from Hacker News

China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

by masonhensley on 1/11/21, 5:47 PM with 353 comments

by xster on 1/11/21, 6:01 PM
Is it me or there's some cognitive dissonance going on with the whole article discussing the ramifications of a nationalization without describing at all what sourced this "news" in the first place?
A cursory search seems to show this is a regurgitation on a sourceless Radio Free Asia article (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/alibaba-probe-1225202...) from December?
by rootsudo on 1/11/21, 6:01 PM
Wow. This, alongside Jack Ma being "missing", is really curious.
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-ma-missing-232138645....
Best, semi-legit source I can find, there's other news postings, but from more tabloid and sources that aren't as sincere as Yahoo Financial News.
Which, itself is curious, because CNBC spins it differently:
"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/05/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-is-l..."
Which also falls under the AU-CN struggle, but also curious about how CNBC did not outright say he's missing yet.
And technically, both could be correct, imprisoned means missing from society but not exactly "missing" in terms of knowing general wherebouts.
by orange_tee on 1/11/21, 6:32 PM
The West thought once China is full of billionaires, the billionaires having all that wealth would then have the power to oppose and dissolve the CCP. Didn't go as planned.
by f00zz on 1/11/21, 6:36 PM
Article looks fishy. But if China goes down this route, it looks like fears of China economically overtaking the US are overblown.
by xyzelement on 1/11/21, 6:19 PM
I was thinking about nationalization separately from this. The west has invested a lot into the Chinese economy hoping to translate the corresponding equity into growth. I wonder if the Chinese are really long term interested in honoring the equity.
Meaning - take the money now, grow the businesses and the economy and then at some point say "It's stupid that we're letting foreigners have 20% (or whatever) ownership of our economy" and just deem it illegal / confiscate that equity.
Obviously it will prevent future foreign investment but if China is in a place where they don't care about that, it would be the move.
by karmasimida on 1/11/21, 6:08 PM
Except for the title, I don't think this article substantiate what it addresses as nationalization.
by hungryhobo on 1/11/21, 7:49 PM
Honestly can we not post stuff from radio free Asia on hacker News, this isn't Reddit
by SZJX on 1/12/21, 8:12 PM
Simply sad to see such a garbage-quality piece of fear-mongering "journalism" (published more than 2 weeks ago, no less), with only wild anti-CCP speculations from a single random commentator for Radio Free Asia (spoiler: not exactly known for their neutrality), and practically non-existent factual information, getting so many upvotes here. If one applies the least bit of logic, one could immediately grasp the absurdity of such a "proposal", which would only do every party involved immense harm.
Then again, maybe this is no longer anything surprising at all, given the multiple recent precedents, including e.g. the ridiculous "chromeisbad.com" post.
by gher-shyu3i on 1/11/21, 6:37 PM
Does that mean that they will be kicked out of the US stock market? They should.
by liuliu on 1/11/21, 7:39 PM
This is a serious misunderstanding of what the means and ways at CCP's disposal. Nationalization or taking controlling share of a company is a very Western view and would not happen to Baba. I wrote a few days ago about what would likely to happen to Baba: https://drz.today/2020/baba-is-not-the-next-khodorkovsky/. Only time would tell of course.
by dgellow on 1/11/21, 6:11 PM
Quite hard to believe. Does someone have a source for this report?
by boringg on 1/11/21, 6:37 PM
Great timing to do this if you are the CCP - the world is focused on the US right now not much oxygen for anything else in the news cycle. I think the CCP's true colors have been showing up a lot recently. I feel badly for the Chinese population as a whole as the rest of the globe finds it difficult to disentangle the two, and that the CCP applies pressure on foreign nationals (see: Australia).
by philipov on 1/11/21, 6:00 PM
Something about how the images and their captions have nothing to do with the topic of the article seems very suspicious.
by guhcampos on 1/11/21, 9:02 PM
This is a highly speculative article with vast, global, implications.
People should be taking this with Kilograms of salt.
Food for thought: if this was to be true we would be seeing several bit coin whale operations going on from insiders, and this isn't the case even with the substantial drops in bitcoin value in the last 24 hours.
by ogre_codes on 1/11/21, 7:08 PM
Wow.. this is like a giant gift to Amazon.
Obviously they aren't getting more Chinese business, but they've struggled there already. But it makes it a lot easier for them to compete everywhere else. Competing against CCP is going to be a lot easier than competing against Jack Ma.
by adam_ellsworth on 1/11/21, 9:22 PM
Excuse my ignorance here, but is the https://ant.design/ suite of React UI/UX components owned/operated by the Ant Group mentioned in the article?
