How Huge Is Jack Ma‘s Alibaba Media Empire That Xi Jinping Is So Threatened by It? (Caijing World)
Just how big is Alibaba’s media empire that the Chinese Communist Party‘s top brass is deeply threatened? Will the CCP’s sense of crisis be lessened by splitting up an Ali?
In addition, another hot news in the past two days is that Pan Rui, the son of Chinese real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi, one of the four young men in the new capital, is said to be wanted by the Chinese Communist Party police. Is this Pan Rui guilty for his words, or is it just a matter of capital?
On the 15th, the Wall Street Journal broke another story that Alibaba’s media business will be split up. The report said that Alibaba has amassed huge media assets and that Beijing is increasingly concerned about Ali’s influence in public opinion and has asked Ali to significantly reduce its stake in the media. This looks as if the Chinese Communist Party is determined to do an emergency surgery on Alibaba.
That’s also before the Wall Street Journal exposed claims from sources that Xi Jinping is this Time severely messing with Jack Ma because he’s afraid Alibaba will be able to use its capital to sway public opinion.
We know that the Chinese Communist Party controls public opinion strictly, and since Xi Jinping came to power, he has repeatedly mentioned the so-called “struggle for public opinion”. The most famous was Xi Jinping’s “August 19 speech” in 2013, which emphasized the importance of ideological control to the CCP. Therefore, this news from the Wall Street Journal may indeed be one of Xi’s considerations to purge Jack Ma.
How big is Ali’s media and opinion map?
Alibaba owns nearly 30 percent of Weibo, in addition to several popular Chinese digital and print news outlets, such as China Business News and Ali’s acquisition of the South China Morning Post, which is only a small part of what is known to the general public. In the article, it was mentioned that Alibaba’s holding, equity and participation companies indirectly control a number of Film and Television, media, advertising, public relations and other companies, it is difficult to count them all, as if it has become a super media group. Some media practitioners say that no one can resist Ali’s footsteps, and most of the media industry practitioners have various relationships with Ali almost directly or indirectly.
So, how Ali media empire is expanding step by step, let’s take a brief look at the process.
In 2014 and 2015, Ali acquired shares in social media “Weibo”, “Stranger” and “Youku”, as well as “Business Review Magazine”, Shrimp Music, Light The most publicized issue at that time was the acquisition of the shares of “Weibo”, “Stranger” and “Youku”. At that time, the most attention of public opinion should be Ali’s acquisition of Hong Kong English media “South China Morning Post”, and is holding 100% of the equity. In addition, Ali spent a lot of money to acquire 60% of Culture China, and then changed its name to “Ali Pictures”.
After 2015, Ali began to set up important media groups, such as Ant Financial’s $20 million investment in financial media Caixin in 2016, which is considered to be a flagship of the mainland journalism industry. In the same period, Ali also increased its stake in Sina Weibo and established a new media company, Xinhua Zhilian Technology Company, with the Communist Party’s Xinhua Network. Such a deep cooperation is also equivalent to establishing relationships with the same Xinhua-owned newspapers and magazines such as Reference News, Economic Reference News, China Securities Journal, Modern Express, Lookout, Half Moon, etc.
In 2017, Ali started to move into the international PR field. It bought a 20% stake in the mainland China operations of international PR giant WPP Group, and thus gained a voice in the PR world. The WPP Group is the world’s largest advertising and communications group, which includes a series of companies such as PR and advertising giant Burson-Marsteller and Ogilvy & Mather Group. While Burson-Marsteller is very powerful in brand PR and media news PR, Ogilvy Group is a world-renowned advertising agency and one of the top 500 brands in the world.
In 2018, Ali invested in Chinese Culture Group. The media giant has even included a number of well-known media companies, such as Star Media, Noon Sunshine, Gravity Pictures, Shaw Brothers and many other media production companies.
In 2019, Ali also took a stake in the film platform Beili Beili (Bilibili), becoming the fourth largest shareholder of B Station; in 2020, Ali took a stake in Hunan TV’s Mango Super Media after acquiring Focus Media.
In the news synthesis, Ali’s equity influence in addition to “Caixin”, “microblogging”, another influential financial media in mainland China, “First Finance” is also in hand, the shareholding ratio reached 37%. In addition, Ali is also working closely with its hometown newspaper, Zhejiang Newspaper Group. Alibaba already has a veritable influence and control in the world of public opinion.
I don’t know if Ma has forgotten or deliberately ignored the point that public opinion and propaganda have always been the lifeline of the CCP’s centralized rule, like a powerful weapon to control the people, so how can it tolerate another voice that can compete with it? This is simply a threat to its Life. It’s a natural reaction to feel threatened and like a man’s back.
In 2015, Jack Ma told the media, “Ali is not an empire, there are a few empires that have a good end!” But now the situation seems that Ma Yun is likely to be a prophecy. The other Chinese technology giant involved in the media, outside of Jack Ma, is Tencent’s WeChat, so perhaps Jack Ma’s encounter is just the beginning.
Having said some of Jack Ma’s news, the following time, let’s take a look at the news of one of Jack Ma’s best friends. In the past two days, we have seen that Chinese real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi has also been pushed to the forefront of public opinion, the reason is because his eldest son, Pan Rui, is wanted by Beijing public security worldwide.
Outspoken Rich Kid Makes Xi Jinping More Worried
On March 15, Beijing’s Haidian Public Security Bureau issued a notice claiming to have launched a “fugitive hunt” for Sina Weibo user Pan, who “defamed heroes and martyrs” by posting comments in the Weibo comment section last year. On the same day, news broke online that the 30-year-old Pan Mou, referred to by Beijing police, was Pan Rui, the U.S.-based son of real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi, who had questioned on Weibo that the Chinese Communist Party was hiding the number of soldiers killed and wounded in last year’s Sino-Indian conflict.
