Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma has not made a public appearance since he confronted Beijing authorities last October.
Jack Ma, who has been highly visible since criticizing the Communist Party’s financial regulatory system in October last year, has not made any public appearances. Foreign media recently visited the bar Ma founded, and its employees anonymously broke the news that Ma has not appeared since the end of last year. A senior journalist from the mainland pointed out that Ma is afraid of a bad luck, because he is a “particularly fat leek”.
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma’s last appearance was at the Bund Summit in Shanghai on October 24, 2020. At the summit, Ma gave a 20-minute speech in which he criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s outdated financial regulatory system for hindering and stifling innovation in the financial sector. The IPO of Alibaba’s Ant Group was later suspended and then further investigated. Outsiders believe Ma’s bold remarks got him into trouble, and he has not been seen again for nearly three months.
According to the U.S. media Bloomberg, the media reporter recently visited the HHB music bar Ma founded in Hangzhou in 2019, trying to find Ma’s whereabouts. One of the HHB Music Bar employees, who did not want to be named, revealed that the bar has been open since 2019 and Ma has been coming at least once a month, but strangely enough, since the end of last year, Ma has not been seen at the bar.
The Bloomberg reporter, in search of Ma’s whereabouts, went around Hangzhou and hit a wall everywhere, whether it was Ma’s Taiji Zen Garden with Jet Li, Ma’s old apartment, or Alibaba’s headquarters, where he was refused entry or refused to talk for various reasons. A current employee explained that this was because Alibaba had recently implemented strict internal risk control and it was “not very convenient” to talk to foreign media, the report said.
On Jan. 13, British media outlet Wired UK reported that a source close to Ma revealed that he is currently in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where Alibaba was founded, taking refuge. The source also said that Ma is still readily available to Communist Party regulators should they decide to take any action against his Ant Group.
The Financial Times revealed that Beijing issued guidelines to the media late last year on reporting on Ma, requiring them to follow a strict official line and not to comment or quote foreign media without permission.
The Voice of America recently quoted Gao Yu, a senior mainland journalist, as saying that Ma was in danger because he was a “particularly fat leek” that was particularly attractive to harvest, and that the group spanned finance, media, entertainment and Alipay, all of which are areas of particular importance to the Chinese Communist Party authorities, making Ma’s fate unlikely.
The New York Times has revealed that Ma has close ties with the Jiang faction of the Communist Party. Alibaba Group, with its deep political background, is backed by Boyu Capital, CITIC Capital, and CDB Capital, the investment arm of the China Development Bank. The $400 million investment in Alibaba by a subsidiary of Boyu Capital yielded a return of more than $1 billion. Alvin Jiang, the grandson of former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, is a partner at Boyu Capital.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it was Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping himself who called off the IPO of Ant Financial Services.
On November 24 last year, a source told China Watch exclusively that the real reason for Ma’s trouble was not simply that “trouble comes out of the mouth” but that it was the anti-Xi forces behind Ma that really angered Xi Jinping. The company’s heavy involvement in the Ant Group has made Xi very unhappy, which is likely to make him think of the previous “financial coup” and vow to make a big effort to rectify Ali.
Recent Comments