Career
According to Alastair Iain Johnston, Guo was until the mid-1980s "the CCP"s most authoritative interpreter and annotator" of The Art of War by Sun Tzu, but Guo was "practically unknown in the West". Johnson said "Guo stressed that from a Marxist–Leninist perspective the notion of "not fighting and subduing the enemy""—the core of the conventional interpretation of Sun Zi—was un-Marxist, since class enemies could not be credibly defeated without the application of violence."
Around June 4, 1937, Guo was the dean of studies of Qingyang Infantry School.