Following the Economic Work Conference of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, one of the key tasks for next year is to continue to “anti-monopoly” and “anti-unfair competition”, the State Administration of Market Supervision of the Communist Party of China recently held an administrative guidance meeting on “regulating the order of community group purchases”.
In response, Xia Yeliang, a former associate professor at Peking University’s School of Economics who now lives in the United States, said in an interview that this round of so-called “anti-monopoly” by the Chinese Communist Party appears to be an attempt to maintain the order of market competition, but anyone with a discerning eye knows that it is actually a very obvious discriminatory practice.
Why do you say so? Because as we all know, the real monopoly in China is the monopoly of state-owned enterprises, government-run enterprises. In many industries, a few state-owned enterprises monopolize the whole industry, and the monopoly profits are amazing. When these enterprises lose money, they use the state treasury to subsidize them, such as PetroChina, Sinopec, and those Chinese communication giants, including China Unicom, China Mobile, etc., and China Telecom. Well, in many industries, whether it is oil, communications, or a lot of, like the steel industry ah many aspects, are in the past decades there is a serious monopoly of state-owned enterprises. And once private enterprises have formed a competitive posture with them, they will soon be under heavy official pressure.
Xi Jinping hosted the Central Economic Work Conference of the Communist Party of China in Beijing from December 16 to 18. The meeting clearly proposed to focus on “eight major tasks” next year, including “strengthening anti-monopoly and disorderly expansion of capital”. Afterwards, the official media and the Chinese Communist Party began to knock the Chinese Internet giants one after another. Xia Yeliang said that in recent years, e-commerce companies marketing through online platforms have done very well, but officials have not kept up, and no state-owned enterprises have succeeded in this area.
[Recording]: Look at this kind of remediation of Ma Yun Alibaba now. This Alibaba is no longer just a business group, it’s even become a big financial enterprise. Because it is on the network, for example, its sales in a day can reach, for example, on November 11, it can reach hundreds of billions, even trillions, that is to say, this is very amazing. In addition, it is also issuing its own financial products, so the Ant Financial Services, including these, were ready to go public, but the Chinese Communist Party used some unclear and unexplained reasons, to find some excuses, and then blocked. So now Jack Ma, the Alibaba Group, is facing a very big risk. Some say even if Ma is willing to transfer part of his business assets to state-owned enterprises, or by the government to take over, it will not be enough to satisfy the government, and may have to take over the whole thing.
Xia Yeliang said that the Chinese Communist Party has issued “nine no-no” anti-monopoly warnings to six major online platform operators, including Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong, Meituan, Jindo, and Drip, but in fact these rules cannot be applied to government-run state-owned enterprises as well. The government-run SOEs have a monopoly on the industry. Do they have a monopoly to suppress other small and weak enterprises? So the anti-monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party is very hypocritical, and it discriminates seriously against private enterprises, cracking down on all unofficial enterprises, in fact, large and small enterprises now have close ties with the government.
In fact, according to the declassified archives of the past few years, we can see that Ma’s shareholders include Jiang Zemin’s grandson, Jiang Zhicheng, and many sons and grandsons of the previous leaders of the Communist Party. Now, Xi Jinping’s attack on Ma’s business is, of course, on the one hand, to express his strong dissatisfaction with Ma’s comments made at the Pujiang Forum, a forum in Shanghai some time ago, which, in my opinion, were already quite moderate, and to suppress them. On the other hand, it is also to the previous leaders of this kind of corruption, but also a kind of knock on the mountain to shake the tiger. So I think now even Ma Yun, a company that used to be very close to the Chinese Communist Party, known as the “red-top businessman”, is threatened, so think about it, look at other companies, there is no company that does not feel a kind of tension, or threat. There is no way for them to escape, and they are not allowed to withdraw their capital and leave China. On the other hand, they have no way to get effective protection.
Xia Yeliang said that no matter how big a private enterprise is, no matter how much wealth it has, one day when the CCP is not happy, it can make you go to zero. The company group “tomorrow system” Xiao Jianhua when the control of funds in how many hundreds of billions, and then even people have disappeared, the whereabouts of unknown. And Wu Xiaohui, with a very large wealth kingdom, but suddenly one day, it disappeared. And the CEO of HNA, Wang Jian, actually died inexplicably. This series of events shows that private enterprises have no real long term security and no equal legal status in mainland China. That is, there is no way to get effective protection, whether they are natural or legal persons.
[Recording]: So the constitution of the People’s Republic of China and the related laws are just a piece of paper. They are not effective protection at all. Those laws can only be used to punish ordinary people, or ordinary enterprises without backstage. Therefore, in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, the law is used to rule others, not to rule oneself. That is to say, even the constitution is a virtual nullity. The constitution back then didn’t even protect the president of the country. So what about now? China’s constitution and laws still can’t protect an ordinary citizen or their legal property. It cannot protect a private enterprise from infringement of their assets and their freedom to operate.
According to Xia Yeliang, this shows that China is not a modern political civilization, it is a pre-modern country. Although so many high-rise buildings have been built, some of them are extremely luxurious, but at the institutional level, the ideology of people and the mode of governance of the government are still stuck in the authoritarian and totalitarian era of 50 to 100 years ago. It has not yet entered the ranks of civilized countries with modern political civilization.
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