Jack Ma's Empire of Business and Power- Volume II- To an Unfinished Farewell -BK24

 

Volume II

By Fang Tianliang

Part Four: The Many Causes of the Fall

 

Chapter 29: The Immediate Cause: Those Twenty Minutes

If one must assign this story a starting point, it is Shanghai, 24 October 2020.

The importance of that speech lies not in what it said but in what it proved.

Before 2020, many of the controversies Ma faced were still generally seen as friction between a business model and its regulators – antitrust, data security, consumer protection – problems that could be negotiated, rectified, resolved with time and the cost of compliance. The speech changed the nature of the problem. It turned a matter between a business and its regulators into a public declaration of attitude.

Even more crucial was the timing. Had the speech been given in 2017, it might have been taken as insightful industry criticism; in 2023, as normal policy discussion. But it was given in October 2020 – in a year when the regulatory keynote had already clearly shifted, in a month when Ant Group was about to list at a valuation of hundreds of billions of yuan.

At such a moment, a man about to become the protagonist of the world’s biggest IPO stood up at a high-level official forum and publicly criticised the thinking and mechanisms of the regulatory system. However one defends it, that could never be treated as an ordinary industry speech.

One detail is often overlooked. The Interim Measures for the Administration of Online Micro-Lending Business (Draft for Comment), drawn up by the CBIRC with the central bank, was released for public comment on 2 November – the very day Ma was summoned. This shows that the relevant regulatory rules had not been cobbled together after the speech. Whether, without the speech, the draft would have been published on the same day, the public record cannot show.

So what did the speech actually change?

What it may have changed was the speed and manner of enforcement. Given more time, Ant might, like many platform companies later, have adapted gradually to the new rules by adjusting its business structure, adding capital and rebuilding its joint-lending model; the listing might have been postponed, but not halted outright. After that posture of open confrontation, urgency moved to the top of the agenda. The word “suspended” contained a great deal that went beyond technical considerations.

A more accurate way to put it, then, is this: the speech was not the cause but the trigger. The deeper causes lay elsewhere.

 

Chapter 30: The Business-Model Cause: The Growth Ceiling

The difficulties Alibaba faced after 2021 were not entirely of the regulators’ making. They were also the problem of a business that had reached a turning point in its growth.

After 2015, the competitive landscape of Chinese e-commerce changed fundamentally.

The first change came from Pinduoduo. The company broke into the market with an extremely simple logic: lower prices, users further down the income ladder and in smaller towns, and more powerful social sharing. Riding on the WeChat ecosystem, it spread rapidly through group buying and sharing, reaching 788 million users within five years of its founding. At the end of November 2023, Pinduoduo’s market value overtook Alibaba’s for the first time, with both companies worth around 190 billion dollars; by May 2024, Pinduoduo had overtaken Alibaba again.

The second change came from live-streamed shopping driven by Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and Kuaishou. It completely rewrote the path by which users discover products – from “I know what I need, so I search for it” to “I didn’t know I needed it, but I saw a streamer recommend it and bought it”. For the Taobao–Tmall system, built around search and shopfronts, it was a structural blow.

The data illustrate the shift. According to brokerage research, Alibaba’s share of China’s domestic e-commerce market fell from about 51.3 per cent in 2021 to about 37.3 per cent in 2024. Over the same period, the combined share of Douyin and Kuaishou rose from about 9.2 to about 22.7 per cent, and Pinduoduo’s from about 15.9 to about 22 per cent. In 2024, the market shares of Alibaba, Pinduoduo and JD.com were about 37.3, 21 and 17.4 per cent respectively – so that Pinduoduo and JD combined now exceeded Alibaba.

In terms of growth, Alibaba’s revenue growth slowed from 8.3 per cent in the previous year to 6 per cent in the 2025 financial year, while Pinduoduo grew much faster over the same period. Alibaba’s revenue failed to break through the trillion-yuan mark, while sales and marketing expenses rose sharply. Taotian Group – the combined Taobao and Tmall business, billed as Alibaba’s engine of revenue and profit – was visibly short of momentum.

These figures point to one conclusion: Alibaba’s moat was not as deep as people had imagined.

In the past, Alibaba’s core advantage was scale. More merchants brought more goods; more goods brought more users; more users attracted more merchants. It was a classic network effect. But network effects rest on a precondition: that users have no better option.

When Pinduoduo offered an alternative at rock-bottom prices, and Douyin used content to merge browsing and buying, that precondition no longer held. Users could switch freely between platforms, and the cost to them of switching from one e-commerce platform to another was extremely low.

Alibaba’s response was first to imitate its rivals and then to invest heavily in new directions. It launched Taobao Special Offers (later Taote), Taocaicai and Taobao Live; it then poured subsidies into instant retail, and announced that it would invest 380 billion yuan in AI and cloud computing over the next three years.

There is one further factor that is hard to quantify. From 2021 to 2024 Alibaba was under antitrust rectification, submitting compliance reports to the regulator every year and treading especially carefully on acquisitions, subsidies and expansion. Seen this way, the regulatory environment may also have slowed its response to new rivals to some degree. This is an analysis, not a conclusion that can be precisely measured.

Strategically, each of these responses made sense. But to some extent they also confirmed a judgement: what Alibaba had lost was the power to define. It had been the one who made the rules; now it was chasing others under rules they had made.

 

Chapter 31: The Financial Cause: Who Bears the Risk?

Of all the business reasons behind Ma’s fall, the most technical, the most concrete and the most easily misunderstood is the question of financial risk.

To explain it, it helps to start with a simple illustration.

In its early days, Ant’s model was closer to securitisation. Suppose an Ant micro-lending company has ten yuan. It lends the ten to Xiao Zhang in return for an IOU to repay eleven in a year; it then packages a batch of such IOUs into securities, sells them to investors and gets its principal back early – and lends it again to Xiao Li and Xiao Wang. The same ten yuan can be turned over again and again into loans worth far more than ten. After Document No. 141 at the end of 2017, this practice became subject to leverage limits.

Thereafter Ant relied increasingly on joint lending. Xiao Zhang applies on Alipay to borrow 1,000 yuan; Ant’s risk model decides whether he can borrow, how much and at what rate. Of the 1,000 yuan, a partner bank supplies most and an Ant micro-lending company only a small part. The bank collects the interest; Ant collects a technology service fee.

What the two models share is this: Ant controls the crucial decisions about who can borrow and how much, yet bears only a small share of the funding. If the economy turns down and defaults rise, most of the losses fall on the banks and investors who supplied the money.

This is not imaginary. The data disclosed in Ant Group’s 2020 prospectus show that, at the end of June 2020, about 98 per cent of the outstanding credit Ant had facilitated was funded by financial institutions or had been securitised.

In other words, Ant’s own money accounted for less than 2 per cent of those 2.15 trillion yuan.

The regulators’ intervention targeted precisely this structure. The Interim Measures for the Administration of Online Micro-Lending Business, opened for comment on 2 November 2020, required that in any single jointly funded loan, a micro-lending company operating online must contribute no less than 30 per cent. That figure pulled Ant back from being “a platform that puts up almost no money” to being “a lender that must put up money”.

The key to understanding this is not to read the regulators’ reaction simply as hostility to innovation. What Ant was doing was technically advanced: through big-data risk control, it allowed small businesses with no property and no financial statements, and young people fresh out of university, to borrow. That was a real social need.

For consumers, the pros and cons of the model were equally real. Within its interest-free period Huabei cost users almost nothing, and many young people used it to smooth their monthly budgets; but instalment fees and Jiebei’s interest rates were not low – on an annualised basis often higher than typical bank credit cards. Inclusive finance had certainly become universal; whether it had become beneficial was exactly what regulators later questioned.

But finance has an inescapable law: whoever bears the risk must hold matching capital. This is not ideology; it is a set of institutional arrangements tested by countless crises. Ant’s problem was not that it had done something wicked, but that it was running a bank-scale business worth trillions of yuan while allocating capital as a technology company would.

On this point, what Ma said in his speech – “Innovation without risk is the killing of innovation; trying to reduce risk to zero is the greatest risk of all” – is right in the abstract. Innovation does mean risk. But spoken on a specific occasion, by a specific interested party, on the eve of its own listing, the words were no longer a principle but a position.

In this book’s view, that is what makes the speech most regrettable: a point that was not without merit in the abstract came to be heard, because of who said it and when, as the voice of a vested interest.

 

Chapter 32: The Data Cause: Who Owns Credit?

If leverage was a technical problem that could be patched with capital adequacy ratios, data was a much harder one.

The scale of the data Ant held was staggering. Through Alipay, it had the payment records, spending habits, Sesame Credit scores and location histories of hundreds of millions of users. According to the prospectus, the Alipay app served more than a billion users and more than 80 million merchants.

Commercially, this data was immensely valuable – it was the basis of risk control, and the ground on which Ant could charge banks technology service fees. But its significance went far beyond business.

What Sesame Credit did was, in essence, build a parallel system of credit assessment outside China’s personal credit reporting system. And that system was held by a private company, covered hundreds of millions of people, and was used in a growing range of settings: renting flats and cars, visa applications, sharing services.

Western readers should note that Sesame Credit is a commercial credit score. It is not the same thing as the Chinese government’s “social credit system” so often described in the Western press – a broader, state-led and more complex set of mechanisms, chiefly concerned with companies’ compliance records and court blacklists of “judgment defaulters”. The two are frequently confused.

In any modern state, personal credit assessment is a classic piece of public infrastructure. It decides whether a person can get a loan, rent a home, be trusted in certain situations. Who controls this infrastructure, by what rules it runs and how it is supervised are questions every country must answer.

According to the Wall Street Journal, senior regulators had asked Ant to share its vast consumer credit data with the central bank and the national credit reporting system, and Ant had responded with passive resistance.

And in the regulatory interview of December 2020, the second of the rectification requirements the financial authorities set Ant read: “Break the information monopoly; strictly implement the requirements of the Regulations on the Administration of the Credit Reporting Industry; conduct personal credit reporting business only with a licence and in accordance with the law; collect and use personal information in line with the principles of ‘legality, minimisation and necessity’; and safeguard personal and national information security.”

Every phrase in that sentence carries weight. “Break the information monopoly” is not a technical formulation; it is a strategic judgement. “Only with a licence” meant that the previous practice of conducting credit reporting outside the licensing regime was deemed unlawful. “Minimisation and necessity” placed a limit on the entire logic of data collection: not collecting as much as one can, but only what is needed.

In a business era driven by data, the requirement drew a clear line: the collection, use and assessment of data must take place within the state’s framework of rules, and cannot be decided by one company’s commercial logic.

In the years that followed, China’s personal credit-reporting system was reorganised. In 2018 Baihang Credit was founded, led by the National Internet Finance Association of China with eight companies including Sesame Credit as shareholders, as the first licensed market-based personal credit bureau. In 2021 the Personal Information Protection Law and the Data Security Law came into force. In November 2024, Qiantang Credit Reporting – owned 35 per cent by Ant Group and 35 per cent by the state-owned Zhejiang Provincial Tourism Investment Group – received a personal credit-reporting licence. Ant’s credit data had in the end been brought into a licensed framework, co-owned by state capital and supervised by the central bank.

That is also why the hardest part of “Ant’s rectification” was never the money but the rewriting of its data architecture.

 

Chapter 33: The Public-Opinion Cause: The Shattering of a Myth

Ma’s shift from object of universal admiration to target of widespread criticism happened in a very short time – and not because of any single wrong act, but because an expectation was disappointed.

In the early and middle 2010s, Ma performed a very particular social function: he was a proof. “If Jack Ma can do it, so can I.” That thought gave countless people hope. His story was reduced to a formula: ordinary background, not handsome, not highly educated, one mark in maths – yet through persistence and hard work, he became the richest man in China.

The persuasive power of the formula rested on an implicit premise: that the rules of the world are fair, and that effort really is rewarded.

By the end of the decade, more and more people had begun to doubt that premise. Slowing growth, soaring house prices, fiercer competition for jobs, harder social mobility – in such an environment, “work hard and you will succeed” was no longer encouragement but pressure. When someone who has already worked hard enough has still not succeeded, to be told it is “because you didn’t work hard enough” is to be wounded twice over.

Every word Ma spoke about effort at that moment was read in this context. When he said 996 was a blessing, people heard: “You’re unwilling to give it your all because you don’t want it badly enough.” When he said “I’ve never touched money; I’m not interested in money”, they heard: “You’ve got everything, and now you pretend to look down on it.” When he said “stupidity is worse than cancer”, they heard: “You’re calling us stupid.”

There was another, more specific disappointment, among small merchants.

In Alibaba’s narrative, merchants were the indispensable other half: “to make it easy to do business anywhere” was addressed to them. Many early Taobao sellers had indeed gone from nothing to something with the platform’s help, and their gratitude was real.

But as the platform grew, merchants felt that the balance of power between them and it had changed fundamentally. Rising traffic costs, fiercer advertising auctions, frequent rule changes and the extra resources showered on brand merchants made life hard for small sellers. Feeling this way, they reinterpreted “to make it easy to do business anywhere” as “to make it easy to do business anywhere – so long as you can pay for the traffic”.

And so a boss once seen as “one of us” was gradually reassigned to another category: the platform. And in the public mind, platforms are not inherently benign.

There is a rule here that is easily overlooked: the more successful a company, the more readily it becomes a receptacle for social emotion. When people cannot find a specific target for their complaints, they complain about the most visible, the richest and the most talkative person around. After 2019, the business figure in China who best fitted all three was Jack Ma.

 

Chapter 34: The Personality Cause: The Price of Being a Communicator

If one had to identify a single thread running through Ma’s entire career, it would be this: he is a supremely gifted communicator.

That trait explains most of the reasons for his success.

He is not a technical genius, a master of capital or an operations expert. But he could bring together technical geniuses, masters of capital and operations experts, and make them believe that what they were doing was worth trading their youth for. Of the seventeen people who joined him in that Lakeside Gardens flat in 1999, not one stayed because of calculations about the business model. They stayed because of one man’s power of expression.

He could also persuade markets and investors. Around 2000, Masayoshi Son met dozens of Chinese internet companies and in the end chose to put his money into Ma. Years later he said it was the man he had invested in.

And he could persuade an entire society. In the 2010s, China’s young saw in him the possibility of success without family background or academic credentials. That kind of social persuasiveness is the highest form of capital an entrepreneur can acquire.

But the same trait also explains most of the reasons for his failure.

A communicator has an inner drive: he needs a reaction. He needs to see the people in front of him persuaded, inspired, changed. That drive kept him talking – at internal meetings, at industry forums, on television, on the international stage. The more he talked, the more accustomed he became to trusting his own judgement, and the harder it became to notice that his judgement had drifted away from new realities.

