A cursory search seems to show this is a regurgitation on a sourceless Radio Free Asia article (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/alibaba-probe-1225202...) from December?
There's a long tradition of "$Person hasn't been seen in public -> gigantic dramatic narrative" in media stories about authoritarian countries. No doubt it's great for clicks, but these things mostly turn out not to be true. If this one turns out to be true, we'll certainly find out and discuss it then.
Edit: also, there have already been a bunch of major threads on basically this same story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"Deep ties to US agencies" is sensationalizing the facts. It's part of the United States government, and nobody has ever tried to keep that secret. Not RFA, not the U.S. Government. Nobody. "Deep ties" makes it seem like it's trying to be covert. It's not.
It isn’t really a credible source.
It's one of the more credible sources of news in Asia. Especially for more authoritarian countries. I used to know a number of its journalists, and they strive for neutrality and factual reporting in places where that is not allowed.
It's the Asian version of Radio Marti, or Radio Free Europe. Funded by the U.S. taxpayers, run by the U.S. government, to bring information to the world. There's nothing new here. This has been going on longer than most of us have been alive.
It's like BBC News, but without all of the sensationalism that has crept into the Beeb over the last couple of decades.
Trying to paint it as some kind of covert propaganda machine illustrates a lack of knowledge, or a personal political agenda.
Some of Chinese audience see the news in somehow opposite direction: True is likely(but not certainly) False. It's a little more than "not credible".
There is another group always fighting against non-believers and saying they are "wumao"
To some point VOA (A lot of Chinese think they are the same but actually not.Just content similar) was criticized by US government that they are helping CCP. What they really did was put some objective/neutral news. It's likely that the management tried to improve their impression and make them more conceptional because Chinese editors of VOA seem quite delusional to fabricate stories. They are much better now that they misleading with some events really happened but mixed with their interpretations.
A lot of their content show up in: https://www.backchina.com/news/ You have to under Chinese though.
are there any "credible sources"? nowadays eveything is biased. the trick is being aware of the biases in your sources and reading sources with different biases.
"These nationalizations are definitely happening, and [the antitrust investigation] will likely speed up that process," Song said. "It's also, I think, about making an example of [Ant and Alibaba]."
So I would trust the article as much as I would trust Song Qing.
What does that mean in this context? What do you know about Song Qing that the rest of us don't that makes him untrustworthy? A quick search didn't come up with anything. Do you have an informative link?
The discourse about China, misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions, and lack of even a basic interest in getting a realistic view of China are rampant. The average view of China in the US is so cartoonish it's quite ridiculous. If you talk to an educated, middle-class Chinese audience about the US people generally have actually a surprising amount of understanding of the basic structure of government, values and so on. You go to a very educated audience in the US or other Western nations and it's still embarrassing. And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-ma-missing-232138645....
Best, semi-legit source I can find, there's other news postings, but from more tabloid and sources that aren't as sincere as Yahoo Financial News.
Which, itself is curious, because CNBC spins it differently:
"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/05/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-is-l..."
Which also falls under the AU-CN struggle, but also curious about how CNBC did not outright say he's missing yet.
And technically, both could be correct, imprisoned means missing from society but not exactly "missing" in terms of knowing general wherebouts.
Perhaps it's simply the Overton Window [2] delta between the US and China.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/china-sentences-ex-banker-to-death-for...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
(nothing in this comment should be construed as approval, support, etc for the actions of the CCP; this is only intended as an observation)
Yes, I did actually. There's every reason to believe that the people installed to run Alibaba / Ant after Jack gets sent off to "re-education camp" will be unable to propel it to further heights. Stagnation is likely as good as it'll get and there's every reason to believe it'll be run into the ground eventually.
I see Jack Ma as a sort of Chinese Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Shooting yourself in the foot like this seems to be incredibly stupid. American government officials would never consider even hobbling someone like Jeff Bezos... that could be partially out of fear (he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution), but its more because of the incredible value someone like a Bezos, Musk, or Ma brings to your economy.
