Just under three years ago, Alibaba founder Jack Ma quoted China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in a speech to a finance conference in Shanghai. “Success isn’t up to me,” Ma said, a phrase Xi initially used to get officials to move away from short-term thinking and do more for the country’s long-term interests. Ma threw this quote back on regulators and state-owned banks who, he insinuated, were holding up the financial technology sector with their “pawnshop mentality.”
Ma is an icon in China’s tech industry, one of its most successful and recognizable figures at home and abroad. He was speaking weeks before Alibaba subsidiary Ant Group, owner of the world’s largest digital payments platform, Alipay, was due to go public in Shanghai and Hong Kong. It would have been the biggest initial public offering anywhere in the world. On November 2, 2020, a week after his speech, Ma was summoned for questioning by the same regulators he’d challenged from the stage. Days later, Ant Group’s $34 billion stock market listing was suspended. For nearly three months, Ma disappeared from public view.
Online, the rumor mill began to churn. There were debates about whether his comments were out of line. Had he been placed under house arrest? Had an exit ban been imposed on him? Or had he already left the country to avoid arrest? When Ma did reappear, it was to go into what many saw as a self-imposed exile. He stopped appearing at conferences and giving talks. He was photographed overseas doing normal billionaire things. There was Jack in a golf cart. There he was sailing a yacht. There he was looking at fish farms. Him again, eating lobster with friends. Reporters tracked him to Tokyo’s private clubs, then to Thailand, where he was spotted holding his fists up with a Muay Thai boxing legend.
Ma’s ill-fated speech and withdrawal from public view marked pivotal moments for China’s tech sector. Admiration of Ma went well beyond the normal worship of tycoons. His success was not underpinned by family connections, nor did he have the fancy overseas schooling that’s often required to raise capital from investors. His brand was that he was 100 percent “made in China,” and self-made at that. His rise showed what an average person could do. The public nicknamed him “Ma Baba” or “Daddy Ma,” and the idea was that everyone could bask in Ma’s wealth. His fall from grace sent a message from regulators that they could, and would, limit his power.
Then, on March 27 of this year, Ma flew back to China. On the social media platform Weibo, “Jack Ma has come back” was a top trending topic as users speculated about why he’d returned and why it mattered. Was this, some asked, a sign that the government’s attitude toward the tech sector had shifted? “Did he choose to come back or was he invited back?” one user asked. “Is this just a retired old man coming back?” another asked. “Is it worth this reaction?”
Ma isn’t just a tech icon; he’s a foundational figure for Chinese private enterprise this century. In the early days of Alibaba, which he founded in a small apartment in Hangzhou, potential customers had to be persuaded that the internet wasn’t a scam. According to Alibaba lore, the sales team, nicknamed Iron Soldiers, went door-to-door with leather backpacks sometimes used to fend off guard dogs and convinced businesses to sign up.
When those Iron Soldiers left the company, they wrote books about their experiences. They set up their own consultancies. They wrote about the company’s philosophy, its six underlying values. “A lot of content that they produced are things you find in an MBA class,” says Sharon Gai, former general head of global key accounts at Alibaba.
Gai says that at this time few Chinese CEOs had been to business school, having studied at technical colleges in the 1950s. There was no equivalent of an MBA in China and no Peter Drucker-esque philosopher of management and business to turn to. Ma and his companions filled that gap.
Alibaba came to dominate ecommerce in China. The company built a global logistics network, an online payment system that a huge chunk of the population uses daily, and then expanded into cloud computing, entertainment, and health. It provided everything someone could possibly want or need. The company was almost evangelical in promoting its methodology, and Ma was its prophet. While other founders of his stature, like Tencent’s Pony Ma, kept a low profile, Jack Ma “would be at every single conference,” Gai says. “His whole personality was teaching and sharing.”
Ma was no stranger to stunts. He took on the country’s “Lipstick King,” Austin Li, in a livestreaming contest. Li outsold Ma 100 to 1. Ma starred in a kung fu movie, scripted so he would beat the likes of Jet Li and Donnie Yen. He started a school with an eye to reforming education. When he formally left Alibaba, he enjoyed a rockstar sendoff, complete with a guitar and wig.
