After Alibaba Group was recently fined 18.2 billion yuan, there are many different opinions among the public: some are upset for Jack Ma, saying that the Chinese Communist Party has started to harvest leeks in the technology field; others are loudly applauding, meaning that the government’s anti-monopoly has done justice for the people, so why not let Internet users open online stores in different online platforms? There are also claims that this is an externalization of the Chinese Communist Party’s infighting in the field of technology, and that Jack Ma is just a victim of political struggle.
All of these claims are true and not all of them are true. According to reports, just last month, the Chinese Communist Party’s Internet Information Office interviewed a total of 11 online platform companies, including Tencent, Alibaba and Byte Jump, asking for “security assessments” of these Internet giants’ new technologies, indicating that “the rain is coming to fill the building”. Alibaba is only the first one that the Chinese Communist Party has attacked, and the others will surely follow. And the Chinese Communist Party’s purpose is not simply 18.2 billion, there is a deeper level of political jockeying behind.
Let’s look back at the U.S. election. Large U.S. technology companies have been able to play a pivotal role in shaping the ideology of the U.S. public, and in fact have become an important political force. Before Trump was out of office, Twitter blatantly shut down Trump’s account, and once Parler gathered too many Trump supporters, Amazon was able to abruptly terminate its cloud computing services to Parler. Who granted these tech companies so much power? The sheer power and efficiency of the technology companies has caught the eye of politicians around the world. The apparently thriving and dynamic new Internet media can actually be the end of liberal democracy.
If this is true in the United States, it is no different in China, except that technology companies under the Chinese Communist Party are interfering in politics in more “Chinese” and covert ways. Jack Ma’s Alibaba has long been not just an online trading platform, but a massive business and media giant. As early as 2015, it was reported that Ma had silently taken control of 24 media companies, and in 2017 published the financial information of the family of Xi Jinping’s right-hand man Li Zhanshu in the South China Morning Post, which he controls, as well as efficiently deleting dozens of Weibo posts involving senior Alibaba executives involved in extramarital affairs. One can imagine, then, with the technological capabilities and massive data currently held by large tech companies, what a huge impact this political force will have on those in power once it is not under the control of the powers that be. In fact, it is well known that there is indeed a political force behind Jack Ma, and the Jiang system plays a very important role in it.
The two legs of the CCP are organization and propaganda. In fact, the CCP doesn’t need any new media or freedom of opinion at all, all it wants is a propaganda channel and a mouthpiece. Therefore, the CCP can never allow two mouthpieces to exist at the same time, and must keep all media firmly in the hands of those in power, especially when these new technology companies make peace with other old forces within the CCP, then they will definitely become the target of the CCP’s strangulation. Therefore, what is meant by “anti-monopoly” is actually to strengthen monopoly, and we will see more restrictions on these technology companies next, and more technology tycoons will be the next target.
Behind the large technology companies is a huge amount of data, and all the forces are competing for how to use and manipulate this data. What the Chinese Communist Party needs is to use this data to monitor the people’s every move, as if they were in a perpetual epidemic, and eventually to completely control and stifle the people’s freedom, while the forces behind the technology companies need more than that to achieve the private interests of these forces. So on the surface it looks like the regulators are intent on maximizing the interests of the populace, but behind the scenes it is nothing more than a mess of interest groups fighting each other.
The timing is right. What we see is that the world is at this crossroads, and for the free world, the question is how to manage large technology companies, whether to let them grow like octopi or to make them truly contribute to the well-being of the people? In the Communist state, as we described above, the question is never far from the core essence of the Communist Party, which is how to control society more efficiently.
Recent Comments