Twitter, Facebook and Apple is doing the same thing at the same time with the US president means that US control is getting more centralized over time, which makes sense with the FED's money printing going on.
The real question is why this wouldn't be able to happen in the US in 10 years.
They look bribery the other way the great majority of the time. Everyone does it, but when they want you, they have air tight, iron clad evidence against you and everyone they need to take down.
I did kind of imagine that, yes, Jack Ma and CCP would be a bit different, but hey, goes to show that CCP still has all the power in China.
Makes you wonder about other power vacuums in the world.
>Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is?
It all seems so over the top that I'm almost convinced that the US has infiltrated the higher echelons of the CCP and is working hard to make China shoot itself in the foot economically. Is that any crazier a notion than the pretty widely held belief that Donald Trump's election was a Russian plot to undermine the US on the world stage?
Because, the only results of this over-the-top crackdown by China are likely to be that:
* More Chinese entrepreneurs are going to 'get the hell out of Dodge' as soon as they can, rather than risk the same fate. By emigrating from China and setting up elsewhere.
* Western businesses are going to be extremely reluctant to enter into any partnerships / large contracts / investments with Chinese companies, for fear of the rug being pulled from under them.
* AliBaba & Ant will stagnate under government management
It just doesn't make sense to me:
* Lots of reports recently predicting China will become the world's no.1 economy before the end of this decade.
* China's economy first out of the starting blocks on the road to recovery, after the Coronavirus pandemic
* Chinese companies outdoing technologically & commercially their US counterparts [so much so that it led to Trump's spurious sanctions against HuaWei et al].
All of this should have led to the CCP becoming more pro-capitalist in outlook and more supportive of Chinese entrepreneurship from people like Jack Ma. Why suddenly shoot yourself in the foot, when you're finally 'winning'? I just find it really hard to believe that the leadership of the CCP which, if nothing else, has demonstrated itself to be extremely pragmatic over recent decades, is so thin skinned as to risk massive and ongoing damage to their economy over such an innocuous remark.
As I say, in my tinfoil-hatted opinion either the CCP has been infiltrated by the US who are attempting to destroy the Chinese economy from within, or there's a lot more to what Jack Ma has actually done than we're being told.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/ant-group-ipo-suspension-reg...
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/08/954046428/alibaba-founder-jac...
The ability of the government to take on actors with vast amounts of private capital is, in my view, one of those things worth learning from.
Many are worried that America's rule of law is also being slowly deteriorated. Once you go down the path of authoritarianism, there is no turning back.
Only in extremely rare cases like South Korea managed to go from authoritarian military junta that came to power, built up its economy by exploiting and oppressing labor movements, , to a democratic state with civil elections only really started in 1993.
Even now South Korea still has problems with following the rule of law. It used to be that the judicial committee is "independent" from the President but recently the Moon administration has completely destroyed this delicate mechanism that was built to prevent authoritarianism. UNHRC openly calls Moon a semi-dictator now and Moon is getting cozy with the CCP and turning its back on the US. Before, this setup allowed for the arrest of past two military dictators that came to power after Park Chung Hee's assassination by his own spy chief. Now it's gone.
What I'm trying to say is that democracy is truly a gift when it works, its noisy, people fight but thats exactly what is needed but it can easily be taken away.
This is what worries me most about Trump, with the recent military manuevers within the country (squad of apache helicopters, troop transports, Trump heading to a USMC command bunker) makes me suggest this is a man with nothing to lose and evrything to gain with the military and police behind him (police were seen removing the barricades in capitol hill rush).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alibaba-jack-ma-idUSKCN1N...
This is a classic power struggle between ideological and technocratic elements. Jack Ma vs Xi Jinping. Jack Ma, a communist party member, challenged party Chairman. As we can dispense with the notion that Jack Ma lacks the necessary wits, the actual interesting question is why did Jack Ma think it opportune to openly challenge Xi Jinping at this time?
