Jack Ma- a successful businessman who had a rapid rise of his empire, met his downfall just as quick as his rise, but what was the cause of it and where is he now?
Jack Ma Yun was born in a Chinese city Hangzhou in 1964 and completed his education there, at Hangzhou University in 1988 with a major in English. After the graduation he has been giving lectures at Hangzhou Dianzi University, however, after the expansion of software and computer industries in the late 1980s his attention was captured the prospects of this field that just started to develop in Asian region, and he wanted to develop it. Jack Ma started from the foundation of his own translation agency “Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency” in 1994. A year later he travelled to the United States on behalf of Hangzhou municipal government, where he discovered the whole potential of the new technologies existing at that time and started to introduce them to China. Right after Jack Ma, in collaboration with his friend, found the first office of Chinapages.com, a website for Chinese businesses. An entrepreneur with the help of his American colleagues started to create websites for Chinese companies. In 1998 he became a head of the China International Economic Commerce Center and a year later Ma has established a common Chinese marketplace-Alibaba Group. In 2003 Jack Ma started an expansion of his e-commerce industry by opening Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx. In the year 2014 Alibaba’s initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange raised $25 billion. Currently, Alibaba is one of the 10 most valuable corporations of the Asian region and 31st largest public company in the world. The company mostly specializes in e-commerce but has also a huge presence in the artificial intelligence industry, cloud computing, entertainment, mobile commerce, retail and media.
Jack Ma has showed himself not only as a successful entrepreneur of one of the largest Chinese holdings, but as quite an outrageous personality. He has been making various types of performances on the celebrations of Alibaba Group. In 2017 Alibaba Annual Party, Ma has been dancing on the stage to the songs of Michael Jackson. The same year Alibaba founder has been singing the “Unchained melody” during the Computing Conference. On Alibaba’s 20th Anniversary Jack Ma performed on stage “A life in full bloom” right before stepping down as the CEO of the company.
Problem of billionairess’s disappearing in China
China is the country with the biggest amount of billionaires by country, which overrun the United States at that point in the year 2016. Starting from being one of the poorest countries in the 20th century to becoming one of the richest nowadays. This economic miracle happened due to Deng Xiaoping policy of free market, what helped entrepreneurship to flourish at that time. When President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he was understanding the power of the entrepreneurial class in China, however, he has started to punish those, who were criticizing his administration. In 2015, Guo Guangcheng, known as China’s Warren Buffet, was detained by Chinese anti-corruption police. In 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese Canadian billionaire was abducted by the Chinese security agents from Hong Kong. In 2022 he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for fraud and corruption. In 2020 Ren Zhiqiang, who called Xi Jinping “a clown” over his handling of pandemic, has been sentenced to 18 years of prison on corruption charges. The latest addition is Bao Fan- a billionaire tech banker has went missing in February last year. Due to the official information, Bao is cooperating with a Chinese government investigation. That type of a sudden disappearance of an important leader of a certain industry makes other Chinese businessmen scare about their own safety.
Alibaba’s founder has disappeared in 2020, what grabbed the attention of the whole world. The first reason given by experts was the growing strength of Alibaba and its financial services company. It was becoming too powerful in terms of controlling the data of Chinese people. Apart from that Jack Ma has become a rival to certain enterprises and to the state-owned banking system of China. After the flourish of his company, Ma started to be more involved into politics: he has been meeting important political and business leaders, like Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and others. And some of the world leaders has been seeing him as a representative of the Chinese state. The most frustrating for the Chinese Communist Party was Jack Ma’s meeting with former president Donald Trump two days before his inauguration as a president in 2017. The Foreign Minister didn’t know about the meeting, as well as the Chinese government itself. Ma said right after the event that “China-USA relationship should be strengthen.”, what was perceived negatively by Xi Jinping administration. In October 2020 during the Bund Summit Jack Ma said his last open statement against the Chinese government:
“We shouldn’t regulate an airport the way we manage a train station. We cannot regulate the future with yesterday’s means.”
These words have been heard by the senior leaders of the Communist Party, who have been sitting in the auditorium. Chinese government has taken measures immediately and Jack Ma firstly stepped down as the CEO of Alibaba in 2019 and a year after disappeared from the public eye.
The biggest mistake of Jack Ma was his criticism against the Chinese financial system: he has been criticizing the state-owned banking system calling it a “pawnshop mentality”. “A good innovation is not afraid of regulation but afraid of being subjected to yesterday’s regulations. China’s financial sector basically doesn’t have a system.”- said the entrepreneur. However, it is important to understand that the rise of Jack Ma is connected directly to the Chinese Communist Party as before Alibaba went IPO, the biggest financial support he received was from the China Invest Corporation, so that means that the government helped Ma to build his empire and he turned his back on it, and betrayal is never forgiven by the Chinese government.
Since the disappearance, Jack Ma has been keeping a low profile. Jack ma became a philanthropist and a judge on “Africa’s business heroes”. He didn’t fully leave the tech world as he remained the major shareholder of ANT Group.
Tech crackdown in China
Vast majority of Chinese tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Bytedance, Didi has been given orders by the Chinese government to curb their finance businesses. The experts are saying that probably the Chinese government viewed these companies as too powerful and influential. Nowadays Chinese government is controlling almost all of the spheres of economy and the life of Chinese people. By sentencing billionaires, the Communist Party of China is not only maintaining its total control over a specific sphere but is also sending a message to an industry from which a certain person disappeared. And this policy towards Chinese businesses will continue as long as Xi Jinping will stay in power and as from the year 2018, he is a de facto president from life, for that reason it can last for quite a time.
The main conclusion about billionaires in China, including Jack Ma is as follows: no matter how rich or famous you are, if you will run against the Communist Party of China- you will be punished, and no human rights organization will help you in this case. If you are not playing by the rules of Xi Jining game- you will face the downfall of your empire just as quick as its rise.
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