Trouble for Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba doesn’t seem to be over. Beijing authorities have ordered Lakeside University in Hangzhou, founded by Jack Ma, to stop enrolling students, sources said.
The Financial Times reported Friday (April 9) that Lakeside University, which Ma founded to train business elites, has been forced to stop enrolling new students. Registration for first-year students, which was scheduled to start at the end of March, has been called off, the source said. It’s unclear when new student registration will resume.
The Financial Times said the authorities’ targeting of Lakeside University strongly suggests that the crackdown on Jack Ma is expanding from business to education. Ma had said when he announced his retirement in 2019 that after retirement, he wanted to do his old job and also become a teacher. Ma was an English teacher before he joined the business world.
Lakeside University, located in the Lakeside Garden neighborhood of Hangzhou, where Alibaba started back then, was founded in 2015. Its founders include Jack Ma, Vantone Group owner Feng Lun, Fosun International and Chairman Guo Guangchang, Giant Network Group Chairman Shi Yuzhu and eight other well-known entrepreneurs.
Jack Ma was the first principal of this school. The school’s enrollment is aimed at successful entrepreneurs. The school is a three-year program with tuition of 580,000 RMB, or about $88,000. The school’s admissions process is very strict, and is said to be more rigorous than Harvard University in the United States.
The Financial Times said a major reason why Lakeside University has been restricted by the authorities is because they fear that China’s top entrepreneurs may be organized to achieve goals set by Jack Ma rather than the Chinese Communist Party. In China, the CCP has clearly declared that the party leads everything, including the government, the military and the people. Any organization or group that is independent of the Party causes unease for the CCP authorities, which always find ways to bring it under their control.
Most experts on China admit that China under the CCP is currently the most socially controlled country in human history. By 2022, it is claimed that each of its 1.4 billion people will have two cameras watching them, and that the CCP’s party organization controls not only government agencies and state-owned enterprises, but also has access to private businesses and foreign companies in China.
Over the past two or three decades, technology companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Byte Jump, Baidu and others have developed, and they control a variety of vast resources that have unnerved the CCP. Late last year, Chinese regulators launched investigations into Alibaba and other companies in the name of anti-monopoly and called a last-minute halt to the IPO of Alibaba’s online bank Ant Group.
Several regulators also interviewed core Ant Group personnel, forcing them to accept a government proposal to rectify the situation. Many analysts say the government is nominally anti-monopoly, but in reality is trying to exert effective control over tech giants like Alibaba.
The Financial Times quoted people familiar with the situation at Lakeside University as saying that the government would never allow Ma and others to use the university as a tool to cultivate followers and expand their personal power. However, they said the Communist Party may not cancel the university, and while it is currently not enrolling new students, classes for the school’s current students have not been stopped.
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