But Ma’s fall came at a moment when China’s Big Tech companies were losing luster in the eyes of the public and the government.
By 2020, news reports and social media conversations were increasingly focusing on the brutal “9-9-6” working schedules at tech companies, which required people to work from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Rather than being set free by tech, workers in offices and on the streets complained about being trapped by algorithms. As in other parts of the world, people voiced concerns about the vast collections of data companies were accruing and how it was being deployed to make the rich richer. Circulating on social media was a Chinese refrain that people were “controlled by capital.” Big Tech companies had become incredibly powerful, dominating huge parts of the economy. Going about ordinary life in China without touching an Alibaba app is difficult. People were quite literally in debt to Alipay as they took out small loans from its platform.
“The monopolistic power of these companies is very strong,” says Northwestern University researcher Alison Zhao.
The state was also increasingly interested in having a say in the daily operations of Big Tech. “Don’t focus on bundles of cabbage,” was the title of one official media column that prodded entrepreneurs to look beyond profit in the “vegetable wars” that started in 2020, when companies fought over who would capture the fresh produce market. The government wanted enterprises to take on more social responsibilities, to do more research and development, to actually innovate instead of simply using their outsize resources to figure out how to sell the most cabbages.
That interference escalated into a full-scale regulatory crackdown, in which the government portrayed the tech sector as a force that needed to be reined in for the good of society.
Almost every top tech company has had to make corrections, and Alibaba was no exception. Ride-hailing group Didi was probed and voluntarily delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Online marketplace Tmall was fined for irregular pricing. Ma’s Ant Group has been restructured, with its consumer finance branch regulated as a financial institution.
Top-level officials have reassured the industry that the government crackdown is, if not over, then winding down. Didi was allowed back onto app stores. The economy is starting to pick up. But the prevailing sentiment is still uncertainty. “Confidence in tech companies has dropped a lot,” Zhao says. “It will take a long time for the market to gain confidence again.”
Ma’s return was heralded by some as a sign of rapprochement between Big Tech and the government—although Ma no longer controls Ant Group.
There is a rumor going around the tech industry that Ma was invited back to China by premier Li Qiang. Li, who has held senior roles across the country, most recently in the financial center of Shanghai, built a reputation for championing private business. Under his watch, Tesla became the first foreign automaker to wholly own its Chinese plant and Shanghai’s version of Nasdaq launched, giving tech companies more access to capital. Since becoming premier, Li has toured the country, talking about advanced manufacturing and core technologies, and met with foreign delegations to discuss international investment. The message seems to be that China isn’t as opposed to private enterprise as was previously thought.
It’s not clear if Ma’s rehabilitation—if that’s what this is—was intended to support that message. The day he arrived, Alibaba shares surged 5.5 percent (although they soon fell back). The following day, Alibaba announced plans to split into six units, each able to raise outside funding and go public. Its shares closed 14.3 percent higher after the news.
With uncertainty still looming across the industry, the tech sector may need more than symbolic gestures to get investment flowing again. “There needs to be aggressive institutional measures to assure businesses their operating environment will be good,” Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says. “It takes more than Jack Ma coming back to restore confidence.”
In fact, Ma has come back not as an entrepreneur, but as a teacher. He’s returned to who he was before he founded Alibaba (in the company offices, employees called him Teacher Ma). He has taken an honorary professorship at Hong Kong University, though he will only conduct research in that role, in addition to accepting visiting professorships with universities in Japan, Rwanda, and Israel. His first public stop in China was at the school he founded in Hangzhou. Dressed down in leisure wear and Allbirds shoes, he spoke about the challenges AI posed to education. ChatGPT was only the beginning of the AI era, he said.
Although Ma is still a massive figure in tech, people have moved on. With Ma out of the public eye, they now hang on the words of entrepreneurs like Xiaomi’s Lei Jun and Qihoo 360’s Zhou Hongyi. The news is captured less by Web 2.0 companies and more by those developing AI and EVs. People are looking at Baidu’s attempt to compete with Chat GPT.
In an era when government is once again central to the economy, the conversation around private enterprise no longer focuses on a single figure. “The era when these kinds of tech entrepreneurs were seen as the driving force of China’s economy has passed,” Lee says. Ma’s quote was on point. Success isn’t up to him.