In the US, this struggle is a non-issue as the ideological element (venture capital) finances and controls the technocrats (such as Jack Dorsey). We just however recently were treated to a purported “outsider” ideologue locking horns, via technocrat proxy of FANGs, with the ideological establishment. Given that this outsider also happens to (still) be the head of state in USA, I guess we need not wonder too deeply as to the logic of CPC reminding a prominent party member and fellow travelers of who still calls the shots in China.
Movements like the Chick-Fil-A boycott and #deletefacebook do hurt companies and billionaires and can force a change in behavior quickly. There's no feedback loop like that with the CCP, and the US gives citizens more power but having to wait 4 years to vote on a change is a very slow feedback loop.
The CCP will not be opposed.
Or maybe in order to archive such success in China one must have connections to people in high places and people with said connections can't imaging their connections turning on them.
don’t think the US acrually expected the oligarchs to overthrow china as they are in bed with the ccp.
The same thing happened in my province, where the power generation industry was nationalized for economic reasons and ended up being a massive economic advantage, along with the lowest unsubdsidized rates everywhere in the world.
I think this kind of dogmatic viewpoint is dangerous.
> But if China goes down this route, it looks like fears of China economically overtaking the US are overblown.
Agreed also. This would be the worst possible thing the government could do to China's tech economy.
They never really stood a chance. Militarily, economically, socially, culturally and spiritually they offer no better alternative to the American one. Similar to how "China owns US treasuries and can crash the US dollar" was the common trope until recently, the US called them out the trillion dollar loan to Qing dynasty which was transferred from KMT to CCP after Chiang Kai Shek's defeat (and really a symbol of CCP's legitimacy over Taipei), and China began buying more US treasuries to increase its US dollar dependence. Without HK, the yuan-hkd-usd peg is collapsing and CCP is running low on US dollars. Kyle Bass's interview with Guo Wengui explains this in detail [1]
I even had Chinese students condescendingly tell me that China is taking over and everybody will be speaking Chinese by 2020 back in 2005.
If Winnie the Pooh, censoring wikipedia, university students protesting over Tibet, Tianmen Square massacre, organ harvesting of Falun Gong (they are "scientology" so its okay they said) causes the security apparatus kick into high gear then you really are the complete opposite of anti-fragility which is what the US is.
US is anti-fragile, authoritarians are not because they are susceptible to even the smallest shock in the economy or the mindset of its citizens, so they use excessive violence and fear to maintain its power. They don't last at all.
It's more likely that people who made a lot of money working with/in China have an extremely skewed view of the world.
How does this action demonstrate that China isn’t going to overtake the US economically?
Coming up with leading edge technologies or business models – as opposed to mere incremental improvements on stuff invented elsewhere – is not China's strong suit.
China's problem is that authoritarian regimes in the long-run are worse at innovation than freer ones. At one point it was hoped that China might address this problem through gradual liberalisation, but recently under Xi China has been moving in the opposite direction.
They needed a slow burn to achieve world domination, but he's much too eager.
Meaning - take the money now, grow the businesses and the economy and then at some point say "It's stupid that we're letting foreigners have 20% (or whatever) ownership of our economy" and just deem it illegal / confiscate that equity.
Obviously it will prevent future foreign investment but if China is in a place where they don't care about that, it would be the move.
The CCP has pretty explicitly said and proved that it places itself and its interests above Chinese and/or international law.
It's playing nice with international investment for now, because it's free money, but ultimately any investment in China is only valued to the extent the CCP feels it's in its best interests.
The West's intent was to make China dependent on the international banking and trade system, such that they would provide additional levers to control China's behavior, but we're talking about a government that starved its population to prove a point...
Nothing shy of being able to melt down the Chinese economy is going to change their decision, if they make it.
What is interesting is China is even powerful enough to do this. This isn't new - it's what Iran tried under Mosaddegh, and it's a story oft repeated in South America, and each case there is suddenly a CIA backed coup who fights against nationalization.