The Jack Ma of 2019 was still speaking the language of 2014. He was still talking about effort and persistence, still talking about how hard it was to start a business, still organising his story around his identity as an underdog made good. By then he was a man with tens of billions of dollars, a platform with hundreds of millions of users, a man received by heads of state.

This mismatch of identity is a problem every long-term success faces, and it has one very cruel feature: the more successful you are, the harder it is to notice. Because success itself supplies all the positive feedback. Every time he spoke, people applauded; every Weibo post was shared hundreds of thousands of times; every forum he attended, the media made him the headline.

By October 2020, the mismatch had reached its peak. The controlling figure of a company that had already reached the summit of financial power stood at an official forum and, in the tone of an industry critic, criticised the thinking of the regulatory system.

He probably genuinely believed he was offering constructive advice. But in that position, at that moment, his words could easily be heard as something else: I understand this better than you. What he really thought, only he knows.

Seen this way, it was one of the most expensive prices he ever paid – and the reason was less malice than a failure to recalibrate.

But personality alone cannot explain everything. In many countries, an entrepreneur who publicly criticises the regulators may provoke rebuttals, public pressure, even closer scrutiny – but rarely the halting of an already-approved listing within two days. Why should an entrepreneur’s public remarks carry such weight in China?

The answer has to do with the space entrepreneurs have to speak. In China, entrepreneurs who criticise policy in public face not only the market and public opinion but political consequences that are hard to predict. Several recent cases are on the public judicial record. In September 2020, the property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In July 2021, Sun Dawu, a farmer-turned-entrepreneur from Hebei, was sentenced to eighteen years on charges including “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and “gathering a crowd to attack state organs”. In August 2022, Xiao Jianhua, a financier who reportedly managed assets for many powerful families, was sentenced to thirteen years on charges including illegally taking public deposits and corporate bribery. In February 2023, the investment banker Bao Fan went missing, and his firm later announced that he was “cooperating with an investigation” by the authorities. Each case has its own particular circumstances, and this book does not suggest any direct connection with Ma’s experience. But together they form the background against which Chinese entrepreneurs judge their own risks.

In such an environment, most entrepreneurs choose silence, or say only what is in line with policy. What set Ma apart was precisely that, for a long time, he did not. His mistake was to underestimate that risk; and the fact that such a risk exists at all is itself an institutional question worth discussing.

 

Chapter 35: The Governance Cause: One Man’s Company

In the theory of modern corporate governance, founder control is a long-running debate.

On the one hand, founder control can stop a company’s strategy from being held hostage to short-term results, protecting long-term investment and continuity of mission. The dual-class share structures of Amazon, Google, Meta and others are products of this logic. Alibaba’s partnership system was, in essence, the same idea: giving a group of people who understood the company’s mission the right to nominate the board, thereby guarding against the short-sightedness of professional managers.

On the other hand, founder control carries an obvious risk: the company’s fate depends too heavily on one person’s judgement. When that judgement matches the environment, the company races ahead; when it does not, the company crashes at the same speed.

Of all China’s internet companies, Alibaba institutionalised its founder’s influence most thoroughly.

In July 2010, Alibaba formally established its partnership system, named the “Lakeside Partners” in memory of the Lakeside Gardens compound where the founding team started out. By the 2020s Ma held no executive post and was not on the board; but as founder and the architect of the system, he remained the spiritual core of the mechanism that nominates a majority of the board.

When Ma retired, the stability of this arrangement looked like an achievement. His handover to Daniel Zhang in 2019 was smooth and uncontested, and was for a time seen as a model of succession in a Chinese private company.

But after 2020, the other side of that stability came into view.

In March 2023, Alibaba announced its split into six business groups, which outsiders called “farewell to the Jack Ma era”. In June 2023, Alibaba announced that Daniel Zhang would step down as chairman and chief executive, with Joe Tsai (Cai Chongxin) taking over as chairman and Eddie Wu (Wu Yongming) as chief executive. In 2024, Ma appeared several times at Alibaba’s campus and on important occasions, including a public speech at Ant Group’s twentieth-anniversary event on 8 December 2024.

Put together, these events form a complex picture: a founder who had in theory retired to the back row still appeared at the company’s big moments, and his appearances often coincided closely in time with major changes in personnel.

This is not a conspiracy but a structural reality. When an organisation’s culture, values and strategic narrative have all been built with one person as their point of origin, that person can never truly leave. He can leave in form; but once he goes, a hollow opens up in the organisation’s sense of meaning.

In this book’s view, this may also be one of the deeper reasons why the 2023 split was never completed. Its logic was “make each business independent and quicker to decide”. But Alibaba’s real decision-making core was never in the business groups; it was in the founder-centred partnership mechanism. Once that mechanism itself was called into question, the split could hardly deliver what it had promised.

In China, corporate governance also has a dimension unfamiliar to Western readers: the Party organisation. China’s Company Law provides that a Communist Party organisation shall be established in companies in accordance with the Party’s constitution, and that companies shall provide the conditions necessary for its activities. Like other large private companies, Alibaba has a Party committee. Most of the time, Party organisations in private companies do not intervene directly in day-to-day business; but their presence means that, alongside shareholders, the board and management, the company’s power structure contains a line connecting it to the ruling party. After 2020, that line carried noticeably more weight.

The central question of modern corporate governance is how a company can have the founder’s vision without depending on the founder’s presence. Alibaba’s answer remains, to this day, an open one. In China the question has a further layer: how a company can obey the law and yet keep its commercial independence in the face of political demands that lie outside the law.

 

Chapter 36: The Cause in the Times: The End of a Cycle

Pull back a little further, and it becomes clear that Ma’s story is not his alone.

Between 1999 and 2020, China’s internet industry went through a quite exceptional cycle of growth.

The cycle began with a vacuum of infrastructure. In 1999, China had very few internet users, online payment did not exist, logistics were underdeveloped, consumers had no habit of shopping online, and small businesses had neither the awareness nor the means to go digital. In such an environment, any company that could build new infrastructure would gain a near-monopoly position – because it was filling a void.

The cycle’s accelerator was the dividend of population and market. China had 1.4 billion people, a fast-growing middle class and the most complete manufacturing supply chain in the world. When these three met the internet, the resulting economies of scale were impossible to replicate in any other market.

The cycle’s umbrella was a permissive regulatory environment. In a new industry, regulators’ attitude is usually “develop first, regulate later”. That gave the early platforms enormous room for trial and error – including room to innovate in highly sensitive areas such as payments, credit reporting and lending.

Around 2020, all three conditions changed at once.

The infrastructure vacuum had been filled. China’s penetration of mobile payments and e-commerce and its logistics efficiency had reached world-leading levels, and the marginal value of each new user had fallen sharply.

The population and market dividend had reached a plateau. Growth slowed, consumer confidence fell, user growth peaked, and competition between platforms shifted from a growing market to a static one. In a static market, competition inevitably becomes fiercer, less efficient and more prone to crossing the bounds of compliance – the root of “choose one of two” and the subsidy wars.

The regulators’ attitude shifted from “develop first” to “regulate”. After 2020, antitrust, data security, personal information protection and the governance of the platform economy became policy priorities. This was not action aimed at one company but a rewriting of the rules for a whole industry: Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent and Didi each went through their own period of adjustment.

Against this wider backdrop, Ma looks more like a symbol of an era than an isolated case. The empire he built was that cycle’s biggest beneficiary; the plight he met was closely bound up with the cycle’s end. But a cyclical explanation cannot replace an analysis of specific decisions. The industry’s shift from “develop first” to “regulate” was a trend; the speed, the procedures and the choice of companies by which that shift was carried out were decisions made by people.

That makes the line quoted earlier – “There is no such thing as the era of Jack Ma, only Jack Ma within an era” – seem all the more apt; except that the “era” includes not only the cycles of markets and technology, but the will of power.

 

Chapter 37: Business and Power: A Course With No Textbook

Doing business in China involves a subject that every private entrepreneur must work out for himself: how to get along with the government.

The subject has no textbook and no standard answer. It has its own historical traditions, its own unwritten rules, and countless paths that can lead to success or failure. And the cost of failure is so high that no entrepreneur dares discuss it openly.

Ma’s performance in this subject is the hardest part of his career to assess.

On the verifiable facts, Alibaba’s growth moved closely in step with China’s policy environment. It seized the opportunity of foreign trade and B2B in 1999; the opportunity of the consumer internet after 2003; it obtained one of the first third-party payment licences in 2011; and it seized the opportunity of internet finance after 2013. Each moment corresponded to a policy or an institutional adjustment.

One detail is worth noting here. In 2011 Alipay was separated from Alibaba Group, acquired domestic status and so obtained its payment licence. For that step to be completed, the system had to offer a window that allowed it.

The relationship between Alibaba, power and capital can be considered at four levels.

The first level is what has been publicly disclosed. In September 2012, Alibaba completed its 7.6-billion-dollar buyback of half of Yahoo’s stake. According to Alibaba’s announcement at the time, the lead investors in the new equity included a unit of China Investment Corporation (the sovereign wealth fund), Boyu Capital, CITIC Capital and CDB Capital, the investment arm of the state-owned China Development Bank; China Development Bank also lent money for the deal. All this can be verified from deal disclosures: Alibaba’s most crucial transaction for control involved state capital and funds closely connected with the state system.

The second level is investigative reporting by reputable media. Before Alibaba’s 2014 listing, the New York Times reported that several institutions involved in its financing had links to the families of senior Party leaders: Boyu Capital counted Jiang Zemin’s grandson Jiang Zhicheng among its partners; New Horizon Capital, co-founded by Wen Jiabao’s son Wen Yunsong, also held Alibaba shares, probably bought from other shareholders; a vice-president of CDB Capital at the time was He Jinlei, son of the then anti-corruption chief He Guoqiang; and a private-equity unit of CITIC had earlier been run by Liu Lefei, son of the propaganda chief Liu Yunshan. The institutions declined to comment or said the individuals concerned were not responsible for the investments. In February 2021, the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous officials and government advisers, reported that Boyu had invested indirectly, through layers of companies, in an Ant shareholder, Beijing Jingguan, which held nearly 1 per cent of Ant – a link not shown in Ant’s prospectus. The report also mentioned Beijing Zhaode Investment, controlled by Li Botan, son-in-law of the former Politburo Standing Committee member Jia Qinglin, as an investor connected with Ant, and said Xi was reluctant to see the listing deliver enormous wealth to well-known “princelings”.

The third level is analysis and inference. On this basis, some overseas analyses have explained the blocking of Ant’s listing as a redistribution of interests between political factions: a fintech platform capable of creating enormous wealth, if its shareholding network reached back to power-holders of an earlier period, might upset the new configuration of political power. This explanation deserves serious examination, and should not be ruled out automatically simply because the official media do not report it. But nor can it substitute for evidence: the disclosed holdings are relatively small, and the public record is not sufficient to prove that any particular family’s stake was the decisive reason for halting the listing.

The fourth level is what cannot currently be verified: what was said at private meetings at the very top, what instructions were given, how different political figures manoeuvred. Such material circulates widely in overseas Chinese-language media and commentary, but has no verifiable source. This book does not present it as fact.

Another explanation focuses on data sovereignty. Ant’s payment gateway, transaction information, credit scoring and loan-matching capabilities gave a private platform the power to influence the allocation of financial resources. Regulators worried about systemic risk; the organs of power may also have worried that key data and financial infrastructure were slipping out of state control. The former can be checked against policy documents and rectification measures; the latter belongs to analysis of the political system and its policy incentives. Both may be true at once. One should not erase real financial risk in order to emphasise political struggle; nor should the existence of real financial risk be used to deny the decisive influence of political power over the boundaries of business.

In China, inside stories find a particularly ready market not only because readers love a good story, but because public disclosure and independent investigation are so often inadequate. The business interests of political families, the identities of beneficial owners and the internal deliberations behind major regulatory decisions are, for the most part, hard to verify through institutional channels. A responsible author need not endorse power’s silence, nor stamp rumour with the seal of fact. The most powerful way to write is to let readers see, side by side, the published documents, the leads from media investigations, the accounts of informed sources, and the questions that remain unanswered.

Ma’s real predicament was that he was doing two contradictory things at once.

First, he maintained close relationships with forces of every kind, and treated those relationships as a resource for the company’s growth. His international prestige, his dealings with heads of state, his banquet at Davos – in the domestic narrative these were at once the success of an entrepreneur and a display of resources.

Second, he repeatedly professed a stance of “keeping politics at a distance”. He said publicly that Alibaba would “fall in love with governments, but never marry them”, and some reports say he declared that Alibaba would not do business with the government.

The coexistence of these two things in one man’s words and deeds was bound to produce contradictions. When a person stresses in public that he stands outside the system while maintaining close ties with its various parts, his true position becomes very hard to pin down. And in a system where order matters a great deal, being “hard to pin down” is itself a problem.

This may be a challenge common to Ma’s whole generation of private entrepreneurs. They were required to walk between the logic of the market and another logic, and the rules of the two were not always compatible. Those who walked well could keep their balance for a long time; those who did not would one day suddenly find the ground beneath their feet had shifted.

But the subject has “no textbook” not only because it is complicated. In a market with a sound rule of law, the boundary between business and government is drawn by public laws and an independent judiciary: companies may lobby, but lobbying must be registered; officials may regulate, but regulation must follow procedure; and conflicts between the two can ultimately be settled in court. In an environment where power is highly concentrated and the rules can be rewritten quickly, entrepreneurs can judge the boundary only by guesswork and connections – and today’s protective umbrella can become tomorrow’s source of danger.

 

Chapter 38: The International Dimension: One Man’s Diplomacy

Of all the reasons for Ma’s fall, the least discussed and the most easily overlooked is the international dimension.

From the mid to the late 2010s, Ma had an international influence unmatched by any other Chinese entrepreneur. He had dealings with leaders of many countries, hosted a lavish dinner at Davos, and was described by the Western media as China’s unofficial business ambassador.

His meeting with Donald Trump in January 2017 was the high point of that influence.

But the meeting had two consequences.

The first was that it encroached on the space of official diplomacy. China was then planning an exchange of visits between the two heads of state, and a private businessman got in first to see the new American president and make a major pledge about American jobs. In the way the global media presented it, Ma became to some extent a symbolic figure in Sino-American relations.

The second was that the pledge itself could not be honoured. In September 2018, Ma abandoned it, citing trade friction between the two countries.

The turnaround was perfectly understandable in logic, and disastrous in appearance. A man once hailed by the world’s media as an economic bridge between China and the United States admitted, less than two years later, that the bridge did not exist.

The 2018 Davos dinner described in Chapter 18 was called by some media “Jack Ma’s private head-of-state diplomacy”. The phrase was both praise and danger – because “head-of-state diplomacy” is a function of the state, not of an individual.

