Here Is Why #China Is Going After Jack Ma, Founder Of #Alibaba and #Alipay. 2020-12-28

#China
#Ma yun
#Alibaba

Jack Ma, China's most ebullient billionaire, and also the most influential opinion leader in Chinese cyberspace. His Chinese name is Ma Yun, and it was he that founded Alibaba Group, a Chinese E-commerce giant that defeated Amazon in China. On his B2C, business to client platforms, Tao Bao and T-Mall, people all over the world can literally buy anything they could think of.

He had been a teacher for some time before he took initiative to build his online empire, and he regards himself as an intellectual. He has said many times in public that he does not like money, but he has been one of the richest people in China, even in the world, for many years.

His Alipay can be found, almost everywhere in China, and has gained more and more overseas markets, in recent years. He himself does not own a bank, but his Ant Group acted as more like a bank than a real financial institution till last month, November 2020, when its IPO was suspended by China's regulators.

Chinese young netizens call him "Daddy Ma", but he is not a sugar daddy for young girls, rather, he is the ideal image that illustrates China's quick rise, and his success encourages thousands of his followers to move forward.

Everything changed overnight, and "Daddy Ma" became "Monster Ma" suddenly. even a lot of his fans turned against him, criticizing him for his endeavor to empty the young generation's pockets.

Another fatal blow came unsurprisingly one month after the suspended IPO of His Ant Group.

On the 24th day of December 2020, Beijing Time, China began its probe into Alibaba Group's monopolistic practices, such as forbidding the sellers on its tao bao platform to sell things on other online platforms like Jing Dong or Pin Duo Duo. This exclusive practice is referred to by those online vendors as "choose one from two". When the news came out, Alibaba's share price plunged by 10% within 24 hours, and the market value evaporated exceeded 700 billion RMB, an equivalent of a little more than 100 billion US dollars.

there are too many things that urge China to go after him, and we list some of them below:

first one is that he is too defiant. one day he was asked how the local government treated Alibaba, he told the public that Alibaba is so big a company that the local government does not know how to deal with it.

second one is that he thinks he is strong enough to change the rules of industries controlled by the country. take the banking industry as an example, he challenged the banking industry in a public speech when attending a forum held in Shang Hai on October 23, 24 and 25 of this year, saying that there is no systemetric danger in China's banking industry, as it does not have a system at all. His good days ended when that speech came to light. just several days later, the IPO of his Ant Group was adjourned.

third one is that he cut into boundaries that he should not reach. like his Ant Group is not a bank, but he positioned it as an innovation to reframe the banking industry, and for the two products it offers to millions of customers on internet, "Ant Credit Pay" and "Ant Cash Now" are like credit cards and cashmoney, which China does allow non-financial companies to provide customers with.

Fourth one is that he is too high-profile, and looks more like a superstar than an entrepreneur. his success has already told Chinese there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor in China, his high-profile talkshows make ordinary people very uncomfortable.

no one knows whether he can turn around this bad situation, but he has been away from the public for quite a long time, and this makes people even more suspicious.