I don't think China would see any blowback from this - the idea that it would prevent future investment in China is like saying Europe would stop investing in the US after the American revolution; as long as there is some alpha to be made in an economy as large as China's, I'd expect them to still see foreign capital.
I think what it more interesting is the concentration of power in the CCP elite and how that power is wielded. On one side you have the "communist" dream where the nationalization of Alibaba is felt by all Chinese citizens who are given more through socialization - one can imagine what China would look like in another 15 years if they focused on further educating and strengthing their citizenry; its the progressive left's "dream" for America. On the other hand, it's also likely you end up in a situation where power corrupts and nationalization is just an excuse to enrich Xi and his inner circle.
In that case the state can still get sued. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos_shareholders_v._Russia As for actual compensation to the shareholders, it can range between money seized from foreign accounts (think US treasuries) to sanctions.
Because if the latter, then the CCP is not going to give a monkey's what happens to that property. The CCP has been trying to stop rich Chinese from investing outside China for years now.
Chinese people are jointly invest in that venture, by (not limited to):
* Sacrifice family and personal time, by hundreds of millions of passent migration workers.
* Sacrifice health and life quality, even today 996 still a norm, and you can imagine what have been since the opening up
* Environment, early pollution has harmed the people's health and well-being
* Mental health, stressful working time, lack of support
At the top, it was CCP and Western capitalists grabbed most of the profit, but leaving the waste to be suffered by the people.
Case in point, Alibaba's success is a CCP sanctioned monopoly and unfair market competition. I pity Jack Ma's treatment from CCP, I don't pity him as a citizen, he already enjoyed too much beyond what he actually deserves.
As such, I do welcome campaign like the poverty elimination [1]. If CCP does nationalize alibaba and use that to help rural areas to gain access to market, I consider that a positive thing for the vast majority of the poor.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-27/china-...
Which is inits entirety a propaganda campaign. I have peers from all across China, poorest parts included. All what 6 people saw were a photoshoot, and a potemkin village.
That framing seems disingenuous given that per capita income in China has increased something like 10x in the last few decades and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty.
That would be a very dumb move since they own over a trillion dollars of US debt.
Also "this isn't Reddit" is just delusions of grandeur, HN commenters are self-selected around technology for the most part not politics.
Then again, maybe this is no longer anything surprising at all, given the multiple recent precedents, including e.g. the ridiculous "chromeisbad.com" post.
The. State. Will. Take. Your. Property. And. Kill. You. If. You. Step. Out. Of. Line.
People should be taking this with Kilograms of salt.
Food for thought: if this was to be true we would be seeing several bit coin whale operations going on from insiders, and this isn't the case even with the substantial drops in bitcoin value in the last 24 hours.
Obviously they aren't getting more Chinese business, but they've struggled there already. But it makes it a lot easier for them to compete everywhere else. Competing against CCP is going to be a lot easier than competing against Jack Ma.
How is this scenario likely to develop after that point?
Also, with Bezos being the (second) richest person in the world, and with Amazon being very much a household name, I wonder if they would risk the backlash from Western governments and private entities if they were to carry out a "disappearing act" on Bezos.
I started my post with the assumption that Amazon is never going to get big in China. Regardless of whether Bezos is nice to the CCP or not, the CCP is not going to allow Amazon to displace Alibaba.
My comment is referring competing for business in the rest of the world. Other countries where Alibaba and Amazon are both trying to gain marker share.
Either way, a standard if frequently-forgotten message to innovators in such regimes.
https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
996 doesn’t sound bad at all if it’s my own Company and I’m not constantly worried about Cash flow or run rate. Maybe that’s why in the quotes they say stuff like “996 is a blessing” :P
I never thought I’d wish for bigger hawks in the white house.
His successor, Deng Xiaoping started a lot of really great reforms, including term limits on leadership and granting Shenzhen & some other cities special/experimental economic status, to basically run autonomously as capitalist.
