“To wake a tiger, use a long stick” is one of the quotes attributed to Mao Zedong, who ruled the People’s Republic of China with an iron fist between 1949 and 1976. Whether or not he was the true author, the quote is a warning about the ability to master the times and distances when facing someone more powerful than yourself.
Jack Ma is a man accustomed to shaking hands with many international leaders every year, as many or . Who was going to tell Ma, an English teacher at the beginning, that he would eventually become the greatest fortune in China.
It was in 1999 when the Asian businessman created an e-commerce platform that is already the largest retail market in China. It became so big that, in 2014, he decided to take the company public in New York and on its first day it raised 25,000 million dollars, a record then.
Comparisons with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos were not long in coming, and just as Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, Ma bought the South China Morning Post in 2015, Hong Kong’s oldest English-language newspaper, known for treating their information with a little more freedom than the mainland Chinese press.
In two decades, Jack Ma had achieved it all
It was not Alibaba’s only major immersion in the world of media: the other major investment notable is the 30% stake in Weibo, a social network similar to Twitter and Facebook through which millions of citizens exchange messages. chinese every day
There is trade, there is the media and there is money, the other great leg of Alibaba’s business. A company with this much liquidity can put money to work to become profitable, and that’s what happened when Ant Financial, Alibaba’s financial arm, launched Alipay, China’s largest digital payment platform.
In two decades, Jack Ma had achieved it all: he was a charismatic leader, he met Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in the great international forums and represented the friendly face of modern China; but he either got the better of her arrogance or gave her a burst of free speech.
Criticism of the regime
Ma’s last operation was to be at the end of last year. During the previous administrative procedures, there was something that upset the businessman and he publicly accused the Chinese authorities of “stifling innovation” and the country’s banks for “having a pawnshop mentality.”
Despite being a member of the Communist Party, he acted like a loose verse and criticized the high command. and threw Alibaba to the lions: antitrust investigation, company restructuring… and now the demand that the firm sell the South China Morning Post less than a year after the Security Law was passed in Hong Kong. A law with which to stop the protests in favor of democracy in the former British colony, and which the newspaper covered widely.
“signals a change in how the Chinese government regulates the Internet,” journalist Li Yuan wrote a few months ago in The New York Times. “Some pro-market people in China are concerned that the country is heading towards the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capitalist class, using language that equated capitalist leanings with impurities, flaws and weaknesses,” he explains. Yuan.
Despite Jack Ma’s influence and popularity in the rest of the world, the businessman may have stretched the string too far. “There is not a single individual, a single company, bigger than the Communist Party of China,” said Rana Mitter, professor of modern Chinese history and politics at Oxford University, in an article published in January on the Chinese Communist Party website. CNN.
“The government has encouraged the growth of its national technology giants, including Alibaba, Ant Gorup, Tencent and Baidu, while leaving out their big US rivals,” the expert says.
“The crushing of big tech business is part of a broader process by the party to regain control and rewrite the narrative of how China’s tech innovation only happens under the circumstances the party allows,” Mitter said.
Now that Alibaba has fallen out of favor with the Politburo, Pinduoduo surpassed Alibaba in number of users in 2020
By allegedly hindering competition and putting the financial system at risk, they will also put an end to the practice of er xuan yi, which can be translated as choose between one of the two. And it is that, according to Chinese regulators, Alibaba punished certain merchants who sold products both on its platform and on those of rivals such as JD.com, reports Bloomberg.
Now that Alibaba has fallen out of favor with the Politburo, Pinduoduo – another large Nasdaq-listed digital store – surpassed Alibaba in number of users in 2020, becoming the world’s most user-friendly e-commerce platform.
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