In the history of Chinese entrepreneurs, it is very rare to find someone who combines enormous domestic business influence, a wide international network of political and business contacts, and a powerful desire for public expression. The combination produces a very particular chemistry: it creates the impression that this person is playing a role that goes beyond business.

Whether that impression was a misreading cannot be determined from public information. What can be said with certainty is that the influence a private individual accumulates on the international stage may, under certain conditions, be seen as a variable to be managed rather than an achievement to be encouraged.

The international dimension had another side, affecting not only Ma but every Chinese company listed in the United States and its investors. In December 2020, the US enacted the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, requiring US-listed companies to let American regulators inspect their audit work papers or face delisting. In July 2022, Alibaba was added to the SEC’s list of companies facing possible delisting; only after Chinese and American regulators reached an agreement on audit inspections later that year did the threat recede. For ordinary American investors holding Alibaba shares, their assets were exposed to the political risks of two countries at once: Beijing’s regulatory policy on one side, Washington’s China policy on the other.

 

Chapter 39: It May Not Have Been Any Single Straw

Having read the previous ten chapters, a question naturally arises: which of these was the real cause?

It is hard to give a single answer. Closer to the truth is to say that this was a collapse with many causes and one result – and that none of them, on its own, would have been enough to produce the same outcome.

Suppose there had been no speech, but the problems of leverage and data still existed. Ant might still have been required to adjust its business structure, and the listing might have been delayed; whether it would still have been halted, no counterfactual can tell us for certain.

Suppose there had been no problems of leverage or data, but the speech had still happened. Ant’s listing might have run into resistance; but given Ma’s prestige at the time and Ant’s commercial fundamentals, whether events would have turned out as they did remains uncertain.

Suppose there had been neither the speech nor the financial risk, but Alibaba had still been the super-platform with a 51 per cent market share, demanding that merchants “choose one of two”, and holding a full portfolio of media and financial assets. Then the antitrust investigation would still have happened; an investigation and a huge fine would still have been possible.

Suppose none of this had happened, but Ma had still been the man hosting banquets on the international stage, called a “private head of state” by the media at Davos, the man who told the government it “cannot manage the future with yesterday’s methods”. Then his position within the system would still have grown steadily more awkward.

And at the personal level there runs another thread, alongside all the other causes: he may have overestimated the power of individual will and eloquence in the face of the institutional environment – though this can only be offered as an analysis of his public words and deeds, not as a claim about his inner thoughts.

So the conclusion of this chapter is this: there is no single, clear, identifiable cause. This was a process of systemic adjustment, and Ma happened to be standing at its centre. But “systemic” does not mean “no one is responsible”: systems are made of institutions, institutions are designed by people – and people can change them.

It is not an easier answer to accept. But it is a more honest one.

 

Part Five: After the Exit

 

Chapter 40: Three Years of Wandering

From the spring of 2021 to the spring of 2023, Jack Ma’s whereabouts became a curious stream of information on the Chinese internet.

First he went to Europe. According to a number of media reports, in the autumn of 2021 he looked at greenhouses and agricultural technology in the Netherlands, and then went to Spain to study breeding techniques. The two destinations were not random: the Netherlands and Spain are among the places where Europe’s modern agricultural technology is most concentrated, and the Netherlands is a global centre of controlled-environment farming and the seed industry.

Then came Japan. In November 2022, the Financial Times reported that Ma had been living quietly in Tokyo for about six months. On 1 May 2023, the University of Tokyo announced that it had appointed Alibaba Group’s founder, Jack Ma, as a visiting professor at Tokyo College, for a term running from 1 May to 31 October 2023, with the contract renewable annually. The university said it hoped Ma would contribute in three ways: advising and supporting the university’s main research themes; carrying out joint research and projects with its researchers, particularly in sustainable agriculture and food production; and sharing, through lectures, his experience of entrepreneurship, business management and innovation. The same month, Tel Aviv University in Israel also announced his appointment as a visiting professor.

After that came Thailand and South-East Asia, where, according to reports, he visited a number of agricultural research institutes during this period.

These travels were later given two sharply different interpretations.

One was “retreat”. Ma had always said he loved agriculture and education, and taking up these interests again after retirement was only natural. Being appointed a university professor, inspecting greenhouses and breeding programmes, fitted his long-standing wish to “go back to school”. On this reading, this was his free time: at last he could do what he really wanted.

The other was “avoidance”. On this reading, in the climate of uncertainty that followed the Ant affair, staying abroad for a long time was a form of self-protection, and agricultural tours and visiting professorships made a long stay overseas look natural. The view is widely held, but no reliable source has described his own thinking.

Of these two readings, what can be verified is that he did appear in these places, he was appointed by these academic institutions, and he did make his agricultural tours. What cannot be verified is his motive.

And the most important fact about this period may be that it ran exactly parallel to events at home. While Ma was touring European farms, Alibaba was undergoing antitrust rectification; while he was living in Japan, Ant Group completed the restructuring of its voting rights in January 2023.

One man walked the world outside, while his empire at home was rewritten, line by line.

 

Chapter 41: March 2023: He’s Back

At the end of March 2023, the news that “Jack Ma has returned to China” shot to the top of the trending lists.

On 27 March 2023, Ma appeared at the Yungu School in Hangzhou, talking with teachers about education and artificial intelligence. The news was first published by the South China Morning Post and other outlets, and was then reported by the official media.

In the circumstances of the time, the appearance was widely read as a signal: the authorities wanted to use it to reassure private entrepreneurs. The annual session of the National People’s Congress had ended only weeks earlier, and the new government was trying to restore the private sector’s confidence.

The next day, 28 March 2023, Alibaba announced “the most important organisational change in our 24-year history”: its split into six business groups. The New York Times stressed the timing: the restructuring was announced the day after Ma, the founder, had returned to mainland China after more than a year away.

The Wall Street Journal put the combination more bluntly: the restructuring “effectively dismantles the business empire that the charismatic entrepreneur Jack Ma spent two decades building”, announced at the very moment the tycoon reappeared in China.

Taken together, the two events make a complete narrative: Jack Ma was back – and at the same time was being told his era was over.

In the months that followed, Ma began to be seen at home more often.

On 20 June 2023, Alibaba announced that Daniel Zhang would step down as chairman and chief executive, with Joe Tsai becoming chairman and Eddie Wu chief executive.

On 29 November 2024, he appeared at Zone C of Alibaba’s Xixi campus in Hangzhou. Someone posted on social media that Ma, coffee in hand and smiling, had posed for photographs with a number of Alibaba employees. He was casually dressed, in a white cap, an off-white jumper and black trainers. Just a week earlier, Alibaba had announced the creation of the Alibaba E-commerce Business Group, bringing together the Taobao and Tmall Group, the Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, and other e-commerce businesses such as 1688 and Xianyu.

On 8 December 2024 – the twentieth anniversary of Alipay and Ant Group – Ma appeared at the Ant campus that evening and gave a speech.

It was his most important public speech since 2020. “Today,” he said, “I have come not for Ant’s past twenty years, but for Ant’s next twenty.” Every era, he said, gives each generation different opportunities and challenges, but not everyone can seize them. Twenty years ago, when the internet was just arriving, his generation had been lucky enough to catch the opportunities of the internet age; and from today’s vantage point, the changes the AI era would bring over the next twenty years would exceed anyone’s imagination.

He also said something that would be widely quoted: “AI will change everything, but that doesn’t mean AI can decide everything. Technology matters, of course, but what will really decide who wins in the future is what we do today – something genuinely valuable and genuinely different – for the era that is about to arrive.”

At the end of his speech he thanked people for their attention: “Without wind and rain, how can you see a rainbow? I am grateful for the experiences and the tests of these past years. And I thank all the friends who, all these years, have believed in Ant, loved Ant, helped Ant and supported Ant. I am grateful, too, for everyone’s encouragement of Ant in these years – and even more grateful for everyone’s criticism of Ant.”

“Even more grateful for everyone’s criticism” – in an era that had begun with his own criticism, the line carried a double meaning.

Around the same time, Ant Group announced that its president, Han Xinyi, would formally take over as chief executive from 1 March 2025.

Looking back, Ma’s “exit” in fact comprised several changes of quite different kinds. Stepping down as chief executive in 2013 and as chairman in 2019 were voluntary handovers announced in advance; the 2023 adjustment of Ant’s voting rights was a change in corporate governance made under regulatory pressure; and his near-total public silence and long stays abroad after 2020 are hard to separate from the policy environment of the time. It would be inaccurate to attribute all these changes to political pressure – and equally inaccurate to describe them all as personal choice.

 

Chapter 42: 17 February 2025: The Front Row

On 17 February 2025, Xi Jinping attended a symposium on private enterprise in Beijing.

It was the first time in more than six years that the top leadership had convened a symposium focused on private business. The private-sector representatives who attended included Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei, Tencent’s founder Pony Ma (Ma Huateng), Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma, CATL’s founder Robin Zeng (Zeng Yuqun), Feihe’s founder Leng Youbin, Chint’s founder Nan Cunhui, Unitree Robotics’ founder Wang Xingxing, New Hope’s founder Liu Yonghao, BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu, Will Semiconductor’s founder Yu Renrong, Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun, Qi An Xin’s founder Qi Xiangdong, DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng, Meituan’s founder Wang Xing, iFlytek’s founder Liu Qingfeng, GalaxySpace’s founder Xu Ming and Cambricon’s founder Chen Tianshi, among others.

They came from fields including the internet, AI, new energy, robotics, agriculture and livestock, dairy, electronics and telecommunications, car manufacturing, semiconductors, consumer electronics, cybersecurity and commercial spaceflight. At the symposium, six representatives – Ren Zhengfei, Wang Chuanfu, Liu Yonghao, Yu Renrong, Wang Xingxing and Lei Jun – spoke in turn.

Of all these names, the one most discussed was Jack Ma.

It was the first time since Ant’s IPO had been halted that people had seen Ma at a public event with Xi Jinping present. He sat in the front row of the business representatives. When Xi entered, he rose and applauded like everyone else.

The symbolism of the scene was interpreted exhaustively. Some saw it as a sign that he had “passed the test” – a man once sidelined had returned to an occasion sanctioned by the system. Some overseas commentators noted that he had been seated not in the centre but towards the side, and read his Mao-style tunic (known in Chinese as a Zhongshan suit, after Sun Yat-sen) as a gesture of loyalty. These readings are only observers’ speculation.

However one reads it, the event conveyed a clear message: the tension that had lasted more than four years had, at least on the surface, eased.

The content of the symposium mattered just as much. Xi stressed that the Party and state’s basic principles and policies for developing the private economy had been written into the institutional system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and would be consistently upheld and implemented – they could not change, and would not change. In the new era and on the new journey, he said, the prospects for the private economy were broad and full of promise; now was the time for private enterprises and entrepreneurs to show what they could do.

He also uttered a line that was quoted again and again: “We hope that private enterprises and entrepreneurs will cherish the aspiration to serve the country, devote themselves to development, abide by the law and run their businesses well, and – as those who got rich first – help bring about common prosperity.”

On the background to the symposium, one fact cannot be ignored: in the years before it, private investment confidence in China had fallen markedly, the expectations of private businesses had turned generally conservative, and foreign capital’s allocation to Chinese assets was shrinking. Against that background, a meeting at the highest level that invited private entrepreneurs into the room sent a signal that far outweighed the content of the meeting itself.

Just over two months after the symposium, on 30 April 2025, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the Private Economy Promotion Law, which took effect on 20 May. It is China’s first basic law devoted specifically to the private economy. It states that private economic organisations enjoy legal status, market opportunities and development rights equal to those of other economic organisations, requires the property rights of private companies and their owners to be protected in accordance with the law, regulates law enforcement involving companies, and prohibits improper cross-regional enforcement and enforcement driven by the pursuit of revenue.

The law answers demands private entrepreneurs had made for years, and deserves recognition. But it also raises a deeper question: the text of a law can proclaim equality, but who guarantees that it will be applied in particular cases? In a system where the judiciary, too, operates under the leadership of the Party, and where courts do not review major political decisions, whether an entrepreneur can obtain redress in court when a policy or a regulatory action conflicts with the law’s promises remains an open question. The situation Ma faced in 2020 – a listing halted within two days of a regulatory interview – can hardly be said to have become impossible even now that the law is in force.

This may be the key to understanding why Ma was in the front row. He did not need to be there; but someone needed to be there. And of everyone in China, the one person who could stand for “how private enterprise was once treated, and how it came to be treated afterwards” was him.

Seen in that light, the Jack Ma of 17 February 2025 was no longer an entrepreneur but a symbol.

 

Chapter 43: Reconciliation With AI

After the symposium, Ma entered a new phase.

On 10 April 2025, he appeared at the Alibaba Cloud Valley campus to take part in Alibaba Cloud’s KO (kick-off) meeting for the new financial year. Photographs leaked from the event showed him in a T-shirt marking Alibaba Cloud’s fifteenth anniversary and wearing a new Alibaba staff badge bearing the name “Feng Qingyang” – the reclusive sword master from Jin Yong’s fiction, and Ma’s long-standing nickname inside Alibaba, where staff traditionally adopt wuxia-style aliases.

The Alibaba Cloud Valley campus, in Yungu town in Hangzhou’s Xihu district, represents a total investment of 13.8 billion yuan and has a total floor area of 450,000 square metres. Opened in 2022, it is a key base for Alibaba Cloud. Ma’s attendance and speech at Alibaba Cloud’s kick-off for the new financial year at this point were widely read as a sign of the high priority he gave to cloud and AI.

It was not an isolated appearance. According to media reports, since November 2024 Ma had frequently appeared at Alibaba campuses and important meetings; he had also turned up at the Alibaba Intelligent Information business group, home to the Quark app, to talk with staff. In March 2025, Alibaba designated the new version of Quark as the company’s flagship AI application, into which the latest results from its Tongyi family of models would be fed first, and created a dedicated chief executive post for Quark.

During this period, Alibaba’s strategic centre of gravity shifted markedly – from traditional e-commerce to cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

In the third quarter of the 2025 financial year, Alibaba Cloud’s revenue reached 31.742 billion yuan, up 13 per cent year on year, and adjusted EBITA rose 33 per cent to 3.138 billion; revenue from AI-related products recorded triple-digit growth for the sixth consecutive quarter.

In the 2026 financial year (to 31 March 2026), Alibaba Cloud’s revenue reached 158.1 billion yuan, up 34 per cent; in the final quarter of that year, revenue from AI-related products recorded triple-digit growth for the eleventh consecutive quarter.

Alibaba also announced plans to invest 380 billion yuan in AI and cloud computing over the next three years.

Taken together, these moves reveal a clear logic: Alibaba was searching for the thing it had lost – the power to define.