Several decades later, paranoia is too strong. Xi Jinping removed term limits because he doesn't trust others to run the country better than him. The One China policy has killed a number of vibrant cultures including those of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. A social credit system is being implemented. Now Alibaba is being nationalized.
These issues will likely only get worse, until another great famine event.
https://www.ft.com/content/055a1864-ddd3-11e9-b112-9624ec9ed...
Fraser Howie, author of "Red Capitalism", says that all Chinese corporations are either state owned enterprises or state overseen enterprises. It appears China may want to transition Alibaba from the latter to the former.
At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this:
1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed"
2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized
3) Rinse & Repeat
Everybody who isn't familiar with the inner workings of the CCP thinks that Jack Ma openly challenged the CCP. That simply isn't the case. They are using as an excuse to take over the company because they can.
As much as people in the West praise CCP's economic rise, and some even point to its authoritarian system as superior to our democracy, but little do they know the very laws that protect them isn't an option in China.
Imagine spending most of your life building a massive business and then one day it is taken from you by force by an authoritarian ruler.
This is why anyone that has money send their kids abroad and move permanently to a Western country that their kids despise and criticize their host for calling out the CCP.
- internal turmoil
- political infighting
- encirclement by democracies (India, Japan, Australia, US, UK, Canada, France, South Korea, Taiwan). Once Merkel is out in sept 2021, Germany will be onboard
- negative sentiment from most of population in the world due to covid
- exploding debt/bankruptcies
- lack of efficient feedback loops to self correct, as dictatorship has little of that. Thus Jack Ma is no more.
If you have a foreign commercial presence in China, expect
- kidnapping of executives (for layoffs, unpaid bills)
- no delivery for paid merchandises
- seizure of molds/machines/factories (nationalization)
- seizure of tangible assets (nationalization)
- trademark/copyrights given to Chinese entities
with no recourses.
China does have one compelling advantage: its enormous population. Even if a horrible plague or even a civil war happened and 100m people died, they still have plenty of people to accomplish anything they want.
They have Ph.D. scientists, many trained at top Western universities, who are equal to anyone in the West. They are doing an amazing job in manufacturing and technology; virtually all high value objects are manufactured in China, and, increasingly, designed there as well.
They're pushing into automotive and aerospace and every other field. I don't see them slowing down any time soon.
In how many months do you expect your predictions will come true, in a way that will cause the majority of Fortune 500 firms to leave China? Three? Six? Sixty? Six hundred?
I, for one, have strong doubts that the majority of those firms will ever leave China.
I will also note that all of your criticisms can be applied even more-so to democracies. Internal turmoil, political infighting, negative world sentiment (for some of them), exploding debt, aging demographics, ossification of political structures and poor ability to self-correct, check, check, check. It's true that, say, the United States is not encircled, but it has a separate problem of having to over-reach to maintain an incredibly ambitious, and unsustainable overseas military presence.
If those criteria were sufficient for a social collapse, then we're all living on borrowed time, and I don't see why you're singling China out as a likely point of failure.
Here's a piece that draws quite different picture from yours.
https://worldaffairs.blog/2020/12/31/from-terrified-to-trium...
Now given that the judiciary in China is just another arm of the CCP, there is no rule of law, there's just the rule of the CCP and the whims of whomever is in charge.
So you build something successful, someone in charge gets envious, then one small misstep and it all gets taken away from you. I don't actually know if it needs an actual misstep or just enough people to conspire against you.
This is also what worries me about Chinese companies buying other companies and property outside of China. There's a danger that at any moment the entire company will get nationalised and therefore China (or rather the CCP) will own it all. I'm not against some foreign ownership and investment, but usually this has originated from a country where the law rules the land and not some arbitrary dictator. (Yes I'm also concerned about middle-east money flowing in, but to a lesser extent because they don't try to hide it)
Play that out long enough, and you have all the "China {X} Industries" being owned by someone whose chief qualification was working their way up the CCP hierarchy. To the detriment of the company's functioning, and the alternate candidates who could perform better in the position.
And that, ultimately, hurts China more than anyone else.
