CZ hits back at claims Binance is a Chinese company

cointelegraph.com:

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has hit back at critics and conspiracy theorists who claim Binance to be a Chinese-based “criminal entity” that “secretly [belongs] in the pocket of the Chinese government.”

CZ's response to critics came from a Sept. 1 blog post via Binance, and stems from a Twitter spat with a former Washington Post journalist who asked him; “While I have you here, who's Guangying Chen?”

He explained that the question is in reference to a conspiracy theory alleging that his personal friend and Chinese national Guangying Chen is the secret owner of Bijie Tech (a company he founded in 2015) and possibly also Binance.

However, CZ explains that Chen is a colleague of his that he met through a friend, which he hired to “manage the back office” at Bijie Tech before re-hiring her again at Binance, adding that conspiracy theorists then linked her as a secret owner of the firms given that she was one of the few to have initially remained in China.

Websites such as Scam Binance allege that Chen at one stage owned 93% of the shares in both Bijie Tech and Binance, among other things. CZ stated that such rumors originated from an "old campaign that a competitor launched via an anonymous microsite."

“As a result, both she and her family have been targeted and harassed by the media and online trolls. Had I known how much of a negative impact this would have on her life, I never would have asked her to do what seemed like such an innocuous step at the time,” he said.

CZ also strongly denied the claims that his company has close links to China and its government, and even went as far as discussing some of his troubling personal and business-related experiences with Chinese authorities.

CZ is of the view that the ill-intended