He joined the party when he was in College. Although many businessmen will be representatives as non-party members. Being a representative is more powerful than being a party member.
I am sure both sides of the spectrum (Marxists and the likes of Rockefeller) are laughing.
How come you can claim you are a communist while at the same time trying to accumulate as much wealth as much as possible? (Yes, I know the whole Chinese communist party is like that, but still)
Reminds me of former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei.
He also disappeared for weeks with every one looking for him.
Turned out he was in a Chinese prison...
Not sure why this is news but didn’t read article yet. I’m sure Q4 was probably pretty crazy for Alibaba and not surprised if he hasn’t been doing public appearances to focus more.
Jack Ma has disappeared as the public face of an African talent show he created, in a hint of the difficulties he is facing after a fall from grace in China.
Mr Ma was replaced as a judge in the final of Africa’s Business Heroes, a television contest for budding entrepreneurs, his photograph was removed from the judging webpage, and he was conspicuously left out of a promotional video.
The final took place in November, shortly after the Chinese tech billionaire made a candid speech criticising China’s regulators and its state-owned banks. In the wake of the speech, Mr Ma was dressed down by officials in Beijing and the $37bn initial public offering of his company Ant Group was suspended. He has not been seen in public since.
A spokesperson for Alibaba, which was founded by Mr Ma, said: “Due to a schedule conflict Mr Ma could no longer be part of the finale judge panel of Africa’s Business Heroes earlier this year (2020).”
One contestant in the competition said she had been star-struck when she pitched her business to Mr Ma in an earlier round. “You can’t imagine,” she said. But by the time of the final, Mr Ma had been replaced by Lucy Peng, an executive at Alibaba.
“There was something going on in China with Jack Ma or something, so (Lucy) also came in as well,” the contestant said.
While the final took place in November, the television broadcast of the show has been delayed until spring, according to two contestants, and one promotional video at the end of November makes no mention of Mr Ma.
Last year, contestants pitched their ideas directly to Mr Ma as they aimed to win huge prizes offered by his charity, the Jack Ma Foundation.
Mr Ma is one of China’s wealthiest men. In recent years, his work for the UN and global charity activities has brought a softer edge to China’s global image.
As the coronavirus pandemic deepened this spring, he donated tens of millions of face masks globally. He paired up with his longtime right-hand man Joe Tsai to donate 2,000 ventilators to New York as hospitals there forecast dire shortfalls — prompting a thanks from both US President Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
In August, Mr Ma tweeted his congratulations to the 20 entrepreneurs pitching their way through his foundation’s months-long contest to crown a second annual batch of African “Business Heroes”.
“I can’t wait to meet them!” he said. It was one of his last tweets.
Would love to get a transcript of exactly what he said at a forum a few months ago, from Quartz:
Speaking at a forum attended by some of China’s most powerful figures in politics and finance, Ma heavily criticized the “pawnshop mentality” of Chinese banks, and accused global authorities’ old-school financial regulation of slowing down innovation. The criticism eventually reached Chinese president Xi Jinping, who was furious about the remarks and personally ordered the suspension, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A couple of other interviews he’s been hammering away at the stagnant (according to him) Chinese banks, and the regulators basically snuffed him by forcing his Ant payment group to ‘stick to just payments’ (he wanted it to give loans via the system, becoming a type of bank in itself).
^ I can see how they would be afraid of this. I think Alibaba is trying to force sellers to only sell on Alibaba exclusively (not allowing them to sell on other sites if they want to sell on Alibaba). If Alipay gives loans, I could see how Ma might make it so that available credit is usable on Alibaba only, further tightening the hold. Jack Ma might be the one trying to be monopolistic here, but I’d love for someone with first-hand experience to speak to what’s going on over there.
Or maybe we’re all just sheep and Chinese insiders know how to shift stock prices with nonsense because they can and buy up shares. Those companies are increasingly being listed on global markets and all the CCP has to do is breath ‘eh, maybe no capitalism’, and the stocks move. SEC can’t stop that.
bigger reason than Alibaba's market control is the fact that the Chinese government is absolutely allergic to unsecured debt. China over the last few years has desperately attempted, and with some sucess, cleaned up parts of its financial sector because the government fears few things more than a financial crisis, it's something they learned when they came out ahead in 2008/2009.
I remember reading https://marginalrevolution.com/ back around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Tyler Cowen was emphasizing the futility of trying to regulate the financial system. The banks paid big money to hire the smartest guys; the regulators had to make do with who they could get. The Collateralized Debt Obligation genie was out of the bottle and you couldn't get it back in.
One has to wonder how that looks from China. The government of the USA looks impressively powerful, yet it lost control of the financial sector. Some players in the American financial sector believed in CDOs and lost their own money. Others saw it as just another scam, with private profits and socialized losses.
To Chinese eyes that probably looks like corruption with extra steps. In particular, the US government could retain some legitimacy with a "Wall Street" versus "Main Street" narrative. Sure, Uncle Sam got ripped off by bankers, but what can you do?
