Out of favor and missing, where is Jack Ma?

The Western media seems to have noticed, unannounced, that Jack Ma has disappeared. What is most surprising is that he did not appear on the African reality show he produced and judged, ‘African Entrepreneur’. The hero of the Alibaba myth, the No. 1 boss in China who was denounced by democrats for affirming Deng Xiaoping’s June 4 crackdown, the man who announced his retirement at age 53 but finally could not retreat, has disappeared since his speech at the Lujiazui Financial Forum in Shanghai in October, criticizing the “system.

During this period, there were many major events related to him. Ma was interviewed by the regulator before the listing of Ant Financial, and the IPO, which was considered to be the largest in history, was suddenly stopped by officials. The situation is quite similar to that of the Cultural Revolution in China, when many high-ranking officials and celebrities disappeared or became prisoners overnight.

What happened to Jack Ma? The French newspaper Liberation on the 4th with the headline “Disgraced and missing billionaire Jack Ma. Ma”, the newspaper’s executive summary pointed out that after publishing a call for “reforming the current system”, China’s most powerful entrepreneur, the founder of Alibaba, has disappeared since October, and like him, other private business owners have been trampled underfoot one by one since Xi Jinping came to power. The French newspaper Le Monde also reported a few days ago under the headline “Alibaba, symbol of China’s new technology, falls out of favor” that two years ago, many foreign leaders on state visits to China often went to Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered, to meet with the group’s leader, Jack Ma, none of whom embodied the same qualities as the former English instructor. No one embodies the image of a China that is on the cutting edge of technology and open to the world like the former English instructor. Jack Ma Ma has not only disrupted the traditional business model of the People’s Republic of China with online shopping, he has revolutionized Chinese finance with Alipay, which has eliminated the need for checks and credit cards in China, replacing the yuan with Mao’s head overnight with online payments.

According to Le Monde, the long-sought-after Jack Ma seems long overdue for a warning, as criticism has been mounting against him for months, some for his greed, others for his arrogance and exploitation of his employees, and it’s not so much the criticism that matters as the green light given to it by censors. The New York Times also reported that many netizens like to call Jack Ma “Papa Ma,” but recently, public sentiment has turned sour and “Papa Ma” has become a street rat in China. He has been called a “villain”, an “evil capitalist” and a “vampire”. One writer even listed Ma’s “ten sins,” and others began calling him “son” or “grandson. One commentator even wrote, “A good people’s tycoon like Jack Ma must be hung at the top of a street lamp,” borrowing from the horrific French Revolutionary lynching slogan “Hang the street lamp,” which shows how crazy the hatred of the rich has become in this country. The absence of Jack Ma has recently been a cause for concern.

Jack Ma’s absence has been a topic of discussion in recent days, until he failed to appear on his own African reality TV show, “Startup Africa,” prompting unspoken questions from the media. The Financial Times said that Ma was originally a judge on the show, but the final judge was temporarily replaced by Vice President Peng Lei, and his name and image suddenly disappeared from the show’s website. Just a few weeks before the final of “Startup Africa,” Jack Ma said on social media that he “can’t wait to meet the contestants. The Daily Mail newspaper considered Ma’s absence from the finale “mysterious. According to the newspaper, Jack Ma is now “completely out of the public eye. This sudden change is all the more remarkable given his formerly high profile”.

The French newspaper Libération analyzed that all this was triggered by Ma’s speech at the Lujiazui Financial Forum in Shanghai on Oct. 24, which led to anger at the highest level in China. Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan had also made a speech at the same forum before him, stressing that China should “guard the bottom line of no systemic risk”. But Ma criticized China’s problem as “not a financial systemic risk, but a risk of lack of financial ecosystem”, arguing that China’s financial system is outdated, with a serious pawnshop mentality, and that China’s current financial system is just a relic of the industrial era, and that we should create a new system for the new generation and young people. We must revamp the current system. The newspaper argued that calling for institutional reform is a dangerous thing in Communist China. Then came the aforementioned sudden suspension of Ant Financial’s IPO, an order that the Washington Times quoted sources close to Zhongnanhai as saying came directly from Xi Jinping himself. Then came the fining of Alibaba, which was placed under an officially launched anti-monopoly investigation.

The rise of a large number of private companies in the relatively free air of China in the 1980s and 1990s and even the early part of this century has created enormous wealth and countless jobs in the country. However, Xi Jinping has in recent years repeatedly emphasized “not forgetting the original intention,” which is seen as the Communists’ original intention of eliminating classes and capitalism, and allowing state-owned enterprises, which already monopolize the lifeblood of the national economy, to monopolize everything. For two years, the official media as well as pro-Beijing academics have been instilling an ideology in dribs and drabs, such as the private economy exit theory, only to be forced to temper it after the sudden arrival of the US-China trade war. Now, after the new coronavirus outbreak that paralyzed the world instead reinforced Xi’s personal power, Beijing has ordered private enterprises to move closer to the party. The General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee issued a document asking private entrepreneurs to “listen to the Party, follow the Party, and be politically clear,” and the CPC United Front Work Department recently issued a directive to strengthen the Party’s construction in private enterprises. “. In early December, Xi Jinping called for “strengthening anti-monopoly and preventing the disorderly expansion of capital.

Ma himself is a member of the Communist Party, an atypical boss who leapt from an English teacher to China’s richest man, attracted by the light of free enterprise. Ma’s aura extends far beyond the corporate world and is representative of the Chinese American Dream. 2017 Davo City Forum, where Ma gave a speech and met with the recently inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump, was by now a strong political figure. This image of Ma unsettled the Chinese Communist Party, and the official media ‘People’s Daily’ published an editorial in September 2019 declaring that “there is no such thing as the Ma Yun era, only the Ma Yun in the era.”

French newspaper Le Monde reported that the missing or out-of-favor Ma is reminiscent of Wu Xiaohui, former president of Anbang, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison and confiscation of all his property after a period of disappearance. Two and a half years after Wu’s imprisonment, no one in China, not even the most powerful and well-known entrepreneurs, can go against the will of strongman Xi Jinping.

Jack Ma officially quit Alibaba in September 2019, but he remains a major shareholder in the group. In Le Monde’s view, Ma’s prominent personal character has not only made friends at the heart of power, but it is also clearly not enough to see the authorities’ measures against Alibaba as a mere resort to personal attacks, Jack. Ma has become a symbol of a new industry that is too powerful in the eyes of the Beijing regime. Beijing is tightening the reins to show that the party is in command of the economy, while the prospects for China’s economic growth in the new year seem good, and Beijing is no longer afraid to take the huge risk of weakening elite companies.

Ma once said he could turn over Alipay to the state if the country needed it, but this was the rhetoric used by the Communist Party in the early days of its power to honor so-called national capitalists and confiscate those who did not want to “turn over” in various guises. After the 1980s, China in the Deng era tried to revive what the CCP had denied after the establishment of the regime, by opening up to the West, its former arch-enemy, under the banner of socialism and on the road to capitalism.

After months of cracking down on a group of private business leaders, until Jack Ma fell out of favor, it seems that this is what Xi Jinping really meant when he kept asking the Communists to “not forget the original intention” in the past two years? Beijing is accelerating the “advance of the state and the retreat of the people”.