Following the record fine imposed on e-commerce giant Alibaba last month, Meituan, a restaurant company, has also been investigated by authorities for alleged monopoly. Wang Xing, the CEO of Meituan, recently reposted a poem on social media that was said to be an allusion to Xi Jinping. The post has been deleted, but Meituan’s share price has plummeted.
Wang Xing retweeted a poem by Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Jie, “Burning the Book Pit,” on the Chinese social media platform “Difu” last Thursday. The poem reads as follows: “The smoke of the bamboo and silk disappears from the empire, and the river is empty to lock the ancestral dragon residence. The ashes of the pits are not yet cold and chaotic in Shandong, Liu Xiang originally did not study.”
The poem is based on the historical fact that Qin Shi Huang burned books and destroyed Confucian scholars, revealing the connection between the burning of books and the fall of the state, and satirizing the tyrannical acts of the First Emperor.
This posting by Wang Xing soon sparked public attention. Some people said that what he forwarded was an anti-poem; some Weibo users called it “Ma Yun’s speech, Wang Xing’s copy of the poem”. Some netizens left a message saying, “Like Mr. Ma, he drifted, and then he was going to receive the iron fist of socialism.” Another netizen asked, “Does this poem mean China is going to die or the party is going to die?” Meituan shares plunged nearly ten percent on Monday.
A month ago, China’s General Administration of Market Supervision imposed a record fine of more than 18 billion yuan on e-commerce giant Alibaba for monopolistic practices in its territory. Some commentators believe that the series of enforcement actions taken by the authorities against Alibaba are related to the dissatisfaction expressed by its co-founder Jack Ma in public last year about China’s financial regulatory system.
China’s General Administration of Market Supervision announced two weeks ago that they had also recently opened a case against Meituan for alleged monopolistic practices such as “choosing one over the other”. After Alibaba was fined, Meituan, one of the first twelve Internet platform companies in China, issued a “commitment to operate in compliance with the law”, promising to respect the right of operators on the platform to make their own choices, not to implement monopoly agreements, and not to abuse its dominant market position to exclude and restrict market competition, among other things.
Some say that Wang Xing’s “anti-poetry” during the company’s investigation will inevitably lead to many suspicions.
As of Monday, Wang Xing had deleted the poem from his Facebook page and posted a special post explaining that he had posted the poem because it gave him a heads-up that the most dangerous opponents are often the ones he doesn’t expect. The “Meituan” takeaway’s biggest rival looks to be the Internet platform “hungry”, but more likely to disrupt it is “Meituan” has not been concerned about the company and model.
A screenshot circulated on the Internet shows that someone sent a message last Saturday alerting Wang Xing: “It looks like someone is going to take advantage of the issue. Wang Xing then replied, “There are so many bad people.” The person who alerted him also stressed that he should pay attention to this matter and not be hyped up, because “this is how the word prison and mojo came about in history.
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