Today’s strutting peacock, tomorrow’s feather duster. Over the past several years, Jack Ma has been China’s superstar “capitalist” and a strutting peacock on the world stage. The founder and recently retired executive chairman of the e-commerce/technology conglomerate Alibaba Group, Jack Ma was rated by Bloomberg in January 2021 as the 25th richest person in the world with a net worth of $53.9 billion. Forbes puts his worth higher, at $61.6 billion. The 56-year-old Jack Ma is China’s premier rags-to-riches story and the global business celebrity who has led China’s re-imaging and modernization of its business models and global outreach. He dines with royalty, presidents, prime ministers, and business titans. He is famous for his elaborately staged imitations of Michael Jackson’s dance numbers.
However, even though Ma is reportedly the wealthiest and most widely recognized person in China — and the boss to over 100,000 employees — Chinese President Xi Jinping (who is also General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, CCP) decided to show him who is the Capo di tutti capi, the real boss of bosses.
Thought Crime and Thought Police
In late October of last year, Ma the billionaire business wizard disappeared. His mysterious vanishing act came after he had uttered a few words critical of the CCP’s financial regulators at the Second Bund Summit, a convocation of global business and financial elites held October 23-25, 2020 in Shanghai. What did he say that earned him the wrath of Xi and the CCP comrades? Good question. The text of his speech seems innocuous enough, about what one might expect from an innovative business magnate addressing a financial conference. But we’re talking about totalitarian, communist China, remember. What would pass for common verbal interchange among business leaders almost anywhere else in the world suddenly becomes, in the People’s Republic of Chairman Xi, something verboten, subjecting one to prosecution, imprisonment, and being “disappeared.”
The Summit’s website states: “The Bund Summit provides an open, pragmatic and internationally influential financial high-end communication platform, which aims at facilitating idea exchange and cooperation, and thus promoting China’s financial opening-up and global economic development.”
Ma, apparently, took those words literally and spoke his mind about “China’s financial opening-up and global economic development.” Ma might have thought he was protecting himself by commenting near the start of his talk that the thoughts he was about to express “might be immature, inaccurate or even laughable. You can listen to them without taking them seriously and forget all about them if you think they are not correct.”
Among his self-deprecating comments, obligatory deference to Xi Jinping, and economic observations, he dared to suggest that China’s regulatory labyrinth is stifling innovation and must be reformed. He also criticized the backward “pawnshop mentality” of China’s financial sector. Big mistakes. Ma should have known better.
Besides being China’s most famous “entrepreneur,” Jack is also a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And he certainly should have gotten the memo that under Dear Leader Xi the CCP is going back to the hardcore Maoism of yesteryear. Which means that everyone, including mega-wealthy rock stars such as Jack Ma, must adhere totally and rigorously to the official Party line. And “deviationism” — questioning or failing to follow Party dogma — is a crime against “political correctness” that must be rooted out and punished. Always has been and ever will be in communist states.
Ma the thought criminal had to be brought to heel. So he was summoned before the CCP officials. Within hours, the $37 billion initial public offering of his Ant Financial Services, which he had touted in his Shanghai speech, and which was heralded to be the biggest IPO in world history, was nixed by the Beijing regime’s securities regulators. Soon after, Ma was scooped up by Xi’s Thought Police, just as he was scheduled to appear in an episode of his television program encouraging entrepreneurship in Africa. For more than two months after that, the previously high-profile mogul was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Jack Ma?” became the headline question for newspapers and business websites the world over.
Jack Ma Was “Embracing Supervision” by CCP
While millions of people wondered what terrible things might have befallen the business magnate, The People’s Daily, an official propaganda organ of the CCP, reported that Ma was “embracing supervision at an undisclosed location.” He was also reportedly “advised” by the communist authorities not to leave the country. On January 20, world media outlets reported that Ma had reappeared, via a video in which he talks to rural teachers. The video was released through Tianmu News, a provincial propaganda portal controlled by the CCP. The chastened tech tycoon reportedly said he had been doing some “learning and thinking.” Undoubtedly that includes studying and regurgitating the CCP’s new “guidelines” issued last September “for strengthening united front work involving the private sector.”
