Jack Ma in trouble again? U.S. media: Beijing forced him to hand over consumer data

Some insiders revealed that Jack Ma cursed Xi Jinping in private and was snitched on, thus being suppressed. Ants Group’s IPO was also called off urgently.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group, previously publicly criticized the Communist Party’s financial regulatory system in Shanghai and was subsequently suppressed by authorities. Recently, sources said that the Communist Party’s financial regulator is trying to get Ma to share consumer credit information about Ant Group that he has been reluctant to hand over.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 6 that according to officials and government advisers with knowledge of the regulatory situation, Chinese authorities will not only regulate Ant Group’s lending business as they do banks, but also plan to break up the situation where Ant Group has sole possession of consumer credit information.

Beijing is concerned that Ma, who has always acted in a high-profile manner, cares too much about his personal career future rather than the state’s goal of controlling financial risks, and now the authorities are targeting Ant Group’s valuable database, leaving Ma with little room to bargain.

Ant Group operates Alipay, a third-party payment platform used by hundreds of millions of people in China, and has a large database of records on users’ spending habits, borrowing behavior, bill and loan payments and more.

Communist regulators claim that this information gives Ant an unfair competitive advantage in the financial industry.

One plan being considered by Communist regulators is to require Ant Group to feed its data into a national credit reporting system operated by China’s central bank, people familiar with the matter said.

Another option would be for Ant Group to share that information with a credit rating company that is effectively controlled by China’s central bank. Although Ant is a shareholder in this credit rating company, it has not yet handed over the data.

The source stressed that Ant has refused to share the data in order to retain a competitive advantage, and that the plan to allow financial institutions across China to share consumer credit information has nearly failed.

Voice of Hope reports that Ma is a member of the Communist Party and has close ties to a number of powerful families with Jiang faction backgrounds. And which is more dangerous in the hands of Jack Ma than in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, whose big data has always involved public privacy? In fact, Ma has also used the information in Ali’s hands to help authorities maintain stability and crack down on dissidents.

According to reports, the Ant Group has made loans to 500 million people, with most of the lending funds coming from about 100 commercial banks that cooperate with the Ant Group. According to the agreement, the risk of default is mainly borne by the banks, while Ant Group earns profits as a middleman.

It is reported that Ma has not appeared in public for more than two months after publicly criticizing the Communist Party’s financial regulatory system. The Financial Times reported on Jan. 1 that Ma did not attend the second final of the “Startup Africa” reality show last November, as planned, and was replaced by Alibaba executive Peng Lei as a judge.

In August last year, Ma said on social media that he would be a judge in the final of the “Startup Africa” competition led by the Jack Ma Foundation.

A spokesman for Alibaba said Ma was unable to judge the final due to “scheduling conflicts,” but did not disclose Ma’s whereabouts, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. People also noticed that Jack Ma’s photo was removed from the show’s webpage.

Ma and the Alibaba Group, which he controls, have been subjected to a series of purges by authorities after Ma publicly criticized Communist Party regulators at a financial summit on the Bund in Shanghai on Oct. 24 last year. On Nov. 2 last year, Ma was suddenly interviewed by four major regulators: the Central Bank, the Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Securities Regulatory Commission and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Subsequently, Ant Group’s IPO was halted, all Ant platform online storage products were forced to be removed from the shelves, and Alibaba was investigated for “violating anti-monopoly laws”.

Bloomberg previously cited a source familiar with the matter as saying that Ma was advised by authorities to stay in China as early as early December. In other words, Jack Ma has actually been banned from leaving the country under border control.

According to Tang Hao, a veteran media personality and host of “Crossroads,” the Chinese Communist Party’s chokehold on Ant and its heavy-handed investigation of Alibaba highlight the rising infighting among the Communist Party’s factions, which has led to a firefight in the economic war.

According to Zhang Zhuan, a financial scholar at Kunming University, Ma is nothing more than a white glove and a proxy holder of CCP assets, and it would be a matter of minutes to take back his power and wealth. If he doesn’t have better dedication, his situation will get worse and worse.