Anti-corruption drives are no substitute for constant, actual market pressures, because weasels will always corrupt the very vehicles you use to implement anti-corruption campaigns. Or equally inevitably, end up in charge of the entire apparatus.
I don't think most of the people praising the CCP or (any other similar system where one's life work can easily be taken) know what it's like to be in business for one's self.
The good news for the West and China's Asian competitors is that he is effectively helping slow and cripple China's progress. Xi advocates a return to Mao centralism while ignoring all the good that came with Deng Xiaoping's decentralization reforms. With this act, he is also introducing a lot of uncertainty for any foreign investors. This gives the West time to recuperate since the failure of the anti-BRIC TPP.
Everyone is talking like the CCP are the culprit here. There is big turmoil within the party right now, because Xi has taken absolute control of all areas of government.
He wants to be a Mao 2 and all the moderates in the party are gone (Deng, Chou, Bo, Hu) The good thing about this is hopefully when Xi dies it gives China an opportunity to change things maybe even away from the party. The bad thing is... well dictatorships...
Not to mention his deep ties with Steve bannon
I would agree that he often exaggerates, and some of his claims do turn out to be false, but I think we should recognize that he correctly predicted a series of unlikely events w/ regards to China. I think his general intuition of the inner workings of the CCP is correct.
And aren't there a lot of negatives by taking over the largest IPO in history only a few months later???
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3pO3ykAUybrjv3RBbXEHw/vid...
They do? I don't think this describes a large population.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/alibaba-founder-jack...
I often wonder how much the CCP studies Scientology, as I think Scientology has been really successful in avoiding any real consequences.
Corporate geed is the reason CCP is so powerful today.
Every single corporation I have worked with is willing to comply with China,it's censorship laws, and it's atrocities on the work force.
Who is praising the CCP's economic rise? The American consensus as far as I can tell is that we need to shut them out and push them into decline.
The West should brain drain the best and brightest from China.
Did you miss the last 40 years in which US economic policy was underpinned by the thesis that shipping manufacturing jobs to China would give rise to a middle class that supports democracy?
Well, here's a reminder if you needed it.
A majority of Americans until relatively recently? China was seen favorably by most Americans until the last decade. An economic world power that we should strengthen relations with if polls are to be believed.
For example:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...
Probably people who have some axe to grind about poverty.
China's rate of extreme poverty from 1990-2016 declined from 66% to 0.7%
During that time the US rate of extreme poverty more than doubled, from .5% to 1.2%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
If people counter me and reiterate stating that the EU deal is going to miraculously discipline China somewhat, boy do I have a bridge to sell to you. Maybe some gutter oil to go along with it too.
That's why the superich in these countries buy any asset they can in countries like USA and EU. 20 billion is funny money and can disappear...might as well have plan B, C and D ready
It's quite disturbing to see an uptick in this claim in the recent years, as if democracy in principle is not American and ought be discarded in favor of a more illiberal system of governance.
(Also, the pledge is not law, so it's a curious reference to cite as some authority on the matter.)
One is Greek for a concept. The other is Latin for the same concept. How this concept expressed itself in Greek and Roman society and law is complex and there were cultural differences, but what has happened between 1789 and 2021 is a whole lot of tea leaf reading into nothing.
We don’t have a King, nor Nobility, nor Serfs, nor Knights, and slavery has been abolished, so we’re a Republic. Or a Democracy, because we govern ourselves and this is the concept these words describe.
A serf or knight can always blame their Lord for their problems, and Lords can always blame a King, but we get no one but ourselves to blame for our problems because they are entirely of our own making. That’s self-government, that’s democracy, and that’s responsibility.
The real hardcore bolshevik style communists have clawed their way back into power.
They are back. I'm very well convinced now that Chinese nouveaux riche class, and foreign capital in China are living on a leased time.
The country is on its way back to seventies, irreversably now.
This is what is eventually supposed to happen every Chinese company according to the Chinese Communist party. They just allow private ownership, "for now".