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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba is much more transparent than say Huawei. Alibaba is even publicly traded on an American exchange, so its ownership is much more clear.

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It's illegal for foreigners to own a Chinese company. A shell company based in the Caribbean is publicly traded. It owns no assets.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/beware-the-pitfalls-of-the-...

It is not illegal for foreigners to own part of Chinese companies. It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest. Softbank and Yahoo invested into Alibaba relatively early on. It was incorporated in China. Their positions represented the majority of shares in the business, just not individually.

> It's generally illegal for a single foreign entity to own a controlling interest.

This is also not true. China, like all developing economies that have reached the global stage, allows WFOEs and FICEs [1]. There's significant taxes involved but these taxes are being decreased all the time .

(It's quite remarkable the stuff people believe about doing business in China. Really have to wonder where these ideas come from.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterpris...

There are severe restrictions on WFOEs. For all practical purposes they're useless for running a domestic tech business.

Really recommend this write up on VIEs and Alibaba: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2017-imo/Documents/M...

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