In e-commerce, it could no longer redefine the rules, because the rules had already been rewritten by Pinduoduo and Douyin. But in AI, everything was only just beginning. If Alibaba could claim a position in AI infrastructure, models and applications, it might once again become a company standing at the gateway to an industry.

And Ma’s role in this strategy was both symbolic and real.

Symbolic, because his appearance was itself a signal: the company was still organising its sense of meaning around its founder. Real, because according to some media analysis Ma took part in top-level discussions of Alibaba’s AI strategy and pushed the direction of integrating AI with e-commerce and local services – claims the company has not formally confirmed.

On 3 March 2026, according to several media outlets including 36Kr and Jiemian, Ma visited the Yungu School in Hangzhou with the core management of Alibaba and Ant Group – Joe Tsai, Eddie Wu, Jiang Fan, Eric Jing and Han Xinyi among them – to talk with teachers about how education must change in the age of artificial intelligence. According to the reports, he said that AI had arrived faster than expected, that its impact would exceed imagination, and that society was not yet ready; education, he argued, must move from being driven by knowledge to being driven by wisdom, with more emphasis on creativity, independent thinking and a sense of responsibility.

“Mend the roof while the sun shines” is a metaphor Ma has used for many years. Recalled in 2026, it carries a layer of meaning it did not carry in 2016.

 

Chapter 44: The Weather Has Changed – Is the Roof Mended?

In the years since Ma stepped back, how has Alibaba changed?

The financial reports tell a complicated story.

In the 2025 financial year (1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025), Alibaba’s revenue was 996.347 billion yuan, up 6 per cent year on year, slowing from 8.3 per cent the year before. Revenue from its China commerce retail business was 425.526 billion yuan, up 3 per cent; customer management revenue rose 6 per cent.

In the 2026 financial year (to 31 March 2026), Alibaba’s revenue reached 1,023.67 billion yuan, passing the trillion-yuan mark for the first time, up 3 per cent – or 11 per cent on a like-for-like basis, excluding the disposed Sun Art and Intime retail businesses. Growth came mainly from cloud computing and AI, with Alibaba Cloud’s revenue up 34 per cent. At the same time, heavy investment in AI and instant retail weighed on profits: net income fell 19 per cent that year.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s organisational structure continued to evolve. From 2025, Taobao and Tmall, Ele.me and Fliggy were combined into the Alibaba China E-commerce Group, while Cainiao, Amap and the Hujing Digital Media and Entertainment Group were reclassified into “All others”. At the business level, the historic six-way restructuring of 2023 had been re-consolidated.

The process of re-consolidation is itself revealing. As Chapter 26 described, the full spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group was abandoned in November 2023, and Cainiao’s IPO application was withdrawn in March 2024. The restructuring once seen as the dissolution of an empire turned out in the end to be just another internal reorganisation.

Why?

The most immediate reason was a change in the external environment. Tighter US export controls on advanced chips directly affected expectations of the cloud business’s valuation, sharply reducing the appeal of a spin-off and listing. And the valuations of Chinese stocks in the Hong Kong and US markets in 2023 and 2024 made independent fundraising poor value.

But there was a more fundamental reason. Alibaba’s core strength never lay in how fast each of six independent business groups could run, but in the synergy between them. Taobao’s traffic could feed Alipay; Alipay’s data could feed Sesame Credit; consumer behaviour could feed Alibaba Cloud’s demand forecasting; merchants’ logistics needs could feed Cainiao. That synergy was Alibaba’s real moat – and a split would weaken precisely that.

Seen this way, the restructuring’s journey from “dissolution” back to “consolidation” was not a failure but a correction of self-understanding. Alibaba finally recognised that it was not six companies. It was one.

 

Chapter 45: A Man Who No Longer Speaks

The biggest difference between the Jack Ma of 2025–26 and the Jack Ma of 2019 is not wealth, not titles, not who stands beside him.

The biggest difference is that he no longer speaks.

He still appears – at the Alibaba Cloud Valley campus, at the Ant campus, at the Xixi campus, at the Yungu School. But the way he appears has changed. He no longer gives long speeches, no longer tosses out quotable lines, no longer offers views on the macroeconomy or the financial system. What he talks about is AI, agriculture, education, his experience as a founder.

At Ant Group’s twentieth-anniversary event, his remarks were brief. For a man who once could stand and talk for two hours without losing the room, that is a very clear change.

And the cost of that change falls on precisely the part of him that matters most.

Jack Ma is not a quiet man. His entire career was built on expression: he persuaded his students, his partners, his investors, his employees, his users, his era. When he can no longer – or will no longer – publicly express his judgements about business, society and the future, his core function as a person is suspended.

One detail is worth remembering. When he appeared at Alibaba’s Xixi campus in November 2024, internet users described him: coffee in hand, smiling, posing for photographs with staff. The description stands in complete contrast to the Jack Ma, surrounded by security and press, of before 2020. And what makes it so poignant is not the size of his fortune but a change of state: from being needed to being permitted.

When you are needed, you are at the centre; when you are permitted, you are a bystander.

For a man used to the centre, being a bystander may be harder to bear than any material loss. And he chose to get through this time in the most low-key way possible – touring farms, accepting visiting professorships, appearing at the company’s internal events, standing in the front row to applaud when required.

In these years he has learned one thing: silence, too, is a form of expression.

 

Chapter 46: After Jack Ma, Will There Be Another?

After 2023, a question began doing the rounds on the Chinese internet: will there ever be another Jack Ma?

The question has its historical points of reference. In the four decades of reform and opening up, China’s private economy produced several generations of representative figures: the self-employed traders and township-enterprise founders of the 1980s; the industrialists of the 1990s; the property developers of the 2000s; the internet founders of the 2010s. Each generation had its own historical context, path to success and social reputation.

Ma belonged to the generation of the 2010s. His success required a particular set of conditions to hold at once: a huge population not yet digitised; a vacuum of infrastructure; a window of permissive regulation; public opinion enthusiastic about business success; and a business narrative that could connect with capital and international markets.

By the mid-2020s, most of those conditions had changed.

The infrastructure was no longer a vacuum. China’s penetration of mobile payments and e-commerce and its logistics efficiency had reached world-leading levels. A new company could hardly gain a monopoly by building new infrastructure, because the infrastructure had been built – and built very well.

The population dividend had plateaued. With user growth at its peak, growth now came not from new users but from taking users from competitors. That made competition inevitably fiercer, more neijuan – the Chinese term, literally “involution”, for exhausting, zero-sum competition – and less likely to produce positive innovation.

The regulatory framework, too, had largely been built. Antitrust, data security, personal information protection, algorithm governance, fintech regulation: new entrants no longer faced a blank sheet. But more rules do not mean predictable rules. The experience of 2020 and 2021 showed entrepreneurs that rules could change in a very short time, and that the vigour of enforcement depended on the political winds. For founders, that uncertainty is harder to deal with than the rules themselves.

Public attitudes had changed too. After a round of soul-searching about the platform economy, society was more wary of “super-companies” than it had been a decade earlier, and its narratives about wealth more complicated.

Under these conditions, could a new entrepreneur emerge with the scale of influence and symbolic meaning that Ma had?

The more likely answer is: there will be entrepreneurs who are just as successful, but not entrepreneurs of the same kind.

The list of attendees at the symposium of 17 February 2025 included a number of names unfamiliar to Ma’s generation. Wang Xingxing, born in 1990, is the founder of Unitree Robotics, the first company in the world to begin public retail sales of high-performance quadruped robots; his humanoid robots appeared on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala for the Year of the Snake – the state broadcaster’s Lunar New Year television spectacular, watched by hundreds of millions. Liang Wenfeng is the founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, whose AI model DeepSeek drew worldwide attention.

What these two companies have in common is that their technological barriers are higher, their growth depends more on research and development than on distribution channels, their path to internationalisation is more direct, and their way of engaging with policy is more cautious.

These are the traits of a new generation of entrepreneurs. They no longer need to build an entirely new infrastructure, as Ma did; what they need is to find their place in a field that already has rules, players and standards.

Another phenomenon is striking too: more and more Chinese founders look abroad from the very start. The cross-border fashion platform SHEIN is headquartered in Singapore; Pinduoduo’s overseas platform Temu operates outside China; and many start-ups choose to incorporate in Singapore, the United States or elsewhere. For them this is both a search for bigger markets and a way of spreading risk. Official statistics show that private fixed-asset investment in China fell slightly in both 2023 and 2024. The figures reflect many factors, including the property slump, and cannot simply be attributed to the regulation of private companies; but they show that private capital’s confidence did go through a trough.

The model of Ma’s generation – building a platform, aggregating traffic, expanding fast, forming an ecosystem – had become very hard to replicate by the mid-2020s. Because the platform positions were already occupied, and the price of occupying a platform had already been written into Alibaba’s story.

 

Chapter 47: What He Left Behind

If one were to take a dispassionate inventory of Ma’s business career, what he left behind falls roughly into four categories.

The first is infrastructure that genuinely changed the way Chinese people live.

This is no exaggeration. Taobao and Tmall built an online retail system covering the whole country; Alipay made mobile payment part of everyday life in China’s cities and countryside; Cainiao built an extensive logistics network; credit systems and rating mechanisms made trade between strangers routine. These changes happened in a very short time, and on a scale rare anywhere in the world.

One figure illustrates the scale: in the twelve months to June 2020, domestic payments through Alipay alone reached 118 trillion yuan. In the 2022 financial year, Alibaba’s global consumer businesses served about 1.31 billion annual active consumers over twelve months and generated gross merchandise volume of 8.317 trillion yuan.

The second is his impact on small and medium-sized businesses.

Alibaba began with B2B, serving China’s small and medium-sized exporters. In 1999, those businesses’ greatest difficulties were that they could not find overseas buyers, did not understand international markets and had no way of putting themselves forward. What Alibaba did was put them somewhere they could be found.

The impact can be described concretely. In the 2023 financial year, the Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group reached more than 47 million active small-business buyers worldwide; more than 1.7 million Taobao shops had been trading continuously for over ten years; and that year Taobao gained 5.12 million new merchants, the great majority of them small businesses, including 1.3 million born after 2000.

There is no doubt that “to make it easy to do business anywhere” was discounted in the execution – platform commissions, traffic costs and merchants’ weak bargaining power were all real costs. But the problem the mission described was a real one.

The third is the technological infrastructure underpinning the digital economy.

According to Alibaba, Alibaba Cloud serves more than four million customers worldwide, including 80 per cent of China’s technology-innovation companies and 60 per cent of the national “little giant” firms; by 31 March 2023 it was providing cloud computing services in twenty-eight regions around the world. The growth of these companies is part of China’s digital economy, and many of them depend, to varying degrees, on the infrastructure Alibaba Cloud provides.

The fourth is something that cannot be directly replicated, but that has influenced countless people.

A slight man with a wildly lopsided school record, who took the gaokao three times and was turned down for more than thirty jobs, ended up building a company that serves a billion people. The place this story occupies in China’s social psychology goes far beyond that of a business case. It was once the grounds on which countless young people believed “I can do it too”.

The story was later found to be incomplete – it left out the conditions of the era, the window of policy, the luck of capital, and all those who failed under the same logic of effort. But even with those discounts, the story still has its value.

A person can be written off, can score one mark in maths, can fail thirty interviews in a row – and still go on to achieve something great. That possibility exists. It is not a guarantee, but it is a real possibility.

 

Chapter 48: The Silent Library

One detail of Ma’s later years deserves to be recorded.

In these years he took up teaching posts at several universities. In April 2023, the University of Hong Kong appointed him an honorary professor for three years, in management and business strategy. The Jack Ma Foundation confirmed at the time that it had received HKU’s invitation and said the work fitted closely with Ma’s experience and ideas as an entrepreneur. The foundation added: Ma had received four years of teacher training and taught at university for six years; he had deep feelings for campus life and a passion for education, and had always enjoyed sharing his entrepreneurial experience with young people; returning to campus after thirty years, he would join teachers and students in continuing his thinking and research on education, business innovation and related fields.

In May 2023, the University of Tokyo appointed him a visiting professor at Tokyo College.

These appointments were small items in the news. But they form an important footnote to Ma’s later life: he had returned to the place where he was a teacher.

When he graduated in 1988, the profession he most disliked was teaching. In his mind, he said, becoming a teacher – especially for a young man – showed a lack of ambition. It was fate that put him into a teachers college on his third attempt at the gaokao; he became a trainee teacher against his own wishes.

Thirty years after graduating, standing at the lectern at Hangzhou Normal University’s 110th anniversary celebrations, he said: “Four years at teachers college and six years as a teacher – those ten years made me who I am today. I will always remember that I trained as a teacher. Being able to become a teacher has been the greatest honour of my life.”

This was no empty courtesy. Of all his identities – Alibaba’s founder, China’s richest man, Asia’s richest man, Daddy Ma, capitalist, pioneer of reform – only “Teacher Ma” has been in use from 1988 to the present day, never questioned and never withdrawn.

He could lose anything else in any storm. But not that.

And among all his public utterances, there is one that almost nobody took seriously in the 2010s and that seems uncannily accurate in the 2020s. The line circulates widely online, though its original source has yet to be verified: “Chinese entrepreneurs really don’t come to a good end.” He is also said to have added: “I, Jack Ma, already know how things will end for me, so I look at all this optimistically. If you know the ending will be bleak and you still go ahead, that’s what makes you a master.”

It is hard to say whether this was foresight, or a consolation attributed to him after the event. But the remark deserves recording because it reveals a very particular frame of mind: a person who knows in advance that things may not end well for him, and chooses to go ahead anyway.

This may be the last key to the whole story. Ma is not a man incapable of reflection. He has read a good deal of history and seen a good deal of human affairs; he may have understood better than many what someone in his position in this country might eventually face. And yet he did all those things: separated Alipay from Alibaba, founded Hupan University, hosted banquets on the world stage, said what he said at the lectern on the Bund.

He was not a man unaware of the risks. He was a man who chose to take them.

And after all those choices, the last thing he did was to go back to school – to be a teacher who no longer speaks.

 

Chapter 49: Jack Ma and Traditional Wisdom: Knowing When to Advance, but Can He Let Go?

1. A Man Who Foresaw the Ending

The previous chapter recalled a line attributed to Ma: “Chinese entrepreneurs really don’t come to a good end.” After Ant Group’s listing was abruptly suspended in 2020, and Ma gradually withdrew from public view, the remark came to sound almost like a prophecy.

Ma is no prophet. He simply grasped earlier than many that in China an entrepreneur can create astonishing wealth and still not be able to decide, over the long run, what becomes of it. He had lived through failed ventures, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, funding crises and regulatory disputes, and had seen at close quarters the complicated relationship between entrepreneurs and political power. He was also, for many years, a reader of the Daodejing, a practitioner of tai chi and an avid fan of Jin Yong’s martial-arts novels.