The Chinese government is worried that corruption will cause it to lose its legitimacy with the Chinese people. But the Chinese people won't let the Chinese government away with the "It is the Banksters not the Officials." line. They don't see the top people as two warring clans, with Bankers beyond the reach of discipline by Officials.
So the Chinese government has to look several moves ahead. First come the CDOs. As the bubble builds the government finds that it is trapped: too many people are dependent on easy money for the government to pop the bubble. As the bubble inflates, the government tries to regulate its way out of trouble by deflating the CDO bubble. Here the Chinese government has second-mover advantage. It can see that the US government lost control and could not do anything, not even close. Eventually the bubble pops, leading to a financial crisis and the Chinese government gets the blame. It must have noticed that the US government didn't manage to shift the blame with long prison sentences for bankers, the US government had somehow lost control.
So I don't think that "absolutely allergic to unsecured debt." is quite it. My guess is that the Chinese government sees the US government losing control of the financial sector, years (ten? twenty?) ahead of the financial sector misbehaving and causing a government-shaking crisis. The Chinese government don't want finance building itself up as a separate (and irresponsible) power center. The American experience is that this happens slowly, little by little, but on a ratchet. A ratchet with a magic pawl that the government cannot lift. So the Chinese government has to nip it in the bud.
Basically Jack said that the banks are working in 'pawnshop mentality', not using the data collected to evaluate loans. With Ant you can get loans in 10 seconds. He also said the global financial regulation is for countries with financial sector, and China's problem is not about regulation, is about there is nothing to regulate.
The new regulation on P2P financing requires Ant to put 30% of the loans with its own money. I can see from Ant's point of view, their loan is super safe (with all the taobao data and AliPay data collected). Ant group will create a financial entity to put its P2P business under banking regulation.
Another interesting thing is that Ant's loans mostly go to TaoBao sellers (small businesses), with their data, which are super safe from their point of view. The problem is that from regulators' point of view, maybe it is not obvious or it is hard to regulate it with one exception.
Why is "Ma missed a TV recording in November" suddenly a story? China isn't the only one who might have wanted him to pull out, "owner involved in political controversy" could cause both Ali Baba and Ma to not want to appear om such a show, even if they were on the correct side. Has he missed anything else?
To be fair with Ma, he doesn't seem to have the level of English required to have a smart conversation with a native speaker. I couldn't conclude much from that interview regarding his intellect.
I wish we hadn’t left behind latin as an international language that everyone has to learn as a second language (to keep things equal).
Fairly or not, English is the international language of science, technology, and culture.
There are some major benefits of learning a second language, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely ‘fair’ to English speakers who have no incentive at all to learn a second language and receive the health benefits it offers.
Latin isn’t some neutral communication protocol the entire would or could easily adopt. Why not Classical Chinese? More people spoke that and it also underpins numerous modern languages.
You misunderstood the context of what I was trying to say.
What I was trying to say, was that Jack Ma is a native Chinese (Mandarin) speaker. And he’s very good at it.
If the debate was held in Chinese Mandarin, then Jack Ma would’ve probably emerged as the better presenter. But since the debate was held in English, then Jack Ma was at the disadvantage.
Jack Ma was a lecturer in English and international trade. In his discussion with Musk, Ma did not seem to be struggling with the language. Instead, he came across as glib and silly.
It's not about what his level of English speaking skills is or the state of his grammar, but rather about what exactly he was trying to convey in the Musk interview, seemed very much like a simpleton.
Okay this is not at all likely but wouldn't it be crazy if you know, given China's reputation, it's possible that Jack Ma could just be sitting tight out of public view letting the world assume that China killed him until they capitulate to his demands.
Very unlikely indeed. The government/party bigwigs he recently antagonize are not going to let an entrepreneur shame them publicly and let him get away with that. He's keeping or being kept out of public view until things are settled. I don't think they care what other countries assume and therefore there's no way for pressure to build up
"After reports speculating about Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s whereabouts, CNBC’s David Faber reported Tuesday that the billionaire is not missing, according to a person familiar with the matter. Instead, Ma has been lying low for the time being, Faber reported."
It's the same sort of person that gets offended by being compared to a children's cartoon and therefore has it and any mention of it banned from the entire country. So because this "Emperor" has seemingly lost "face" therefore the whole country must suffer.
There is a drama now happening on Youtube with former presitator of Kazakhstan, where his past subordinates now surface and dump their personal accounts of him.
As could've been imagined, none are positive of his personal ability. But the biggest insecurity of such people is to appear to be useless.
He very much understands that he surrounded himself with sharks, and able lieutenants while being on the borderline of mental development scale himself.
In many dumped secret recordings of him by one former official, he often explodes with "You would've been nobody without me!!!" whenever challenged with even an innuendo of "I could've done it without you."
What holds such people firmly in their chairs of power, is not their ability, but such shark pool of capable executors whose loyalty is conditional
I didn't know. Interesting. The news coverage of Kazakhstan is bordering on nothing in my part of the world. Other than covering his resignation, I don't think I have read anything other than the renaming of Astana.
