Official media praise China’s contemporary entrepreneurs avoid talking about Jack Ma

In an article praising China’s contemporary entrepreneurs, a Chinese official media mentioned Ma Huateng, Ren Zhengfei and other business luminaries, but only “Jack Ma“, a name that enjoys high popularity in China and internationally, was missing. This is a highly unusual phenomenon that has reappeared since Ma’s loss of power.

The Shanghai Securities News published a front-page article on Tuesday (Feb. 2) titled “How can entrepreneurship be missing in high-quality development? According to the article, Chinese entrepreneurs have evolved from the image of “reckless heroes with no inhibitions” in the early days of reform and opening up to today’s modern business leaders who “abide by the rules of the market” after the “great wave of sand”. modern business leaders.

The article lists a long list of contemporary Chinese entrepreneurs, such as Ren Zhengfei, founder of huawei; Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent; Wang Chuanfu, founder of BYD; Dong Mingzhu, chairman of Gree; Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi; Nan Cunhui, chairman of Chint Group; and Cao Dewang, founder of Fuyao Glass Group. But only Ma Yun’s name is missing.

Jack Ma has a very important and special position among contemporary Chinese entrepreneurs, not only because he founded the influential e-commerce and Internet financial services companies Alibaba and Ant Financial, but also because Jack Ma himself is a dynamic personality, eloquent and fluent in English, and through his frequent speeches he makes people understand the trends of the Internet era and the development of China’s Internet technology. It can be said that Ma’s popularity is unmatched among successful Chinese business people.

The official background of Shanghai Securities News, an agency under the official Chinese media Xinhua News Agency, speaks for itself. It is also because of this status that the paper apparently did not omit Ma’s name from this article by accident. Observers point out that this should imply that Ma’s problems are not yet over.

Ma lost contact with the outside world after speaking at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai last October, and was not seen at an online charity event until Jan. 20, 2021.

But just a few hours after Ma’s appearance, China’s central bank proposed new anti-monopoly rules that would hit Alibaba’s payments affiliate Ant Group in particular.

Ma’s speech at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai is believed to be the start of his troubles. At the conference, he criticized China’s banking regulator for lacking a contemporary vision and always using “the same approach to managing airports as railway stations.

Ma also refuted the assessment of senior officials, including Wang Qishan, that there is systemic risk in China. He argued that China’s financial and banking systems are still developing and have not yet formed a system, so how can there be any systemic risk?

Ma’s words apparently upset the upper echelons of the Communist Party. There are rumors that the repair of Ma was ordered by Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the CCP, himself.