This is, say the guidelines, “an important way to realize the Party’s leadership over the private economy, an important content to develop and improve the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and an important guarantee to promote high-quality development of the private economy.”
The Myth of China’s “Private Economy”
In truth, the People’s Republic of China has no private economy; all economic activity falls under the purview of the omnipotent state, which is controlled by the Communist Party. And Jack Ma and the rest of China’s billionaires are not “entrepreneurs,” they are privileged “champions” who have access to capital and who receive special treatment and exemptions from the oppressive regulations and taxes that keep genuine competition down. As we pointed out a decade-and-a-half ago (“Has China Really Gone Capitalist?” ), China’s great “liberalizing reformer” Deng Xiaoping, explicitly told the CCP Central Committee that his push toward capitalism was purely utilitarian, to acquire the “scientific and technical knowledge and equipment” China needed from the advanced Western countries.
“In the international united front struggle, the most important strategy is unification as well as struggle,” he declared. In the future, the “American imperialists,” he said, “will have no way of avoiding defeat by our hands…. What we need mainly is scientific and technical knowledge and equipment.”
Jack Ma’s Secret Communist Party Membership
In China’s opaque world of government and business, it is impossible to get a true picture of who really owns and controls any corporate entity. How can we know whether businesses that are ostensibly private are not, in fact, essentially the same as the CCP’s mammoth State Owned Enterprises (SOEs)? We can’t, as Jack Ma’s recent comeuppance demonstrates.
Many Jack Ma admirers must have been surprised when, in November of 2018, The People’s Daily, for reasons unknown, revealed that Jack Ma is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. They shouldn’t have been surprised; many of us had assumed as much for years. While it may not be absolutely necessary to be a CCP member to operate a business successfully in China, when a rise is as meteoric as that of Ma and Alibaba, it’s a pretty sure sign of the CCP’s blessing. And that blessing is not easily bestowed on those who are not under Party discipline. We are not aware that any of the adulatory pieces that have appeared globally in the media prior to that 2018 revelation ever mentioned his CCP membership, or even hinted that it might be a possibility.
Jack Ma & Alibaba: Creatures of a Communist-Capitalist-Globalist Axis
“In just a decade and half Jack Ma, a man who rose from humble beginnings and started his career as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into the second largest Internet company in the world.” So gushes the HarperCollins promo for the 2016 book, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, by Duncan Clark. “The company’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the world’s largest, valuing the company more than Facebook or Coca Cola,” the publicity piece continued. “Alibaba today runs the e-commerce services that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend on every day, providing employment and income for tens of millions more. A Rockefeller of his age, Jack has become an icon for the country’s booming private sector, and as the face of the new, consumerist China is courted by heads of state and CEOs from around the world.”
There’s a problem with this picture, a problem that is common to just about all the media hype surrounding Jack Ma. Not only does it leave out his CCP connections, but it also ignores the boosts he has received all along his storied path from the globalists of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
In 1995, Ma was sent to the United States by the municipal authorities (read local CCP members) of his hometown of Hangzhou to study the internet. He came back and took an executive job with what was then known as the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation (now the Ministry of Commerce), which is subservient to the State Council and the CCP. In 1999 he left his government job to launch his envisioned e-commerce company Alibaba, supposedly with investments from a ragtag group of friends. Did he receive initial funding from the Beijing regime as well? We don’t know, but it would seem very likely that he did.
What we do know is that in 1999 Ma secured a $25 million investment from the globalist insiders at Goldman Sachs and Japanese investment giant Softbank. Goldman Sachs has long been one of the premier Wall Street promoters of investment in and transfer of technology to the communist regime. It is also a top corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and is well represented at the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Aspen Institute, and the World Economic Forum. In 2005 Ma got another huge boost with a $1 billion investment from Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang (CFR). In 2014, Alibaba’s historic IPO was underwritten by Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. All of the aforementioned financial firms are corporate members of the CFR, which for decades has been the principal American brain trust pushing for U.S.-China “convergence” — the complete intertwining of our economic, political, and social systems — and the destruction of America’s independence.
That convergence agenda ran into its first real roadblock with the administration of President Donald J. Trump. The new administration of “China Joe” Biden will be pushing hard to put that agenda back on track.
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