Modern business teaches people how to compete, expand and grow – how to turn a small firm into a commercial empire. Chinese tradition keeps reminding them of something else: that things pushed to their extreme turn into their opposite, that what flourishes must decline, and that one should withdraw once the work is done. The Daodejing – the short classic attributed to Laozi, some two and a half thousand years old and the founding text of Daoist thought – says in its ninth chapter: “A hall full of gold and jade cannot be guarded. Wealth and rank joined with arrogance bring their own ruin. To withdraw when the work is done and one’s name is made – that is the way of heaven.”

Written on an office wall, such words are merely a motto. But can someone who has really built a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with hundreds of millions of users and countless admirers and followers around him, still grasp what they mean? Ma’s life offers a rare chance to watch that question play out.

One point should be made clear at the outset. Ma loves the Daodejing, practises tai chi, is devoted to Jin Yong’s fiction and once tried a period of silence. None of this makes him a spiritual practitioner in any religious sense. Reading the classics is a philosophical interest; tai chi is physical exercise and a cultural pastime; the silence was a brief experiment. This chapter is about how these strands of traditional wisdom and the life of a modern entrepreneur illuminate one another – not about claiming for him any faith or spiritual vocation.

He talked about retirement earlier than most entrepreneurs, yet found it harder than most to leave the stage he had built. He practised tai chi and understood how softness can overcome hardness, yet at the height of his career he collided head-on with the power of the regulators. He admired Feng Qingyang, the swordsman in Jin Yong’s fiction who withdrew from the jianghu – the world of rival martial clans – yet he built with his own hands a vast and complicated commercial jianghu of his own.

He had once been a teacher, and later countless young people affectionately called him “Daddy Ma”. But when the consumer-credit services of Alibaba’s ecosystem entered young people’s daily lives, the former teacher faced a sharper question: was making it easy for the young to borrow and spend really helping them, or cultivating material desires they would struggle to escape?

These contradictions say more than how many classics he has read, or how many years he has practised tai chi, about what traditional wisdom left in him – and where it failed to take root.

2. That Copy of the Daodejing

Chen Wei, who worked as Ma’s assistant, has written that Ma liked to carry books with him, and that the Daodejing was one he read for years. According to Chen, Ma preferred editions without elaborate commentary, wanting to face Laozi’s words directly rather than let someone else’s interpretation stand in for his own understanding. Ma once even said that, at moments of excitement, it felt not as if he were reading Laozi but as if Laozi were reading his heart. These recollections have not yet all been checked against their original sources.

That way of reading fits Ma’s character. He is not a scholar of philosophy, and has no intention of parsing a classic two thousand years old word by word. What he cares about is whether these ancient ideas can help him solve today’s problems. He has linked Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism to leadership, organisation and the human heart respectively. The scheme may not satisfy strict academic categories, but it reflects his pragmatism. He wanted Chinese companies not merely to imitate American management science or Japanese corporate systems, but to find spiritual roots in their own cultural tradition.

And what most attracts the successful in the Daodejing is probably the idea of withdrawing once the work is done. Modern entrepreneurs generally understand success as continued growth. This year a billion; next year, ten billion. Enter one market, then another. Laozi reminds us that having completed something, one need not occupy it for ever.

In 2013, Ma stepped down as Alibaba’s chief executive. The company was still growing fast; he handed day-to-day management to Jonathan Lu and stayed on as chairman. In 2018 he announced he would step down as chairman a year later. On 10 September 2019, Alibaba’s twentieth anniversary, he formally handed over to Daniel Zhang.

On the surface, this had something of the spirit of withdrawing once the work is done. But Ma never truly left Alibaba. He remained its founder, a significant shareholder and the symbol of its culture. Even without the top executive post, his every move still shaped how the market judged the company.

It recalls the predicament of many founding figures in China’s imperial history. While a dynasty is being won, everyone needs a strong leader. Once the realm is settled, the personal prestige that once united people can get in the way of institutions functioning normally. Companies face something similar. If the founder is always the final arbiter, a successor can never be truly independent; if the founder remains the company’s spiritual centre, every major change can be read as his personal will.

Leaving a post is not difficult. What is truly difficult is making the organisation you created stop revolving around you.

3. Three Days Without Speaking: From Silence to Guarding the Tongue

Ma is a man whose destiny was changed by words. He was once an English teacher. As a founder, he found partners through speeches, inspired employees with stories and, with his infectious eloquence, persuaded investors to believe in an internet dream that seemed impossible. For him, speaking was not just a means of communication but a way of moving the world.

So what is the hardest thing for so gifted a speaker? Perhaps, precisely, not speaking.

According to Chen Wei, in 2008 Ma went to Jinyun Mountain near Chongqing and tried three consecutive days of silence. He attended no business meetings in the usual sense, did not keep offering opinions as he normally would, and was in no hurry to answer other people’s questions. He walked, read and practised calligraphy, stepping out for a while from the familiar rhythm of work. The exact dates, place and details of this episode cannot yet all be verified.

In Chinese tradition, people often speak of xiu kou – literally “cultivating the mouth”: guarding one’s tongue, being careful with words. But guarding the tongue is not just keeping one’s mouth shut. Three days without speaking does not mean a person has learned it. True restraint of speech also means asking why one wants to say something. To help others, or to prove one’s own cleverness? Because something genuinely needs explaining, or because one cannot bear others rejecting one’s view? To uphold a principle, or out of momentary excitement and an unwillingness to give ground?

Some things, though true, are not fit to be said on every occasion or in every way. Some things, however satisfying to say, may bring consequences for oneself and others that cannot be undone. An old Chinese saying has it that “illness enters through the mouth, and disaster comes out of it.” That applies to everyone, and above all to an entrepreneur of enormous influence.

An ordinary person complaining about the banks over dinner is merely grumbling. An entrepreneur at the head of a giant fintech platform publicly criticising the regulatory system at a major financial forum is another matter entirely.

Ma once tried three days of silence. Years later, a speech of twenty-odd minutes at the Bund Summit in Shanghai made him the focus of the whole nation. Had he been able to stay quiet for a few more minutes, and think harder about his position, his interests and his manner of expression, might history have been different? There is no certain answer, but the question lends those three days of silence a particular resonance.

With practice, a person can keep quiet for a while. But when he truly believes he has something he must say, and the whole world is listening, can he still restrain himself? That is the harder discipline.

4. Tai Chi: When to Advance, When to Withdraw

Ma’s relationship with tai chi has lasted many years. He studied Yang-style tai chi, and also travelled to Chenjiagou in Henan province, the home of Chen-style tai chi. The details of his reported formal apprenticeship in 2009 to Wang Xi’an, a master of the Chen style, still need to be checked against original sources. Thereafter, tai chi was not only his personal hobby but gradually entered Alibaba’s corporate culture. The company organised tai chi classes for staff, and Ma would practise between work sessions as a way of clearing his mind.

What he truly valued was not how many opponents he could defeat but the view of change that tai chi embodies. Tai chi is about yin and yang, the empty and the full, the hard and the soft, advancing and withdrawing. When an opponent’s force is great, one need not meet it head-on; when force has reached its peak, one need not keep adding to it. A movement that looks like retreat may be a search for a new direction.

Ma has liked to explain his understanding through three words: ding, sui and she. Ding is knowing what one truly wants; sui is adjusting one’s methods to changing circumstances while holding one’s direction; she is being able to let go of what is no longer needed. The exact source of this formulation still needs to be verified, but it is close to the way Ma has spoken publicly about tai chi and management.

The three words call to mind Taobao’s contest with eBay. When Taobao entered the Chinese market in 2003, eBay already had an international brand, capital and mature e-commerce experience. Had Taobao competed entirely on its rival’s familiar terms, it might not have won. Ma chose another path. Taobao attracted sellers with free service, stressed instant communication between buyers and sellers, and used Alipay’s escrow to solve the problem of trust between strangers.

It did not simply copy eBay; it changed the way the competition was fought. The strategy bears some resemblance to the way tai chi borrows and redirects an opponent’s force. Of course, Taobao’s success also owed much to its understanding of the local market, its team’s execution, its capital and its rival’s own decisions; it cannot be credited directly to Ma’s tai chi. But tai chi gave him a language for understanding commercial competition.

The true master is not necessarily the strongest. Sometimes it is the one who can change the direction in which force is travelling. But tai chi rests on a precondition that is easily overlooked: you must sense your opponent’s force accurately. Misjudge its source and direction, and a movement meant to borrow strength can turn into a head-on collision.

The Bund Summit of 2020 was exactly such a turning point in Ma’s life.

5. From “Daddy Ma” to Consumer Credit: What Should a Teacher Teach the Young?

Ma was once a teacher. In Alibaba’s most glorious years, many young people affectionately called him “Daddy Ma”. The name carried closeness and admiration, and a special kind of expectation: the young hoped he would be not only a successful businessman but a teacher who could offer guidance for life.

Alibaba’s ecosystem did bring young people real convenience. Taobao let people buy goods that had once been hard to find; Alipay made paying online simple. Ant Group’s financing services for small businesses helped some self-employed traders and small firms meet funding needs that traditional banks would not. These contributions should not be erased by the controversies that followed.

But the same ecosystem had another side. Huabei let consumers buy now and pay later; Jiebei and other credit services made it easier for eligible users to borrow cash. Business lending and personal consumer credit are not the same thing. The first may help merchants manage cash flow, buy stock and expand; the second may be used to satisfy immediate personal consumption.

That is where the problem lies. Financial technology made borrowing ever easier, but it could not automatically make borrowers more mature.

Imagine a young person who has just started work, earning 6,000 yuan a month. After rent, transport and basic living costs, not much is left. One day he sees a new phone on his screen, priced at 8,000 yuan. If he had to find 8,000 yuan in cash at once, he might hesitate. But the page tells him he can pay in instalments – just a small amount each month. So 8,000 yuan no longer feels like 8,000 yuan; it becomes a monthly figure that seems easy to manage.

Next he takes a liking to a pair of trainers, a jacket, or a trip he could not otherwise afford. Each purchase on its own seems small. But when several instalment plans pile up, he discovers that his income for months ahead has already been spoken for. If he suddenly loses his job, falls ill or his family needs money, he may find himself in trouble.

This young man is a hypothetical illustration of the risks of consumer credit, not a real case. Nor is it to say that all instalment buying is wrong, still less that everyone who uses Huabei lacks self-control. Sensible short-term credit can genuinely help consumers smooth their cash flow. But for young people with little financial experience, unstable incomes and a susceptibility to advertising and social comparison, convenient borrowing tools can also amplify impulsive spending.

In the past, wanting something usually meant saving for it first. Saving was itself a kind of reflection. Do I really need this? What am I willing to give up for it? Will I still like it this much in three months? Technology has shortened the distance between the birth of a desire and the completion of a purchase – and that distance may be exactly the space in which a young person learns restraint.

An old Chinese saying advises: “Carry an umbrella on a sunny day; take provisions even when you are full.” When the weather is fine, think of rain; when you have eaten today, remember you may have nothing tomorrow. It is a very simple kind of risk management. It involves no complex financial models, yet it understands a household’s most basic principle of safety: do not spend all of tomorrow’s income on today’s desires.

If Ma really saw himself as a teacher, then besides teaching young people how to start businesses and pursue their dreams, should he not also have taught them how to save, how to control their desires, and how to prepare before hard times arrive? The question deserves to be asked.

It is particularly worth noting that the commercial interests of a consumer-credit platform and the long-term financial health of its users are not always fully aligned. When a platform’s income is tied to transaction volumes, borrowing and the growth of related services, a company may face a temptation to encourage users to spend more and borrow more. But a truly responsible financial provider should ask not only whether users want to borrow, but whether they can repay, and whether the loan serves their long-term interests.

This is where business ethics meets the traditional idea of self-cultivation. The Daodejing says: “Know contentment and you will suffer no disgrace; know when to stop and you will come to no harm.” Knowing what is enough spares one the humiliation that comes from greed; knowing when to stop keeps one out of danger.

If a young person has fallen into debt through spending ahead of his income, and keeps seeing new product recommendations and credit limits pop up on his phone, what he needs may not be faster approval but someone to remind him: first save three months’ living costs; do not buy what you cannot afford for the sake of vanity; do not treat the coming months’ income as wealth you already have.

Many people once called Ma “Daddy Ma” because he made young people believe that ordinary people, too, had a chance to change their fate. But if a commercial platform, in effect, keeps stimulating excessive consumption without giving users adequate warnings and protection, the public may turn around and see the former “Daddy Ma” as a capitalist profiting from the young – even reaching for words as harsh as “bloodsucker” to express their anger. Such labels cannot substitute for an examination of a platform’s specific conduct, nor can they prove that Ma personally intended to push young people into debt.

What people expect of a teacher is not the same as the standard by which they judge a financier. A teacher wants students to become independent; a commercial platform may want users to keep using its services. A teacher wants the young to learn restraint; a commercial platform has an incentive to keep generating new desires to buy. When these two roles are concentrated in one entrepreneur, contradiction follows.

Ma loves the chivalric spirit of Jin Yong’s heroes. But true chivalry lies not only in helping the weak to opportunity; it also lies in refusing to profit from their desires and vulnerabilities. Sometimes what a young person needs most is not someone to lend him more money, but someone to teach him when to keep his money in his pocket.

6. The West Lake Sword Debate and Gong Shou Dao: An Entrepreneur’s Martial-Arts Dream

Ma does not only love tai chi; he is captivated by Jin Yong’s martial-arts fiction. Jin Yong’s novels helped to shape the way he understood organisations, talent, competition and personal destiny.

In 2000, Ma met Jin Yong. On 10 September that year, the first “West Lake Sword Debate” was held in Hangzhou. Jin Yong attended as a guest, alongside internet entrepreneurs including Wang Zhidong, Ding Lei, Zhang Chaoyang, Wang Juntao and Ma himself. Chinese internet business was just taking off; many ordinary people had little idea what portal websites, e-commerce or internet business models were. But almost anyone familiar with Chinese popular culture knew Jin Yong’s jianghu.

So an internet forum took on the colours of a great martial-arts tournament. Entrepreneurs became the heads of rival schools; business competition became a duel on Mount Hua. An abstract new economy suddenly acquired a story framework familiar to Chinese readers.

Ma understood the power of this kind of cultural communication. He was not simply inviting Jin Yong to advertise Alibaba; he was borrowing Jin Yong’s world to create an easily shared narrative language for the Chinese internet. Alibaba employees adopted martial-arts nicknames; the company’s values were once called the “Nine Swords of Dugu”, after an invincible sword technique in Jin Yong’s fiction, and later became the “Six Vein Spirit Sword”. Ma’s own nickname was Feng Qingyang.