I find this sort of flippant posturing and minimization much more disturbing than a higher-profile-than-usual disappearance.
Acting as if these horrific, nebulous governing systems can be reduced to the image of a Saturday-morning cartoon villain, an infantile mustache-twirler angrily shaking his fist at the TV screen.
It is not “offense”. A system does not get “get mad”. It constantly sniffs for the slightest hint of dissent, any figure that might even come close to nudging public opinion the wrong way, and grinds it to dust.
It’s no different from every other country’s power-seeking and preserving systems, just with a much more sensitive trigger-finger, and that seemingly excessive sensitivity and reactivity is simply because they can. Not because some CCP higher-up has a fragile ego.
That flippant posturing is the result of reading history books from the perspective of everyone who lived over the past several thousand years being backwards and evil.
It blinds people to the realities of power dynamics that still exist today and have not been at all lessened or subdued by progressivism one bit.
In what world is an attempt to understand the actions of a governing body more disturbing than disappearing someone? The pondering of morality and underlying intentions are what fuel the entire "East vs West" debate.
Chalk it up to systemic casualties all you'd like, but let's not pretend as if that isn't reductive as well. Behind every system, there are decisions being made by human beings and it's not flippant to be cognizant of that.
This needs to be viewed through the lens of the Communist Party's primary motivation: the persistence of the single-party system.
In a single-party system, you can't allow dissent or you will end up with multiple parties, if enough of the dissenters agree with each other.
When someone speaks against the government in China, particularly someone with a high profile like Jack Ma, the government is worried that other people might agree with him, and they might form a movement that demands change and challenges the party's policies.
If the party allows this to happen, that would mean they recognize the legitimacy of political action originating outside of the party. That would be an existential threat to the single-party system.
(Also, the last time the party allowed public dissent, it grew out of control and turned into the Tiananmen Square protests. The party's current leaders remember that time well, and the lesson they took from it is that allowing dissent was a serious miscalculation.)
Don't even accidentally look for pics of Tiananmen massacre. There are some truly gruesome ones which remind all viewers, fight tyranny in any way, shape or form that one can get away with. History will judge the vile.
You're not thinking like an authoritarian enough. Some farmer living in Nepal might as well say, "Imagine driving a car just to buy a dozen eggs because you don't want to walk - isn't this a sign of mental illness?"
However, Americans do it all the time, not because they're exceptionally lazy or mentally ill, but because the driving infrastructure is so exceptionally good that there's no reason not to use it. Driving is just what you do every day, without much thinking, instead of something that must be deliberately planned and executed.
(Whether that's a net plus to America as a whole is, of course, a different question altogether.)
If Musk had murdered someone in secret, he still wouldn't just disappear with no formal charges or acknowledgement of what happened.
Ignoring the fact you haven't actually made any accusations, "disappearing" someone just doesn't happen in the US to US citizens.
And I'll get in front of it: no I don't consider foreign citizens on US soil "the same thing". While the US does provide robust protections for foreigners (relatively speaking) it's never fair or honest to compare the treatment of a citizen in one country to a foreigner in another.
The rumor in China is that Jack Ma is part of Jiang Zemin's clique of politicians/sphere of influence. Alibaba's backed by and invested by Jiang's families.
Xi has been purging Jiang's people/influence on the Central Government for the last few years to strengthen his ruling. Originally he was going to leave Ma alone as he has proven himself to be useful.
But 2 things happened- 1. people start to idolize Ma the businessman over the party's absolute rule. 2. Perhaps as a result Ma is embolden to speak out against Xi's government directions.
So now Ma has to go. Ma knew this and that's why he resigned from Alibaba's Chairman position, but it was too late. Ant Financial, with its main backers from Jiang's gang, was put to a standstill. This is only the first step. Expect the party to eventually to take over the Alibaba group (????). No private civilian will be allowed to gain this much power again.
“There is no so-called [Ma] era,” read a recent headline in the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily, “but only an era that has [Ma] in it.”
Anyway, to quote House of Cards-
“Such a waste of time. He chose money over power, in this town, a mistake nearly everyone makes. Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years. Power — is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who doesn’t see the difference.” - Frank Underwood
Ah it's just a false dichotomy. In reality these things go together. Can't have (real fuckoff) power without money; can't have (real fuckoff) money without power. If you don't have one but have another, you'll soon lose it.
I think you can actually wield quite a bit of power without necessarily having a lot of money personally. Harry S Truman was one. There are quite a few senators and congresspeople today that don't have that much wealth to speak of. Ocasio-Cortez comes to mind. Quite a few with military backgrounds. Granted, many do eventually obtain wealth. But some like Biden stayed pretty average for his whole 50 years career in congress. Were it not for his proximity fame for being the VP to the first Black president in history, he likely wouldn't be wealthy today (seeing as the vast majority of his wealth is from a single book deal after leaving office).
Yet these politicians inevitably wield a lot of power. In some cases, more than their wealthy counterparts. AOC has a lot of power just from her twitter account and star power.
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