by JumpCrisscross on 1/11/21, 7:27 PM
Not sure if someone in the party saw something wanted and created the groundwork to yank it. Or if this is genuinely punitive.
Either way, a standard if frequently-forgotten message to innovators in such regimes.
by PeterStuer on 1/11/21, 8:50 PM
In China the government silences the enterprises if they run out of step, in the US the enterprises silence the governments if they run out of step.
by nowherebeen on 1/11/21, 6:27 PM
I wonder how SoftBank will take this news.
by xwdv on 1/11/21, 7:34 PM
Will the Ant design framework for React be compromised because of this? Would you still use it?
by 29athrowaway on 1/11/21, 6:53 PM
If Jack Ma is still alive, he must be enjoying the blessing of 996 somewhere.
by didip on 1/11/21, 8:31 PM
Now this... is real totalitarianism.
by trhway on 1/11/21, 7:08 PM
it may happen not necessarily as straight "nationalization", instead the CCP/government would just buy a controlling interest at a very sweet non-cash price what Ma and other shareholders would be more than happy to sell at ... given the alternatives.
by martin1975 on 1/11/21, 7:28 PM
This is scary. Thank you for posting things - I've reshared it to as many places as I can.
by ddmma on 1/11/21, 7:41 PM
that concludes the story of the 40s thieves in the Alibaba case
by nashashmi on 1/11/21, 7:14 PM
In a different time with a hardline conservative government we would see moves being drawn in the sand to prevent this kind of power domination by China. But neither Biden nor Trump have any incentive in drawing boundaries on CCP.
I never thought I’d wish for bigger hawks in the white house.
by idrios on 1/11/21, 7:39 PM
The CCP is caught in its own version of purgatory through paranoia. When the great famine happened under Mao, it was because Mao had surrounded himself by yes-men who were competing to be the most loyal. When the famine hit, the provinces all reported better yields than actual, collectivism happened based on reported and not actual yield, and millions of farmers starved.
His successor, Deng Xiaoping started a lot of really great reforms, including term limits on leadership and granting Shenzhen & some other cities special/experimental economic status, to basically run autonomously as capitalist.
Several decades later, paranoia is too strong. Xi Jinping removed term limits because he doesn't trust others to run the country better than him. The One China policy has killed a number of vibrant cultures including those of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. A social credit system is being implemented. Now Alibaba is being nationalized.
These issues will likely only get worse, until another great famine event.
by skyde on 1/11/21, 8:24 PM
isnt jack ma still reported missing ?
by metabagel on 1/11/21, 6:07 PM
China previously required Alibaba and other companies to accept government officials within their companies.
https://www.ft.com/content/055a1864-ddd3-11e9-b112-9624ec9ed...
Fraser Howie, author of "Red Capitalism", says that all Chinese corporations are either state owned enterprises or state overseen enterprises. It appears China may want to transition Alibaba from the latter to the former.
by impalallama on 1/11/21, 8:00 PM
This is the most overtly communist thing China has done in a while.
by f430 on 1/11/21, 7:09 PM
Guo Wengui said back in September 2019 that "Jack Ma would be jailed or killed" on Kyle Bass's youtube channel. [1]
At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this:
1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed"
2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized
3) Rinse & Repeat
Everybody who isn't familiar with the inner workings of the CCP thinks that Jack Ma openly challenged the CCP. That simply isn't the case. They are using as an excuse to take over the company because they can.
As much as people in the West praise CCP's economic rise, and some even point to its authoritarian system as superior to our democracy, but little do they know the very laws that protect them isn't an option in China.
Imagine spending most of your life building a massive business and then one day it is taken from you by force by an authoritarian ruler.
This is why anyone that has money send their kids abroad and move permanently to a Western country that their kids despise and criticize their host for calling out the CCP.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJK_5qDraM
by ketamine__ on 1/11/21, 9:24 PM
What is Jack Ma's projected net worth after nationalization? Do investors get a buyout?
by baybal2 on 1/11/21, 7:42 PM
10 years ago, nobody would've believed me if I were to say China will slide back into mass nationalisation, let alone nationalising something like an Internet company.
The real hardcore bolshevik style communists have clawed their way back into power.
They are back. I'm very well convinced now that Chinese nouveaux riche class, and foreign capital in China are living on a leased time.
The country is on its way back to seventies, irreversably now.
by nabla9 on 1/11/21, 7:50 PM
China is Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist republic. Communists are actually communists.
This is what is eventually supposed to happen every Chinese company according to the Chinese Communist party. They just allow private ownership, "for now".