In The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, Feng Qingyang is a master of the Mount Hua school. His skill is supreme, yet he keeps far from the politics of the sects. He passes the Nine Swords of Dugu to the young hero Linghu Chong, teaching him not to memorise moves but to understand the art so deeply that he is freed from set forms altogether. Ma liked this image. He hoped to be not only a successful entrepreneur but a teacher who could nurture talent.

In 2017, he turned his long-held martial-arts dream into a short film, Gong Shou Dao (roughly, “The Way of Attack and Defence”). Many people who have never seen it know only that Ma traded blows with martial-arts stars such as Jet Li, Donnie Yen and Wu Jing. In fact it is a martial-arts short with a distinctly comic flavour.

The story opens with an unremarkable-looking middle-aged man. Ma plays “Master Ma”, plainly dressed, walking alone down a street. He happens to see a sign reading “Mount Hua School” and, as if suddenly stepping into the martial world he knows so well, goes in to challenge the masters.

What follows is a relentless series of contests. Masters of different styles appear one after another – one skilled with fists, one relying on strength, one lightning-fast, one supremely agile. Master Ma answers them all with tai chi. When they attack fiercely, he dissolves hardness with softness; when they are strong, he turns with their momentum; when they strike fast, he finds the gaps.

The film lets Master Ma gain the upper hand again and again, as if to prove that tai chi can absorb and neutralise the force of every martial style. To anyone familiar with kung fu films, the scenes are lively and a little absurd. The real Ma could of course not defeat these professional martial artists with his tai chi alone, and the film does not truly ask its audience to believe it. It is more like an entrepreneur using cinema to act out the martial world of his imagination.

The most interesting part is the ending. Master Ma thinks he has entered the Mount Hua School of martial legend, but the camera finally reveals that the sign actually reads “Mount Hua Police Station”: in Chinese, the words for “school” and “police station” share a character, and the joke turns on it. The whole grand dream of mastery rests on a laughable misunderstanding. The martial world is suddenly returned to modern society; masters, schools and the jianghu run up against the real-world police.

The ending is telling. In the imagined world, Master Ma can beat every master with tai chi. But in the real world, no one is exempt from law and institutions because of martial prowess. For Ma, it reads almost like a metaphor of his fate, written without his knowing.

In business he had repeatedly defeated powerful rivals. Taobao took on eBay, Alibaba changed traditional retail, Alipay carried Chinese society into the age of mobile payment. He grew used to believing that, with the right method, old rules could be changed. After 2020, he discovered that some rules are not for entrepreneurs to decide.

Master Ma in the film finally discovers that he has walked into a police station. The real Ma came to see afresh, in the face of financial regulation, the limits of commercial power.

Gong Shou Dao, then, is more than the entertainment of a successful entrepreneur. It reveals Ma’s deepest wish: to be a knight-errant, a teacher, a carrier of culture – someone who could bring China’s ancient wisdom into modern society. But it also raises a question. When a person has grown used to being the hero of his own story, can he accept that in the real world he is not always the one who decides how it ends?

7. The Bund Summit: What Did Those Twenty Minutes Change?

On 24 October 2020, at the Bund Summit in Shanghai, Ma took the stage. Ant Group was preparing to list, and the market widely expected it to be one of the largest initial public offerings in the world. Yet in his speech Ma sharply criticised the traditional financial system. Today’s banks, he said, still had a “pawnshop mentality”; he stressed the importance of financial innovation and criticised regulatory thinking that he believed could hold back future development.

The remarks quickly caused controversy. Days later, regulators summoned Ma and other senior figures. On 3 November, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced that Ant Group’s STAR Market listing was suspended, and Ant’s Hong Kong listing was suspended too. A listing awaited with enormous anticipation came to a sudden halt.

People naturally linked the two events. A story spread: Ma had lost his financial empire for speaking twenty minutes of truth. But that is not the whole history. Ant’s consumer-credit business, its capital requirements, its joint-lending model and its financial risks had already drawn regulators’ attention. The speech and the suspension were closely linked in time, but that does not make those twenty minutes the sole cause.

There is, however, a further question worth asking. Regulators being aware of risks is one thing; regulators being able to halt a listing before it happens is another.

The speech was given on 24 October; Ant was due to list on 5 November – just twelve days later. By then Ant had been through a long listing process and had reached the final stage. Even if regulators had concerns about its business model, that did not mean those concerns could be turned into a decision to halt the listing in little more than ten days.

China’s vast bureaucracy often requires layer upon layer of reporting, coordination between departments and political decision-making. Between a problem being identified and its being swiftly dealt with there can be a long distance. Ma’s Bund speech suddenly changed the nature of the matter.

That day, Vice-President Wang Qishan also addressed the summit, by pre-recorded video, stressing the prevention of financial risk and the strengthening of regulation. Ma’s speech emphasised financial innovation and criticised traditional regulatory thinking. The same summit displayed two quite different views of financial governance.

According to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter in November 2020, the authorities moved swiftly after the speech: the General Office of the State Council compiled a report on public reaction to it and submitted it to senior leaders, including Xi Jinping. The Wall Street Journal later reported, citing officials with knowledge of the matter, that Xi personally decided to halt Ant’s listing. These reports rest on anonymous sources and should still be distinguished from published regulatory documents.

They do not prove that Xi had been entirely unaware of Ant’s financial risks beforehand, nor that Wang Qishan himself reported the matter to Xi. But they raise a question worth studying: without the Bund speech, would the potential political and financial implications of Ant’s listing have reached the top leadership so swiftly before the planned listing date?

What if Ma had not given that speech?

Imagine another scene. Ma sits in the hall and listens to the other speakers. When his turn comes, he does not publicly criticise the regulators, nor use language likely to provoke conflict. He simply expresses gratitude for the opportunities of fintech, talks about the difficulties small businesses face in raising finance, and voices his hope of continuing to work with the regulators. The speech ends, the applause rises, and Ant carries on preparing to list.

Would the regulators still have halted the listing? Possibly – regulatory problems do not vanish because of one speech. But another outcome was also possible: the listing goes ahead as planned, and some of the problems are later resolved through rectification, fresh capital and changes to the business.

Once a listing is complete, a huge market valuation, the interests of countless investors and complex shareholding relationships all become accomplished facts. Regulators can still intervene, but the market consequences and political costs they face may be different. It is what a Chinese folk saying calls “the raw rice already cooked”.

Seen this way, Ma’s speech may have changed not only the speed of regulatory action but the historical course of a major capital transaction. And what is most striking is that Ma had once deliberately practised three days of silence. A man who understood the Daodejing’s teaching on knowing when to stop, and who knew tai chi’s art of advance and retreat, chose the most combative form of expression just twelve days before another peak in his career.

Had he truly been able to guard his tongue – to hold back his urge to speak for a while – might history have taken another road? Perhaps he did not need to win a debate about financial innovation that day at all. He only needed to wait twelve more days.

But history did not give him those twelve days.

Such reflection, however, belongs to the plane of traditional culture. To say that Ma failed to guard his tongue is to discuss how a person treats his own words; it does not lead to another conclusion – that everything that befell him afterwards was his own doing. A speech can be a misstep. But the weight of what followed – a company already approved for listing halted within two days, an entrepreneur silenced for years – depended on how power was exercised, not on the speaker’s self-discipline. To lay all the blame on “disaster comes out of the mouth” would obscure the question that most deserves asking: why, in such a system, can a few words carry so heavy a price?

A Misstep, a Contest of Power – or the Will of Heaven?

Yet the Chinese often look at history from another angle as well: tianyi, the will of heaven. The ancients believed that however carefully people plan, they cannot necessarily determine the outcome. “Man proposes, heaven disposes,” as the saying goes – in Chinese, mou shi zai ren, cheng shi zai tian.

Ant had prepared for years to list; the capital, legal, financial and market work had reached its final stage. Who could have foreseen that, just twelve days before the listing, Ma would give that hugely controversial speech in Shanghai? Who could have foreseen that, with only two days to go, the entire listing would suddenly be suspended?

Had Ma not given the speech, might Ant have listed smoothly? And had it done so, into whose hands would the vast shareholding gains have flowed?

Chapter 37 noted that The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous officials, reported that Boyu Capital – a fund linked to Jiang Zemin’s grandson – and other institutions held indirect stakes in Ant, and that the top leadership was reluctant to see the listing deliver enormous gains to “princelings”, the privileged offspring of senior Party families. Such reports rest on anonymous sources, and the related disclosed stakes are relatively small; it cannot currently be shown that factional interests were the decisive reason for halting the listing.

Likewise, a company’s valuation at listing cannot be equated directly with cash that any faction could command. But from the perspective of the mutual checks between power and capital, the sudden halt to Ant’s listing did change the capital gains and the configuration of interests that might otherwise have been realised.

Does this mean that a capital feast that might have benefited certain older networks of power was, in the end, never held? Does it also mean that the top leadership used the occasion to reassert control over a giant fintech platform? These questions merit further investigation by historians.

And yet, seen from yet another angle – that of heaven’s will in Chinese tradition – the matter takes on a different meaning.

Perhaps all this was not simply Ma’s misstep. Perhaps, precisely when every party believed the listing was in the bag, a man’s temperament, a public speech and a swiftly taken political decision together changed what had seemed a settled outcome.

People can plan for wealth, design shareholdings and schedule a listing date, but they cannot necessarily schedule their fate. Ma had practised three days of silence, read the Daodejing and knew tai chi’s principles of advance and retreat. Yet at the very moment when caution was most needed, he did not choose silence.

In terms of practical politics, this may be a chain of explicable events. Through the eyes of traditional culture, one may also offer another reading: was it heaven’s will that Ant should not list at that moment?

To ask this is not to say that the side which later held greater power must therefore accord with heaven’s will, still less to equate any political figure’s victory with the expression of heaven’s will. In traditional Chinese thought, the will of heaven was never a guarantee that any emperor or family would hold power for ever. Dynasties rise and fall, power changes hands, and the warning that what flourishes must decline applies to every ruler.

In traditional thought, too, the will of heaven is ultimately expressed through the hearts of the people. If there is such a thing as heaven’s will, its concern is not which side wins a struggle for power, but whether power is used justly and whether ordinary people are treated fairly.

This is not a conclusion that can be proved by financial statements or regulatory notices; it is a historical question of a kind peculiar to Chinese tradition. The ancients said: “Man’s calculations are no match for heaven’s.” A person may have immense wealth, a vast business empire and a carefully arranged listing, and still not be able to decide the final outcome.

Ma wanted to use the wisdom of tai chi to master advance and retreat, yet at the most critical moment he lost control of the situation. Was it his temperament, the force of politics, or what the Chinese call the will of heaven? Readers may reach different answers. But one thing deserves reflection: the closer a person comes to the peak of his life, the more he needs to remember that he is not the final master of the world.

8. Why Did He Worry So Early About Entrepreneurs’ Fate?

Why did Ma worry so early about the fate of Chinese entrepreneurs? The answer need not be sought in some mysterious gift of foresight. Chinese history itself is full of stories that should make entrepreneurs wary.

In traditional society, merchants could accumulate wealth without enjoying political standing to match it. A family could trade for generations and lose everything to war, a change of policy or a transfer of power. Entrepreneurs in modern China, too, have lived through violent upheavals. Ma knew this history, and had felt for himself the complex relationship between business and power.

The Alipay ownership dispute of 2011 mattered to him especially. When a company is small, its founder can act quickly on his own judgement. But once it has grown into a platform involving domestic and foreign shareholders, regulators and hundreds of millions of users, every major decision can trigger complex conflicts of interest. Wealth grows and influence widens, but the things one is free to decide do not necessarily increase with them.

This echoes the Daodejing’s view of rise and decline: “What grows strong begins to age.” When things reach their height, they may also begin to approach a turning point.

Jin Yong’s novels gave Ma more accessible images of human fate. Xiao Feng, whose martial skill is unrivalled, cannot escape the conflict of his divided identity; Guo Jing, loyal and righteous all his life, ends up bearing the heavy responsibilities of his age; Linghu Chong longs for freedom yet is drawn again and again into the feuds of the sects; Feng Qingyang, by withdrawing from the jianghu, keeps his independence. All of them remind the reader that even a person of extraordinary ability may not be fully master of his fate.

Ma’s insight may have come from combining these experiences. Business taught him the risks of the real world; history showed him the relationship between wealth and power; Daoism warned him that what flourishes must decline; Jin Yong let him understand, in the language of the jianghu, the conflict between an individual and his times.

He did not see the future. He simply realised earlier than many that success itself creates new dangers.

9. Withdrawing Once the Work Was Done – or Being Pushed Off the Stage?

Ma’s withdrawal in fact went through different stages. Stepping down as chief executive in 2013 was an arranged, voluntary handover; stepping down as chairman in 2019 was a succession plan announced in advance. Both reflected his wish to build institutional succession.

His low profile after 2020, however, cannot be explained in quite the same way. Ant’s listing was suspended, Alibaba came under antitrust investigation, and China’s internet platforms entered a new regulatory environment. Ma’s public appearances fell sharply; he no longer spoke frequently, as he once had, about China’s economy, finance and management.

Later he appeared at agricultural research institutes, universities and other events abroad, focusing on agricultural technology, education and philanthropy. Some believed he had finally achieved the life he longed for; others that the low profile came mainly from outside pressure. The two explanations need not be wholly opposed. A person may both wish to leave business management behind and have to adapt to new limits the environment has placed on him.

Either way, Ma’s public role had changed. Once he stood at the centre of the stage, talking about the business revolutions of the next ten or twenty years. Later he was more often the subject of other people’s talk. Would he reappear? How much influence did he still have over Alibaba? Why had he gone to this or that country? What had he said at some internal event? Such questions kept appearing in the news.

This shows that although Ma had left many formal posts, he had still not fully left the jianghu he created. If a company depends for a long time on its founder’s personal charisma, the outside world will go on linking its fate to him even after he steps down.

To truly withdraw once the work is done means more than resigning a post. It means letting successors judge independently without relying on the founder, freeing the organisation from the need for an infallible head of the clan, and letting institutions gradually take the place of personal will.

That is far harder than announcing a retirement.

10. A Man Who Has Not Yet Let Go

What, in the end, did Ma gain from Chinese tradition? He realised early that a company cannot depend on its founder for ever, tried to give his company a spiritual language that went beyond money, and long cared about education, hoping to pass on what he had learned in business to those who came after. These are parts of his life that deserve recognition.

But his experience also shows that cultivation in traditional culture is not the same as having reached some higher state. Understanding the Daodejing does not mean always knowing when to stop; practising tai chi does not mean always knowing how to yield before great force; loving Jin Yong does not mean that real business competition and political relationships can be handled like a martial-arts tale.

