That video gave me a lot of insight into Ma's character, and frankly, the contents of the article were thoroughly unsurprising in that context.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/alibabas-jack-ma-has-been-co...
So it’s not everyone but it’s a lot. The actual CCP membership itself is much lower though. It’s more like an octopus in their society.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth/dp...
Even without language barrier, I think most of it is just the nature of politics and holding positions of power. It's not like many of us have a very good understanding of the inner workings of the higher cadres in the (D) and (R) parties, or of the leadership teams / boardrooms of large companies either.
As mentioned in the article, the CEOs of the other tech giants Tencent and Baidu are not members. It's simply not a huge deal one way or the other.
Not only that, but there isn't even a singular party of democrats or repulicans. Every state has its own party for each.
People can decide which party they are in and the party itself has no say in the matter.
Absolutely. Political affiliations speak to the philosophy of the CEO and, by proxy, how they'll lead their company. E.g. Palantir is behaving exactly as expected given Peter Thiel's politics.
In Germany my friends spoke very good English, but there were still times they'd sound like the drunken ramblings of a native speaker.
Only later on I'd realize the points they were trying to make and that they were running rings around me intellectually, just having trouble expressing it.
That experience has left me more or less giving a free pass to ESL speakers saying things that sound dumb, especially when it's off the cuff.
To be fair, Jack Ma was an English teacher, has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hangzhou Teachers University and he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. While he may have an accent his communication style is quite clear IMO.
If I thought this was at all a language or communication issue I’d never have posted it.
I agree the points he was making were vapid, and I stopped watching fairly quickly because of it.
Maybe he really is an idiot, but I don't think this video was at all conclusive proof.
You also need to take into account to whom he was saying it. Although they were ostensibly talking to each other, Musk was speaking to the fears of Americans afraid their jobs might get automated, while Ma was addressing Chinese who hope their jobs will get automated.
Consequently, their definition of "smart" is not the same. Musk equates smartness with being good at your job, while Ma thinks it's better to be "street smart" and let someone else do the work for you. Or in the car vs. human example, why try to outrun it if you could be sitting in the driver's seat?
> Then he states that human intelligence comes from the soul anyways.
I thought that was a clever riff on Musk's somewhat awkward "AI means love in Chinese, right?" conversation starter.
> To be fair, Jack Ma was an English teacher, has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hangzhou Teachers University and he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. While he may have an accent his communication style is quite clear IMO.
I don't know whether you've ever experienced a foreign-language class taught by a non-native speaker, but I've taken Academic Writing classes in English at a top Chinese university and the quality was terrible. English literacy is rare in China even though it is a mandatory subject, so the bar to becoming a teacher is quite low. Often, they'll have an excellent breadth of vocabulary, while being unfamiliar with many idiomatic expressions and cultural references that come naturally to a native speaker.
That said, I did think he was communicating quite clearly, but since my understanding appears to be quite different from yours, maybe that's just a reflection of our different expectations.
On the other hand, if the event was specifically organized so that they could speak past each other and endear themselves to their respective audiences, it was a genius move.
Oh neat, a pun which works both in Japanese and Chinese.
Why do Chinese want their jobs to be automated?
Of course not all Chinese think like that, but an optimist view of future technology seems much more prevalent in Chinese-language media than in the English-speaking world. Maybe that's because China is still at a relatively low level of industrial automation and trying to catch up to advanced manufacturing economies like Japan or Germany with their "Made in China 2025" initiative.
And the overall optimism doesn't mean there aren't also critical voices, worried that instead it will be the machines controlling the humans who do the work. E.g. Renwu recently published an article about delivery drivers struggling to meet the deadlines set by the system, which you can read translated into English by Jeffrey Ding here: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food...
That said, I agree that Jack Ma is far from as technical as Elon Musk, and still consider his spin-off of Alipay (Ant) from Alibaba to be very questionable from a corporate governance standpoint.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/09/technology/business/jack-ma...
For what it's worth this matches my own limited experience from the early 2000s.
Relevant from other comment:
> I don't know whether you've ever experienced a foreign-language class taught by a non-native speaker, but I've taken Academic Writing classes in English at a top Chinese university and the quality was terrible. English literacy is rare in China even though it is a mandatory subject, so the bar to becoming a teacher is quite low. Often, they'll have an excellent breadth of vocabulary, while being unfamiliar with many idiomatic expressions and cultural references that come naturally to a native speaker.
Language barrier is real and I am guessing some English speakers may never understand/empathize with the non-native speakers.
He sounds more like some kind of new age guru or a motivational speaker rather than someone with a good insight into the future.
He's probably in the position he is because he bows down to the CCP.
If you can't say certain things and have the obligation to say others...you could end up making no sense.
Making money is far more about luck than skill. Always has been. Net worth is not a proxy for ability.
[edit] Don't get me wrong I'm not saying billionaires are idiots. I'm just saying that having a fat stack is not in and of itself a proxy for aptitude. Judge that on the person instead. Just judging them on their bank balance is an unnecessary appeal to authority that hasn't historically held.
Ma, a former English teacher, is one of China’s internet pioneers, building an e-commerce empire with Alibaba and a fintech giant with Ant.Stupid is a loaded word, but you can be a genius in chemistry and not be able to hold a "normal" conversation. You can also be homeless and super-smart.
''He's not stupid. He just has a lot of Alibaba Intelligence.''
Jack Ma had said AI is Alibaba Intelligence
https://becominghuman.ai/china-aims-to-be-a-leader-in-ai-by-...
I wasn't surprised when they removed him.