudly displayed on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, but the white marble and glass offices sit empty most days. Khan Funds does not have any clients, and though Dai declined to disclose his net worth, he says he lost 90 percent of his assets when he couldn’t go back to China. He now invests his family’s money in real estate and in the stock market, mostly by shorting companies with large China exposure such as Tesla and Apple. 

Still, though, he has held onto the extravagant New York real estate. 

“It’s symbolic,” says a Khan Funds lawyer who declined to be named in this article. “That was going to be his global headquarters. He feels like if none of this ever happened, there would be a lot of great business for him there. So then if he gives up on it, he’s letting the other side win.”

I met Dai at his personal Alamo on a cold bright day in November. Wearing a gold tie and a pinstripe dress shirt, he invited me into a conference room where an American flag and a picture of Genghis Khan flanked the dizzying view of the Hudson Bay and Ellis Island, where immigrants arrived in the early twentieth century looking for better lives.

Dai seems particularly drawn to America’s emphasis on individualism, which he says contrasts with China’s ‘whole of society’ approach. “Even though I am great — learning great, doing business great — there is no need to be great for your country. For what? In China, they consider everyone to belong to the government,” he says. “I have no interest in making my country great.”

Dai says he had frustrations with the Chinese government when he was younger — most notably when the government refused to give him a permit to set up a private dental clinic, leading him to abandon the medical profession — but he never thought of himself as particularly political. After the dispute with Nations, however, Dai started to reject everything Chinese; he even decided he didn’t want his “family’s blood” to continue to be 100 percent Chinese. 

Dai — who already had two daughters with his Chinese wife, Ally Liu — pursued having more children via white egg donors and surrogates, a move he says his wife was not comfortable with. In 2019, right before Dai was going to pick up the first newborn in California from the surrogate, Dai and Liu got in an argument, and Liu ended up calling 911. 

Dai took her call as proof that she must be working with Nations and the Chinese government⁹Dai says the timing was also suspicious because the FBI had just asked him to participate in the sting operation.. They are now separated.

“They just want to injure me, and make me have a bad life,” he says. “When my wife works with them, that means that my wife broke the rule of law. If my wife went to jail, am I happy or unhappy? How about my daughters?” 

Liu told The Wire that she has never worked for Nations or the Chinese government and says that their separation was not related to Dai’s decision to have children with a surrogate. (Dai has had four children using white egg donors and surrogates.)

Eric Dai with his four youngest children. Credit: Katrina Northrop

Laura Harth, campaign director at Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization based in Spain, says such erratic behavior is not uncommon among communities of dissidents and individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese state. Although it is unclear “what is real and what is perceived,” she says, it ultimately doesn’t matter. 

“What ends up happening is that these people become increasingly isolated and afraid. All this creates a huge amount of tension, and that is exactly what the Chinese government wants,” Harth says.

With his wife and his business gone, all Dai really has left are his deputies, Zhang and Xu, who have lived permanently in the U.S. since 2017, after Dai says Luo threatened him in New York. The two women — who are accused by Nations of helping Dai steal the $70 million dollars — also live in Florida. Although they are fiercely loyal to Dai, they are also visibly rattled by the situation they’ve found themselves in.

I am a businessman. I should keep quiet about that, but if I have to make a choice, I should stand with America. This is the freedom country. This is my dream.

Eric Dai

After two masked men recently broke into Dai’s sister’s house, for instance, Xu, 38, decided it was safer for her to live in an RV on Dai’s property, rather than at home alone. Zhang, 38, initially stayed with her dog at her own home, where she had already installed an advanced security system, but later also moved to Dai’s property. Zhang says she never orders things online because she doesn’t want to provide her address, and she makes a point of avoiding her neighbors, especially those who are Asian. 

Zhang hasn’t talked to her parents and brother back in China for more than five years because she doesn’t want to cause trouble for them. When I asked her whether she wishes she took a different job — Dai recruited her right out of law school, at Peking University — she started crying. 

“I’m not Batman. I’m not Superman. I’m just a very ordinary person,” she says. “I know Eric may not be happy with me saying I wish I could choose another job. But I just want a normal life. My parents may wish they never had me. I never had a chance to say goodbye to them.”

From his perch atop New York City, Dai also claims to want the “simple life” — which he describes as “stay with kids, stay with family, make money” — but after the last few years, he worries that it is slipping out of reach. Still, he says he doesn’t regret the choices he’s made. 

“Mr. Luo guaranteed a good life, [I would have been] very rich. But why did I still say no? Because I do not like the CCP style,” he says. “I am a businessman. I should keep quiet about that, but if I have to make a choice, I should stand with America. This is the freedom country. This is my dream.”

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