A person can speak of the wisdom of letting go and still cling to his influence; can understand that what flourishes must decline and still hope his business will keep growing; can long to leave the jianghu and still struggle to accept that it no longer revolves around him.

More important still, traditional wisdom cannot remain a matter of private feeling. If one truly believes in contentment, one should ask whether one’s business model encourages others in an endless pursuit of material things. If one truly believes in caring for others, one should care whether financial products may draw inexperienced young people into debt. If one truly believes in guarding one’s tongue, one should weigh the possible consequences of one’s words before every major public statement. And if one truly believes in withdrawing once the work is done, one should be willing to let successors grow independently, rather than living for ever in the founder’s light.

Ma is said to have expressed the view that he had not yet reached the state of withdrawing once the work is done; his exact words still need to be verified. But the sentiment is worth remembering, because for anyone, true self-examination may lie not in showing others how many truths one understands, but in seeing clearly what one still cannot do.

Today Ma has not lost all his wealth, nor vanished completely from public life. He still has considerable social influence, but he can no longer, as he once could, easily change his surroundings through personal eloquence and commercial imagination. He has to rethink his position, relearn the limits of influence, and learn anew how to keep his distance from the commercial world he created.

In Jin Yong’s novel, after passing the Nine Swords of Dugu to Linghu Chong, Feng Qingyang disappears back into the Mount Hua wilderness. He does not demand that Linghu Chong always wield the sword his way, nor does he come out of seclusion to prove his skill against the heads of the other schools. His worth lives on in the growth of the one who came after him.

For Ma, there may be a question harder than founding Alibaba: not how to create another business empire, nor how to win another contest, but how to let a world he began run healthily without his direction.

How much wealth a person can create determines his commercial achievement. How much of what he has gained he can let go of may say more about the measure of his life.

This may be Ma’s unfinished life’s work – and one of the most important lessons Chinese tradition offers the modern world: one may pursue success, but must not let success become one’s master; one may possess wealth, but must not let wealth devour one’s conscience; one may change the world, yet still needs to learn how to change oneself.

Only when a person truly understands contentment, knowing when to stop, guarding the tongue and stepping back, perhaps, does he begin to understand a wisdom that matters more than success.

And after all of this, there may remain a quieter question, for Ma and for every reader. When success, wealth, power and setback have all been lived through, is a person willing to take one step further – to ask about the things that wealth and status cannot answer: what we live for, and where the meaning of life is to be found? The question has no standard answer, and no one can answer it for another. It tends to appear, quietly, only when a person has truly come to a stop.

 

Epilogue: Jack Ma Within an Era

In Hangzhou, the merchants on Taobao and Tmall are still busy every day. Some answer customers’ questions late into the night; some pack parcels in warehouses; some use live-streaming and algorithms to find new buyers. Alipay still serves a vast ecosystem of payments and financial services, and Alibaba Cloud goes on building computing infrastructure for the age of artificial intelligence. None of this needs Jack Ma to direct it any more. Yet all of it belongs to the commercial world he helped to create.

Ma’s story cannot, in the end, be summed up as success or failure.

Looking back over his life, his rise was not an isolated commercial miracle but the result of a man, an industry and an era meeting under particular historical conditions. He saw the difficulties China’s small and medium-sized businesses faced in international trade; he saw that strangers trading online lacked trust; and he saw the vast population that traditional finance could not reach. He and his team turned these problems into business opportunities that changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. He did not merely ride the tide of his times; to some degree, he changed them.

If we look only at his personality, we can say that he was too confident and too eloquent, and that when caution was most needed he did not choose silence. We can say, too, that his judgement about financial regulation had its limits, and that he did not fully recognise the public responsibilities a large technology company bears.

These analyses have their value. Yet they are still not enough to explain the whole affair.

For there is a question more important than Ma’s personal gains and losses. Why could one entrepreneur’s public speech have such grave commercial consequences? Why could a company’s future depend not only on markets, consumers and legal rules, but also, decisively, on highly concentrated political decision-making?

An entrepreneur can make mistakes, and should bear responsibility for breaking laws and regulations. No company, however large, is entitled to exemption from regulation. Financial business in particular, which touches ordinary people’s savings, debts and security, needs effective supervision.

But the power that supervises companies must itself be supervised.

If regulatory rules are clear in advance, enforcement is open and transparent, and companies have a full opportunity to state their case and seek legal redress, then even a company that is ultimately penalised can understand the legal basis of the responsibility it bears.

What should truly worry us is a situation in which companies cannot accurately foresee how power will be exercised, and cannot be confident that political factors will not overturn established commercial procedures.

In such an environment, entrepreneurs must not only study the market but constantly second-guess the direction of policy; not only judge what consumers need but judge the attitude of those in power; not only weigh business risks but weigh the political consequences their words may bring.

When such factors deeply shape business decisions, a company’s competitiveness no longer comes entirely from its products, technology and service. It may also depend on its distance from power.

That creates a deep unfairness.

Those with special political resources may find it easier than ordinary founders to obtain capital, land, licences and other opportunities. Those without such resources, however hard-working and creative, may face higher institutional costs.

Political connections may also protect certain companies – and leave them suddenly unprotected when the balance of power shifts.

When rules cannot reliably constrain power, people in the market can hardly stand on the same starting line.

And the cost of this unfairness is not borne only by wealthy entrepreneurs.

In the end, it may fall on ordinary people too.

When a private company postpones investment because of policy uncertainty, the young people it might have hired lose a chance of work. When a founder fears that what he builds will not be reliably protected, he may decide not to expand. When a small firm cannot obtain finance on fair terms, it may lose its chance to compete with larger ones.

When more and more people choose caution and retreat, or spend their energy seeking political connections rather than improving their products, a whole society loses part of its creativity.

What truly deserves discussion in Ma’s experience, therefore, is not just how much wealth a billionaire lost, but what signal his experience sent to other entrepreneurs.

If even an entrepreneur with an international reputation, a giant company and abundant resources has to judge the boundaries of political power so carefully, what of the ordinary founders who have no wealth, no social influence and no special connections?

China’s private economy, of course, is not a story only of suppression and setback. Since reform and opening up began, vast numbers of private businesses have created jobs, driven technological progress and changed ordinary people’s lives. The Chinese government, too, has created conditions for enterprise through infrastructure, market opening and industrial policy.

The problem is that when a society needs private enterprise to create wealth, yet also demands that it always submit to highly concentrated political power, a lasting tension may form between the two.

Companies need stable property rights, public rules and independent commercial judgement. A highly concentrated political system may weigh economic growth, financial security, social stability and political control in shifting orders of priority.

When those goals conflict, who decides what price a company should pay? Who reviews whether that decision is just? And through what channels can the companies, investors, employees and consumers affected defend their lawful rights?

These questions matter more than Ma’s personal fortune.

Chinese tradition speaks of tianyi, the will of heaven, and also of tiandao, the way of heaven.

But the traditional idea of the way of heaven does not simply tell people to accept their fate.

The ancients also valued justice, and insisted that those who hold power should restrain their private desires and use power with care. The Book of Documents, one of the oldest Chinese classics, says: “Heaven sees as my people see; heaven hears as my people hear.” The line ties the people’s feelings to the idea of heaven’s mandate, reminding rulers that they cannot judge the gains and losses of the realm by their own will alone.

Seen this way, whether a society is just cannot be judged only by whether it creates great wealth. It must also be judged by whether ordinary people’s labour is respected, whether lawful property is protected, whether power is restrained, and whether people facing the same rules are treated fairly.

Ma loved Jin Yong all his life and took the name Feng Qingyang. Feng Qingyang possesses profound martial skill, yet cares nothing for the power of the sects; he passes the Nine Swords of Dugu to Linghu Chong, yet does not ask the young man to live for ever in his shadow. What Feng Qingyang truly leaves behind is not a jianghu of his own, but a wisdom that those who come after can inherit.

Yet entrepreneurs in the real world should not have to keep away from power and leave the jianghu altogether in order to find peace.

A society more worth striving for would allow founders to do business freely within the law, and also allow them to voice dissenting views in public. It would regulate large companies effectively while preventing regulatory power from being used arbitrarily. It would protect consumers from financial harm, and also protect entrepreneurs and ordinary investors from the losses caused by opaque decisions.

This is not a demand that entrepreneurs enjoy privileges. It is a demand that no one should hold privileges free of constraint.

Looking back over Ma’s life, we see an ordinary English teacher seize the opportunities of his time and build a commercial platform that touched the lives of hundreds of millions. We also see that when commercial power collides with highly concentrated political power, personal wealth, reputation and business achievement are not enough to remove institutional uncertainty.

Ma’s success shows how much creativity Chinese society holds.

His experience urges us to keep asking what kind of institutional environment that creativity needs in order to grow over the long term – steadily, and fairly.

And for Ma himself there may be a harder question still. He has known great wealth, received countless people’s praise, and lived through the controversy and loss that followed success. After all of this, can he find again the simplicity of the boy by the West Lake? Is he willing to look, beyond wealth and fame, for something more lasting? Only he can answer.

The story began with a boy in Hangzhou who cycled to the West Lake to be a free guide for foreign tourists. He learned English not because anyone promised he would become a billionaire, but because he longed to know the world outside, and how many possibilities a life might hold.

Decades later, he did see a vast world, and helped to change a part of it.

Yet in the end his experience poses a question deeper than personal success:

Can a society allow ordinary people to change their lives through hard work, talent and creativity, without having to rest their future on the favour of power?

That is a question Jack Ma’s story leaves not only for Chinese entrepreneurs, but for Chinese society as it moves into the future – and one it still needs to answer.

 

Appendix One: A Chronology of Jack Ma’s Life

10 September 1964 – Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province; family roots in Gulai township, Sheng county (now Shengzhou), Zhejiang.

c. 1980 – Meets the Morley family from Australia by the West Lake in Hangzhou, and becomes pen-friends with Ken Morley.

1982 – Sits the gaokao for the first time; scores one mark in maths and fails.

1983 – Sits the gaokao a second time; scores nineteen in maths and fails.

1984 – Sits the gaokao a third time and passes maths (79 or 89, according to different sources), but his total is five marks short of the threshold for a degree course. Because Hangzhou Teachers College’s English department has unfilled places, he is admitted to a degree course on a diploma-level score.

1985 – At Ken Morley’s invitation, spends the summer holidays in Newcastle, Australia – his first trip abroad.

1988 – Graduates in English from the foreign languages department of Hangzhou Teachers College with a Bachelor of Arts; the same year, becomes a lecturer in English and international trade at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Engineering.

1992 (some sources say 1994) – With friends and retired English teachers from the college, founds the Haibo Translation Agency, one of Hangzhou’s first professional translation firms.

Early 1995 – Travels to the United States on business; encounters the internet for the first time, in Seattle.

April 1995 – Founds China Pages with his wife Zhang Ying and He Yibing. In 1995 he is also named one of Hangzhou’s Ten Outstanding Young Teachers.

March 1996 – China Pages forms a joint venture with Hangzhou Telecom, which contributes cash for a 70 per cent stake.

1997 – After disagreements with Hangzhou Telecom, leaves China Pages. At the end of the year, goes to Beijing to work at the China International Electronic Commerce Centre of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.

End of 1998 – The team returns to Hangzhou.

20 February 1999 – Holds the first full meeting with seventeen partners at Lakeside Gardens in Hangzhou – the “meeting of the Eighteen Arhats” – raising 500,000 yuan.

March 1999 – The Alibaba website goes live.

1999 – Joe Tsai joins Alibaba. In October, a first funding round of US$5 million, led by Goldman Sachs, is completed.

January 2000 – SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son invests US$20 million. In July, the international edition of Forbes features Ma on its cover.

April 2003 – Assembles a team to prepare the Taobao project. On 10 May, Taobao goes live, pledging free service for three years. On 18 October, Alipay is launched.

2004 – Alipay becomes independent of Alibaba Group as a third-party online transaction platform. In December, Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd is established.

August 2005 – Yahoo exchanges US$1 billion in cash and the assets of Yahoo China for about 40 per cent of Alibaba. Taobao overtakes eBay as number one in China’s C2C market.

6 November 2007 – Alibaba’s B2B business lists on the main board in Hong Kong at HK$13.50 per share, with a market value of about HK$199.6 billion.

2008 – Alibaba launches Taobao Mall (later Tmall).

June 2009 – August 2010 – Ownership of Alipay is transferred in two stages from Alibaba Group to Zhejiang Alibaba E-commerce Co., Ltd, for total consideration of about 330 million yuan.

July 2010 – Alibaba formally establishes the “Lakeside Partners” partnership system.

May 2011 – Alipay receives one of the first Payment Business Licences; Yahoo discloses the Alipay ownership transfer, provoking controversy. On 29 July, Alibaba Group, Yahoo and SoftBank reach an agreement under which Alibaba will receive a one-off cash payment when Alipay lists, of at least US$2 billion and at most US$6 billion.

2012 – Alibaba buys back about half of Yahoo’s stake for US$7.6 billion.

10 May 2013 – Steps down as chief executive of Alibaba Group. In June, Yu’e Bao is launched.

Autumn 2013 – Talks with Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing over a listing with the partnership structure collapse; Alibaba turns to New York.

19 September 2014 – Alibaba lists on the New York Stock Exchange at US$68 per share, eventually raising about US$25 billion, with a first-day market value of about US$231 billion – the largest IPO in history at the time. In October, Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group is established.

2015 – Co-founds Hupan University with Liu Chuanzhi, Feng Lun and others. In December, Alibaba announces the acquisition of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post for HK$2.06 billion.

9 January 2017 – Meets US President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, discussing ideas for helping American small businesses and creating jobs.

February 2017 – Through the Jack Ma Foundation, donates US$20 million to the University of Newcastle in Australia to establish the Ma & Morley Scholarship.

November 2017 – Stars in the short film Gong Shou Dao, and sings its theme song, “Feng Qingyang”, with Faye Wong.

September 2018 – Announces that he will step down as chairman the following year; the same month, abandons his pledge to “create a million jobs for America”, citing Sino-American trade friction.

November–December 2018 – The People’s Daily discloses his Communist Party membership; he is named one of 100 officially honoured “pioneers of reform”.

April 2019 – His remarks on “996” provoke widespread controversy.

10 September 2019 – Steps down as chairman of Alibaba Group, succeeded by Daniel Zhang. On 26 November, Alibaba completes its secondary listing in Hong Kong.

September 2019 – Alibaba completes the acquisition of a 33 per cent equity stake in Ant Financial, ending the earlier profit-sharing arrangement.

21 October 2020 – The CSRC approves the registration of Ant Group’s IPO on the STAR Market.

24 October 2020 – Gives a speech of about twenty minutes at the second Bund Summit, criticising China’s financial regulation and banking system.