So what exactly did Pan Rui say that made him wanted across the border in Beijing? Back on June 23 last year, Pan Rui left a message in the comments section of his Weibo account saying, “I heard that at least one camp was buried alive by India …… seems to have no chance of a sky burial.” The company’s newest product is a new product that will be available in the marketplace.
After the bloody clashes between Chinese and Indian troops at the border in June last year, the Chinese Communist Party kept the number of Chinese casualties secret until February this year, when it announced that four Chinese soldiers had died and one officer had been injured. However, this number reported by the CCP was widely questioned as a forgery. Since then, a succession of mainland netizens have been arrested by police for questioning the data, including blogger Spicy Pen Little Ball, who has a million followers on Weibo, and Wang Jingyu, a 19-year-old Chongqing youth, who was also chased across the border by authorities.
Pan Rui, along with Wang Sicong, the son of Wanda, Wang Shuo, the son of a business tycoon, and Zhang Quan, the son of Fuli, are known as the new four young men of the capital. While Wang Sicong is the most vocal “conversation star”, Pan Rui is not as active on Weibo, but his comments always bring traffic, and he is known by netizens as the “most outspoken second-generation rich man”.
Let’s take a look at what the outspoken Pan has been saying under the high firewall and tight internet censorship of the Chinese Communist Party.
Last December, when Zhang Zhan, a mainland citizen journalist, was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison, Pan Rui left a message on his microblog: “The man who holds the salary for you and me, Zhang Zhan. At the time, some netizens said that the only person who dared to mention Zhang Zhan on mainland Weibo was Pan Gongzi.
Regarding the Epidemic, Pan Rui also posted, “Unblocked, where is Qiushi?” This seems to imply that Chen Qiushi, the citizen journalist who was arrested by the Chinese Communist authorities for reporting on the Wuhan epidemic, should not be forgotten, and has not been heard from since.
Pan Rui has also replaced a cartoon of a “June 4, 1989” tank man with his Weibo avatar and called on netizens to stand together and take a stand.
In the walled environment of the Internet police, this Pan not only dared to speak out, but did so more than once. The Chinese Communist Party has been grasping at Internet opinion control, and rich kids like Pan Rui, who attract attention, are the ones to be silenced if what they say is not what the Communist Party loves and needs to hear.
And it’s probably no coincidence that the news of Pan Rui’s conviction for his words was released along with the news that the Chinese Communist Party was going to overhaul the Ali media empire.
Was it capital that caused the trouble? Or was he convicted for his words?
According to Zhai Dongsheng, a Chinese Communist Party official who burst onto the scene late last year, “there’s nothing under the sun that the U.S. dollar can’t handle. If this is what people in the Chinese Communist Party system think, how could Pan Shiyi, with his connections and financial power in Beijing, not be able to handle the Beijing Public Security Bureau, and instead have his son wanted online?
Some analysts believe that Pan Rui was first besieged by the leftist network and then chased across the border by Beijing public security officials for a microblogging comment he made eight months ago, and that the whole thing may be related to the factional struggle within the Chinese Communist Party system.
Pan Rui’s father, Pan Shiyi, is very close to Ren Zhiqiang. Ren was sentenced to 18 years by the CCP last year for embezzlement and bribery. Many analysts believe that the real reason for Ren’s sentence was that he ridiculed Xi Jinping as a “clown who wants to be an emperor even after taking off his clothes” and criticized the CCP system for failing to fight the epidemic.
On Sina Weibo, netizens often saw Pan Shiyi and Ren Zhiqiang talking in unison about some of the CCP’s current problems and issues. Ren Zhiqiang was also known as “Ren Da Cannon”, while Pan Shiyi and Pan Rui were also considered to be the most outspoken.
In addition to Ren, Pan Shiyi has also publicly stated that he is familiar with Jack Ma, who is not in a good position either. Some informed netizens say that there is a big mystery behind Pan Rui’s conviction for his words this time. The Chinese Communist Party’s high-profile pursuit of Pan Rui, who is outside the country, is just a front. The real purpose is to crack down on Pan Shiyi and his wife in order to seize their Family‘s assets. Long before Ren and Ma’s accident, the Chinese Communist Party had used online water forces to stigmatize Pan Shiyi and his wife, calling them “American spies” and “traitors to the country”. It is clear that the Chinese Communist Party has long put Pan Shiyi and his wife on a par with business tycoons like Ren Zhiqiang and Jack Ma.
In mainland China, a new round of “fight the rich and divide the land” campaign is underway, with a large number of entrepreneurs getting into trouble one after another. The Pan Rui case seems to be fermenting in the same direction.
While his son is wanted, on the 16th, the mainland media brought up Pan Shiyi’s sale of assets in mainland China over the past few years. According to statistics, within the past five years, Pan Shiyi has cashed in RMB 30 billion by selling off SOHO China’s mainland assets. According to some sources, while selling off the company’s assets, Pan Shiyi and his wife have also registered several offshore companies with registered capital ranging from 1.5 million yuan to 200 million yuan.
Perhaps there are too many lessons learned from the past, and Pan Shiyi is also speeding up the movement of asset transfer. From the point of view of these famous figures in mainland China, the two most crucial things that the Communist Party wants to control are the “barrel of a gun” and the “barrel of a pen”, which cannot be touched or touched. Of course, the above-mentioned people are businessmen, so it is impossible to rob its “gun barrel”, but whoever wants to touch its “pen barrel” is also a very big thing, so even if you are famous and have status, under such a one-word system of the CCP, you can only Everyone is in danger.
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