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[More proof that money doesn’t equal smarts.

Why would someone that rich stay in China to be picked up and jailed on a whim?

Take the money and run, dude....]

He wanted to be a player. And he may yet be, depending on the people he can get on his side. Plenty of China’s party leaders have spent time on the political outs or in prison. Mao viewed Deng Xiaoping as a threat to the throne for speaking out in favor of private enterprise*, but perhaps too popular with powerful members of the PLA brass to kill, having served as co-commander during one of the CCP’s decisive penultimate battles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaihai_campaign

Deng was purged twice and spent some time as a line worker in an industrial plant decades after serving as the equivalent of a 5 star general. Then, some time after he got out, and after Mao died, Deng organized a coup against Mao’s hand-picked successor, and the rest is history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng#Ousting_and_death

* Not so much for the idea per se, but for what in power politics terms was a challenge mounted against Mao’s authority. And in truth, there was method to Mao’s paranoia. In absolutist regimes, challenges to the sovereign’s power from courtiers are never head-on collisions. They run more along the lines of picking at loose threads. Then one day the emperor finds out that he’s emperor in name only. And the day after that, he’s no longer emperor even in name.