He was the wealthiest man in the country, a role model for his fellow citizens and an idol for entrepreneurs looking for the right shot to climb the social ladder. Then it all ended abruptly, and in a short time, Jack Ma’s life changed. He remained rich, albeit losing part of his fortune (reduced from $61 to $34 billion), but he became invisible. Very few public outings, or at least those that through the media run by the Chinese regime, have reached our latitudes: rare incursions into public life, with limited images of forced smiles and, in any case, different from the past.
Never defy the Chinese government
It was his popularity, too great for the Communist Party that runs everything in the country, that determined the Alibaba founder’s exit from the scene. So when Ma levelled criticism at the suffocating system of control imposed by the authorities and blamed the country’s most important banks for their lack of support for private enterprise, the party took the opportunity to isolate him and gradually put him out of business. Hitting its properties, Alibaba and Ant Group, one of China’s most important fintech platforms. First came the halt to Ant Group’s listing, then the heaviest penalty inflicted by the Chinese antitrust authorities, 18.2 billion yuan, for its advantage over its competitors and forbidding merchants to sell their products on other e-commerce sites.
Jack Ma – China
What has been written is only part of the harsh measures taken by the Chinese authorities against Ma, who has been used as a scapegoat and symbol of what is due to those who dare to challenge the central government. This explains how since 2020, the figure of the entrepreneur so much admired even outside China has fallen into silence. According to Bloomberg, Ma recently attended the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition at a school in Hangzhou, the city where the company is based and where its founder spent most of his life.
As with the other times he has shown himself in public, there have been few pictures and no statements or videos showing Ma speaking in public. This is precisely why, ever since his outings began to thin out, there have been rumours about possible health problems. As it turns out, however, there are no medical complications in the way (thankfully), but rather an attempt to extricate himself from China, looking with interest at neighbouring Japan.
The new life in Tokyo
The billionaire moved his interests to Tokyo a few years ago, relocating to the capital with his family and bodyguards. While he first moved quietly, mostly attending private clubs to meet other business people, Jack Ma has recently been giving his first lectures at the University of Tokyo, as reported by the South China Morning Post. His new passion after entrepreneurship and online trading is sustainable agriculture and food production, topics he has been studying, devoting much of his time to since his break with the Chinese government, including while in Japan, attending the Aquaculture Research Institute at Kindai University. According to the Hong Kong English-language newspaper that broke the news, Professor Ma was followed and engaged by his students in a long and fruitful exchange on Agritech.
As much as no one can deny Jack Ma’s brilliant entrepreneurial rise, his downfall at the behest of the Beijing government has succeeded in eliminating him from the scene, thus diminishing his figure as a role model for young people who dream of repeating his exploits and launching the next successful startup. One demonstration is that of the founder of Alibaba, whose control he relinquished in recent months; it is practically impossible to find comments in the first person. Once again, it is always someone else who speaks for him. ‘Jack is alive, he is well and he is happy. He’s going through a creative period, he’s teaching at university and spends much of his time in China,’ said Michael Evans, president of Alibaba. And as every time one hears such words, the question remains whether they are real or facade statements.