26 October 2020 – Ant Group publishes its H-share offering, priced at HK$80 per share.

2 November 2020 – The People’s Bank of China, CBIRC, CSRC and State Administration of Foreign Exchange jointly summon Ma and Ant Group executives; the draft Interim Measures for the Administration of Online Micro-Lending Business is published for comment.

3 November 2020 – The Shanghai Stock Exchange suspends Ant Group’s STAR Market listing; Ant announces the same day that its Hong Kong listing is also suspended.

11 December 2020 – The Politburo calls for “strengthening anti-monopoly work and preventing the disorderly expansion of capital”.

24 December 2020 – SAMR opens an investigation into Alibaba Group for suspected monopolistic conduct, including “choose one of two”. On 26 December, the financial regulators summon Ant Group again.

20 January 2021 – Takes part in the Rural Teacher Award ceremony – his first public appearance since Ant’s IPO was suspended.

10 April 2021 – SAMR imposes an administrative penalty on Alibaba, fining it 18.228 billion yuan. On 12 April, the financial regulators summon Ant Group again and set out five rectification requirements.

March 2021 – Hupan University suspends admissions and is later renamed the Hupan Research Centre; in May, the Ministry of Education and seven other bodies issue opinions regulating the use of the names “university” and “college”.

July–September 2021 – Didi placed under cybersecurity review; private tutoring sector overhauled; “common prosperity” announced; Alibaba pledges 100 billion yuan towards it.

Autumn 2021 – early 2023 – Spends most of his time abroad, touring agricultural sites in the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Thailand and elsewhere; lives for a time in Tokyo.

7 January 2023 – Ant Group announces the adjustment of its upper-level shareholding structure; Ma’s voting rights fall from 53.46 per cent to 6.208 per cent and he ceases to be its actual controller.

27 March 2023 – Appears at the Yungu School in Hangzhou, back in mainland China. On 28 March, Alibaba announces its split into six business groups.

21 April 2023 – The University of Hong Kong appoints Ma an honorary professor for three years. On 1 May, the University of Tokyo appoints him a visiting professor at Tokyo College; the same month, Tel Aviv University appoints him a visiting professor.

June 2023 – Alibaba announces that Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu will become chairman and chief executive respectively.

7 July 2023 – The financial regulators fine Ant Group and its subsidiaries 7.123 billion yuan (including confiscation of illegal gains), and announce that concentrated rectification of platform companies’ financial businesses is giving way to routine supervision. The same month, Ant announces a share buyback implying a valuation of about 567.1 billion yuan.

16 November 2023 – Alibaba abandons the full spin-off of its Cloud Intelligence Group and puts the Freshippo listing on hold.

29 December 2023 – The People’s Bank of China approves the change of Alipay (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd to having no actual controller.

End of November 2023 and May 2024 – Pinduoduo’s market value twice overtakes Alibaba’s.

26 March 2024 – Alibaba withdraws Cainiao’s IPO application.

30 August 2024 – SAMR announces that Alibaba Group has completed its three years of rectification.

11 November 2024 – Qiantang Credit Reporting, 35 per cent owned by Ant Group, receives a personal credit-reporting licence.

29 November 2024 – Appears at Alibaba’s Xixi campus in Hangzhou. On 8 December, attends and speaks at Ant Group’s twentieth-anniversary event.

17 February 2025 – Attends the symposium on private enterprise in Beijing, seated in the front row of business representatives.

10 April 2025 – Appears at the Alibaba Cloud Valley campus for Alibaba Cloud’s new-financial-year kick-off meeting.

30 April 2025 – The Private Economy Promotion Law is passed, taking effect on 20 May.

3 March 2026 – Visits the Yungu School in Hangzhou with the core management of Alibaba and Ant Group to discuss education in the age of AI.

May 2026 – Alibaba reports FY2026 results: revenue passes one trillion yuan for the first time, with Alibaba Cloud up 34 per cent.

 

Appendix Two: Key Figures

500,000 yuan – Alibaba’s entire start-up capital, raised by the Eighteen Arhats in 1999.

US$5 million – The first funding round in October 1999, led by Goldman Sachs.

US$20 million – SoftBank’s investment in January 2000.

US$1 billion – Yahoo’s investment in 2005, in exchange for about 40 per cent of Alibaba.

US$7.6 billion – The sum Alibaba paid in 2012 to buy back shares from Yahoo.

US$25 billion – The amount raised by Alibaba’s NYSE listing in September 2014, then the largest IPO in history.

US$231 billion – Alibaba’s market value at the close of its first day of trading.

More than US$13 billion – The value of Ma’s Alibaba stake at the IPO price; he also sold some shares, realising about US$867 million.

Approximately 268.4 billion yuan – Alibaba’s reported “Double Eleven” gross merchandise value in 2019; the corresponding 2018 figure was approximately 213.5 billion yuan.

8.317 trillion yuan – Alibaba’s global GMV in FY2022 (the twelve months to 31 March 2022).

1.31 billion – Annual active consumers served by Alibaba’s global consumer businesses in FY2022 (de-duplicated).

1 billion – The milestone number of Chinese consumers served by Alibaba.

118 trillion yuan – Domestic payment volume through Alipay in the twelve months to 30 June 2020.

711 million – Alipay’s monthly active users at the end of June 2020.

1 billion users and 80 million merchants – The reach of the Alipay app, which worked with more than 2,000 financial institutions.

2.15 trillion yuan – Outstanding credit facilitated by Ant Group’s micro-lending technology platform at the end of June 2020 (of which consumer credit about 1.73 trillion yuan and small-business credit about 421.7 billion yuan).

98 per cent – The proportion of the credit Ant facilitated that was funded by financial institutions or securitised.

4.1 trillion yuan – Assets under management facilitated by Ant’s wealth-management technology platform.

120.618 billion yuan – Ant Group’s revenue in 2019.

53.46 per cent – The voting rights in Ant Group controlled by Ma and his concert parties before the adjustment.

6.208 per cent – Ma’s voting rights in Ant Group after the adjustment of January 2023.

18.228 billion yuan – SAMR’s fine on Alibaba of 10 April 2021 (4 per cent of its 2019 domestic sales of 455.712 billion yuan).

7.123 billion yuan – Total fines and confiscated illegal gains imposed on Ant Group and its subsidiaries by the financial regulators on 7 July 2023.

About US$34.4 billion – The amount Ant Group’s IPO was originally set to raise (A and H shares combined, before over-allotment).

2.1 trillion yuan – Ant Group’s expected market value after listing.

51.3% → 37.3% – The change in Alibaba’s share of China’s domestic e-commerce market between 2021 and 2024 (brokerage research).

About US$190 billion – Alibaba’s market value at the end of November 2023, when Pinduoduo first overtook it.

380 billion yuan – Alibaba’s announced investment in AI and cloud computing over the next three years.

31.742 billion yuan – Alibaba Cloud’s revenue in the third quarter of FY2025.

About US$45 billion – Ma’s net worth in early 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

567.1 billion yuan – The valuation implied by Ant Group’s share buyback of July 2023, roughly 70 per cent below pre-listing market expectations.

1,023.67 billion yuan – Alibaba’s revenue in FY2026, the first time it exceeded one trillion yuan.

 

Appendix Three: Principal Sources

The factual content of this book draws mainly on the following categories of public material.

The first category is official documents and announcements. These include the People’s Bank of China’s Measures for the Administration of Payment Services Provided by Non-Financial Institutions (14 June 2010) and Trial Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Financial Holding Companies (September 2020); the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Decision on Suspending the STAR Market Listing of Ant Group Co., Ltd. (3 November 2020); the CSRC spokesman’s answers on the suspension; the answers of Pan Gongsheng, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, on the financial regulators’ interviews with Ant Group (27 December 2020 and 12 April 2021); the financial regulators’ statement on completing the rectification of platform companies’ financial businesses (7 July 2023); SAMR’s administrative penalty decision on Alibaba’s “choose one of two” conduct (10 April 2021) and its announcement that Alibaba had completed three years of rectification (30 August 2024); Ant Group’s Announcement on Continuing to Improve Corporate Governance (7 January 2023); the People’s Bank of China’s notice approving Alipay’s change to having no actual controller (29 December 2023) and its approval of Qiantang Credit Reporting’s personal credit-reporting licence (11 November 2024); and the Private Economy Promotion Law (30 April 2025).

The second category is companies’ public disclosures. These include Alibaba Group’s annual reports (Form 20-F), financial reports and prospectuses, and the prospectus and related announcements published by Ant Group on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2020.

The third category is reporting by authoritative media. These include mainland Chinese outlets such as Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily Online, the People’s Daily, the Economic Daily, CCTV.com, the Beijing News, Caixin, Yicai, Securities Times, 21st Century Business Herald, National Business Daily, The Paper and Jiemian; and international outlets such as Reuters, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, CNBC, NPR, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale and the Associated Press.

The fourth category is institutional and academic sources. These include the official description of the Ma & Morley Scholarship programme at the University of Newcastle, Australia; public information on the Jack Ma Foundation’s programmes; the appointment announcements of the University of Tokyo and the University of Hong Kong; and brokerage research reports on market shares in Chinese e-commerce.

The fifth category is the subject’s own accounts. These include Ma’s own statements in public speeches, media interviews and internal talks, concerning his early life, his ventures and his personal judgements.

The principal sources for key facts, chapter by chapter, are as follows.

Chapters 1–3: materials of the Ma & Morley Scholarship programme, University of Newcastle; Information Age (Australian Computer Society) on the 2017 donation; Hangzhou News on the city’s first KFC (July 2026); Ma’s speech at the 110th anniversary of Hangzhou Normal University (May 2018).

Chapters 4–6: The Paper, “Jack Ma’s Long Journey Home” (the China Pages–Hangzhou Telecom joint venture); retrospectives by Sina Finance (September 2017) and Jiemian on Ma’s time in Beijing, his return to Hangzhou and the Lakeside Gardens meeting; Alibaba’s 2014 prospectus (Form F-1) on its VIE structure.

Chapter 7: The Nanjinger, “How Taobao Won the Ecom Race”; Knowledge@Wharton on eBay’s joint venture with TOM Online (December 2006).

Chapter 8: the text of the 2010 payment-services measures; Yahoo’s filing with the US SEC of May 2011; Alibaba Group’s announcement of 1 February 2018; Caixin Global (September 2019).

Chapters 9–10: Alibaba’s FY2018 results announcement; CNN Money on the collapse of Alibaba’s Hong Kong listing talks (October 2013); Hangzhou News on Ma’s farewell speech (11 September 2019); IT Home on Alibaba’s annual galas (2019).

Chapters 11–13: Ant Group’s 2020 prospectus; the notice on regulating “cash loan” business (1 December 2017); Niu Wenxin’s commentary on Yu’e Bao (February 2014); the Wall Street Journal on regulators’ request that Alibaba sell media assets (March 2021); the NDRC’s draft market-access negative list (October 2021).

Chapters 14–18: SAMR’s penalty decision and its announcement of completed rectification; reports on JD.com’s lawsuit against Tmall (2023); model overtime cases published by the Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (August 2021); the People’s Daily on Ma’s Party membership (November 2018) and the list of “pioneers of reform” (December 2018); the Party General Office’s opinions on united front work in the private economy (September 2020); Phoenix Tech on the Hupan centre (September 2025).

Chapters 19–23: Alibaba’s 2019 Double Eleven figures; the full text of Ma’s Bund Summit speech published by the Beijing News (24 October 2020); the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s suspension decision (3 November 2020); Reuters and Wall Street Journal reporting on the decision-making behind the suspension (November 2020); the Politburo meeting communiqué (11 December 2020).

Chapters 24–28: the ICIJ investigation with Le Monde and Radio France (29 April 2025); Ant Group’s governance announcement (7 January 2023) and reporting on its share buyback (July 2023); Reuters and Financial Times reporting on “golden shares” (January 2023); the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Chapters 29–39: Alibaba’s announcement of the completed Yahoo buyback (18 September 2012); the New York Times on Alibaba’s listing and politically connected investors (July 2014); the Wall Street Journal on Ant’s shareholders and “princelings” (February 2021); the SEC’s list under the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (July 2022).

Chapters 40–48: appointment announcements by the University of Tokyo (1 May 2023), Tel Aviv University (May 2023) and the University of Hong Kong (April 2023); the Financial Times on Ma’s life in Tokyo (November 2022); the Private Economy Promotion Law; Alibaba’s FY2026 results announcement (May 2026); 36Kr, Jiemian and others on the Yungu School visit of 3 March 2026; National Bureau of Statistics data on private investment.

Chapter 49 and Epilogue: Chen Wei’s writings on Ma (for the silence at Jinyun Mountain and his reading of the Daodejing – original passages still to be checked); the Daodejing, chapters 9 and 44; the Book of Documents.

Three points should be made about the sources of the material cited in this book.

First, some narrative scenes come from Ma’s public speeches, from the recollections of those involved, and from retellings in overseas Chinese-language commentary programmes. Details concerning private life, chance encounters abroad and conversations between individuals should, where there is no traceable original footage or written record, be treated as narrative material awaiting verification rather than as independently confirmed fact.

Second, with regard to overseas reports and rumours concerning political figures, powerful families, capital relationships and particular private events, this book retains those leads that have public significance, and distinguishes between verifiable transactions, named media reports, anonymous sources and the author’s own inferences. That the authorities have not reported something is not enough to disprove it; that something has been widely circulated is not enough to prove it.

Third, for statements of specific figures, dates, positions and sums, this book gives priority to official announcements, company disclosures and mainstream media reports. Where several versions of the same event exist – such as Ma’s maths scores in his three attempts at the gaokao, some details of the early transfer of Alipay’s ownership, and the timing of certain public appearances – the book notes the differences in the text rather than unilaterally choosing one version.

 

Appendix Four: A Note on the Boundaries of This Biography

Writing about someone who is still alive, and still at the centre of public debate, requires the observance of certain boundaries.

First, inference is not presented as fact. Wherever this book deals with motives, intentions, private relationships, undisclosed transactions or political roles, it marks them clearly – “some analysts believe”, “according to media reports”, “reports say” – or states plainly that they cannot be verified.

Second, investigative leads and inside stories of public value are retained, but fact and allegation are not confused. For claims that have not been independently verified, the book states clearly who made them, what the evidence is, and which links remain in dispute. This applies with particular force to people who are still living.

Third, motive is not inferred backwards from outcome. Ma’s eventual situation cannot be used to prove that every choice he made early on was wrong; nor can his early success be used to prove that every judgement he made later was right.

Fourth, and most important: the author’s role is not given any authority beyond that which a book itself can carry. This book is about a man’s public life – what he did, what he said, what happened. What he was really thinking, only he knows.

For more information, please visit our website at theFTL.org.

– The End –