That success has translated into a rock star life for “Daddy Ma,” as some people called him online. He played an invincible kung fu master in a 2017 short film packed with top Chinese movie stars. He has sung with Faye Wong, the Chinese pop diva. A painting he created with Zeng Fanzhi, China’s greatest artist, sold at Sotheby’s auction for $ 5.4 million. For the young and ambitious of China, Daddy Ma’s story was worth emulating.
But lately, public sentiment has soured and Daddy Ma has become the man people in China love to hate. He has been called a “villain”, an “evil capitalist” and a “blood-sucking ghost”. One writer listed Ma’s “10 deadly sins”. Instead of Dad, some people have started calling him “son” or “grandson.” In stories about him, a growing number of people leave comments quoting Marx: “Workers of the world, unite!”
This loss of stature comes as Ma faces growing problems with the Chinese government. Chinese officials said on Thursday they had opened an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the powerful e-commerce company he co-founded and over which he still has considerable influence.
At the same time, government officials continue to surround Ant Group, the financial technology giant that Ma had created from Alibaba.
Last month, authorities canceled Ant’s successful IPO, less than two weeks after Ma criticized financial regulators for being obsessed with minimizing risk and accused China’s banks of behaving like “pawn shops.” by making loans only to those who could offer collateral. On Thursday, the same morning that Alibaba’s antitrust investigation was announced, four regulatory agencies said officials would meet with Ant to discuss new oversight measures.
At first glance, the change in Ma’s public image is due in large part to the Chinese government’s growing criticism of his business empire. A look below the surface shows a deeper and more worrying trend for both the Chinese government and businessmen who pulled the country out of the economic era of the past four decades.
A growing number of people in China seem to feel that the opportunities enjoyed by people like Ma are disappearing, even amid the post-coronavirus surge in China. While China has more billionaires than the United States and India combined, about 600 million of its population earn $ 150 a month or less. While consumption in the first 11 months of this year fell about 5% domestically, China’s luxury consumption is expected to grow by almost 50% this year compared to 2019.
Young college graduates, even those with degrees from the United States, face limited prospects for white-collar employment and low wages. Housing in the best cities has become too expensive for first-time buyers. Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Ma’s Ant Group, have debts that they suffer more and more.
Despite all of China’s economic success, a long-standing resentment of the rich, sometimes called the rich-hating complex, has bubbled under the surface. With Ma, he has come up with a vengeance.
“A billionaire of prominent people like Jack Ma will definitely be hung at the top of the lamppost,” wrote an online commenter in a widely circulated social media post, referring to the famous lynching slogan in the French Revolution, “À la lanterne! ” The article received 122,000 likes on the Twitter-like Weibo platform and was read more than 100,000 times on the WeChat social media and messaging app.
The Communist Party seems more than willing to take advantage of that resentment. This could spell trouble in the future for entrepreneurs and private companies under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, who values servility and loyalty above all else.
At an annual leadership meeting last week that set the tone for the country’s economic policies for the coming year, the party promised to strengthen antitrust measures and prevent “the disorderly expansion of capital.”
Some businessmen say that hostility towards Ant and Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country.
“You can be in complete control or you can have a dynamic and innovative economy,” said Fred Hu, founder of investment firm Primavera Capital Group in Hong Kong. “But it’s doubtful that you can have both.”
Your company is an investor in the Ant Group and sits on the Ant’s board of directors.
Xi made no secret of what his ideal capitalist should look like. Ten days after the Ant IPO debacle, he toured a museum exhibition dedicated to Zhang Jian, an industrialist who was active more than a century ago. Zhang helped build his hometown, Nantong, and opened hundreds of schools. Business figures of the Xi era, the message said, should also put their nation ahead of business.
In a July meeting with members of the business community, Xi singled out Zhang as a role model and urged them to rank patriotism as their top quality. (Xi reportedly did not mention that Zhang died in bankruptcy.)
Ma has her own high-profile philanthropic projects, such as various initiatives in rural education and an award to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa. But in many other ways, the flamboyant tech entrepreneur differs greatly from Zhang.
It has long enjoyed a better reputation than its peers in the manufacturing, real estate and other industries, the advantage of which can come from cultivating close ties with the government, ignoring environmental rules, or exploiting employees.
He is also famous for making bold statements and defying authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of the Ant Group, placing his business empire at the center of the state-controlled financial world.
“If anyone needs to go to jail for Alipay, let it be me,” he told his colleagues at the time.
Sometimes he subtly challenged the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions: “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.”
His top lieutenants also repeated the line.
At the time, few people took these comments seriously. People who know him well regard them as a very “Jack” thing to say.
“Give Alipay to the country? Jack Ma just says, ”read the headline of a 2010 opinion piece in the China Business News newspaper.
Now the chances of those bold statements coming true have increased.
“Given what has happened, eventually Ant will have to be controlled or even majority owned by the state,” said Zhiwu Chen, an economist at the University of Hong Kong business school.
The pressure on Ma indicates a change in the way the Chinese government regulates the Internet. It has long censored content, but in other ways it has taken a laissez-faire approach. Regulations were scant. No state company participated. And in the beginning, China’s Internet industry was small.
Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook, and other tech titans in the United States. And like their American counterparts, Chinese giants sometimes intimidate smaller competitors and kill innovation. You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party to see reasons to control them.
Instead of disrupting the state system, companies have become used to it. Sometimes they even help the authorities to track people down. Still, the government has increasingly viewed its size and influence as a threat.
However, China’s tech companies are not the largest monopolies in the country. They are owned by the state, which dominates banking and finance, telecommunications, electricity, and other essential businesses.
“China Mobile is a monopoly. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is a monopoly, “wrote Zhang Weiying, a highly respected economist at Peking University, in 2017,” because without government permission, you cannot enter these industries. ”
The article was republished on various social media accounts last week, but was quickly censored.
It is too early to say how far regulators will go to control Ma and big technology. But some pro-market folks in China worry that the country is heading toward the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capitalist class, using language that compared capitalist leanings with impurities, flaws, and weaknesses.
For these people, some of the language recently used by Eric Jing, president of Ant, was reminiscent of the time. At a conference on December 15, he said the company was “looking in the mirror, discovering our shortcomings and conducting a body check.”
.
