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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I am most surprised about how surprised everyone is about these events. Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is? China is executing an executive for bribery and corruption [1] (a lot of bribery and corruption though!).

Perhaps it's simply the Overton Window [2] delta between the US and China.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/china-sentences-ex-banker-to-death-for...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

(nothing in this comment should be construed as approval, support, etc for the actions of the CCP; this is only intended as an observation)

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> Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is?

Yes, I did actually. There's every reason to believe that the people installed to run Alibaba / Ant after Jack gets sent off to "re-education camp" will be unable to propel it to further heights. Stagnation is likely as good as it'll get and there's every reason to believe it'll be run into the ground eventually.

I see Jack Ma as a sort of Chinese Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Shooting yourself in the foot like this seems to be incredibly stupid. American government officials would never consider even hobbling someone like Jeff Bezos... that could be partially out of fear (he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution), but its more because of the incredible value someone like a Bezos, Musk, or Ma brings to your economy.

> There's every reason to believe that the people installed to run Alibaba / Ant after Jack gets sent off to "re-education camp" will be unable to propel it to further heights.

We in America are much too obsessed with "one great man" theories of history. I also think we are inclined to underestimate the competency of Chinese governmental figures, which is structured very differently from the West.

> that could be partially out of fear (he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution), but its more because of the incredible value someone like a Bezos, Musk, or Ma brings to your economy.

I think it is actually much more about the former than the latter.

> We in America are much too obsessed with "one great man" theories of history. I also think we are inclined to underestimate the competency of Chinese governmental figures, which is structured very differently from the West.

Eh... Do I think Bezos is a visionary responsible for all of Amazon's success? No. But culture comes from the top. There's a lot of ways to run a company poorly, especially if it's doing something novel and not just churning out mundane products. The big ones involve bureaucracy and short term profits. If Jeff Bezos died, I'm sure Amazon would be just fine. Tesla maybe not. How mature is Alibaba and Ant?

People thought the same thing about apple when Jobs died but it's up 900% in the 9 years since his death

Stock price isn't especially meaningful in the context of the current economic times. I'd say Jobs dying is more or less along the lines of what my worldview expectations are. Apple is fine. But its product offerings tend to be a lot shittier and generic.

Stock prices being up is a function of zero / near-zero percent interest rates and the injection of enormous amounts of capital into the system from the Fed just printing, literally, trillions of dollars.

Capital has very few "good" places to be allocated at the moment - really for the past decade or so - and COVID-19 put everything into hyperdrive for the tech sector.

Economics Explained on YouTube has a good video about this.

Apple's relative stock price has increased, so the general increase of equity prices doesn't explain this.

Low interest rates means that people will search for yields elsewhere, it doesn't intrinsically mean they would settle on Apple outside of solid management.

Doesn't mean anything besides people want to buy Apple stock, for a myriad number of reasons.

Jobs rescued Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.. There would be no Apple to be up 900%.

I think the problem with the “great man” theory is the thinking that if Bezos/Musk hadn’t done their thing nothing would have happened. I am pretty sure that in a free society one or many others would have achieved similar things. For example the computer industry would have been fine without Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Or it may have been even better off without them overshadowing others? Same for eCommerce. Maybe things would be better without Amazon domination. Who knows?

Yeah. Less so the rarity of the great person, but the rarity of the opportunity. But both are required for teh magicks

> We in America are much too obsessed with "one great man" theories of history.

Seems to me that China also has this theory at the moment, with Xi.

Cross-cultural cognitive biases (:

I think they still have catch up to play with us, but I'm sure will be there soon enough.

I saw a discussion a while back between Musk and Ma. I think you do a disservice to Musk to compare them. He really didn't seem able to keep up.

Wouldn't it be a disservice to Ma if you're saying Musk couldn't keep up?

I think they are saying that Ma couldn't keep up.

I’m saying it’s a disservice to compare them, since I felt like thy were in different intelectual leagues.

But I’d say it’s a bit unfair to compare musk to most people

There’s a lot of reason why Jack Ma might not want to say anything interesting, esp with asymmetrical stakes where for Elon this is just fun banter and brand building, but missteps by Jack Ma could be severe.

> but missteps by Jack Ma could be severe.

Looks like missteps by Jack Ma were severe.

This was quite a while back when he didn’t seem that worried. It wasn’t that he wasn’t speaking. I just thought Musk came across A LOT better.

Just my opinion though.

Here’s the video if you want to form your own: https://youtu.be/WSKYWu-S2G0

>(he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution)

That's a HUGE over exaggeration. Yes money matters, but only so much and it very much matters where that funding comes from. That's why McConnell still has a job despite his opponent spending three times as much. People knew that money was coming from outsiders trying to unseat him. Bezos or some other billionaire trying to pour an ungodly amount of money into a political campaign is more likely to backfire than help.

The main problem was that Kentucky went R+26. Throwing money at a Dem candidate who isn't Manchin, hoping to overcome that difference was an exercise in futility. You'd have better luck trying to primary him.

Sure, money can't do the impossible, but if you only need a few percentage points it's pretty likely to help

Yea but the OP was making the claim that no US government official would dare stand up to Bezos for fear of him outspending them out of office. Entrenched incumbents in non-battleground states/districts really don't have that fear at all.

Like how Apple has crashed and burnt since Steve Jobs' death? Oh... wait, their stock is up 11x and their revenue is up 2.5x. Seems like things are actually going fine. Maybe we attribute the success of companies almost entirely to the one man at the top, instead of to the thousands of workers who make up the company.

Apple wouldn't exist without a great man to have led it back from, quite literally, the brink of death...

Or did you forget where Apple was when Gil Amelio got ousted for Steve to come back?

Microsoft revenue increased a lot when Steve Ballmer was in charge. I don't think anyone would claim MS was a great organisation during that period though, given how many major industry trends they just totally missed. Ballmer didn't trash the business but the action moved elsewhere.

As for Apple, putting the questionable meaning of the stock market to one side for a moment, when was the last time they did anything truly exciting, that cut their competitors legs out from under them? The M1 chip? That's the only thing I can think of for a long time, and it's a bit unclear how much consumers will care vs geeks.

Isn't that overton window closing though?

Twitter, Facebook and Apple is doing the same thing at the same time with the US president means that US control is getting more centralized over time, which makes sense with the FED's money printing going on.

The real question is why this wouldn't be able to happen in the US in 10 years.

I think Bribery in China is like the book/film the firm with regard to “having the goods” for blackmail or in this case Control of party officials via corruption.

They look bribery the other way the great majority of the time. Everyone does it, but when they want you, they have air tight, iron clad evidence against you and everyone they need to take down.

> They look bribery the other way the great majority of the time. Everyone does it, but when they want you, they have air tight, iron clad evidence against you and everyone they need to take down.

Perhaps in the China of the past, but I don't think the low-level bribery you see in places like Nigeria or India is incredibly common in China anymore.

I imagine CCP support of WeChat and similar digital currency systems is to suss out this activity.

WeChat and Alipay are effectively the only two, and you're almost certainly right. I'm not opposed to that per se either.

You're right, but also, it's quite compelling news how you think change is coming - yet it doesn't and it falls back under the old ways.

I did kind of imagine that, yes, Jack Ma and CCP would be a bit different, but hey, goes to show that CCP still has all the power in China.

Makes you wonder about other power vacuums in the world.

  >Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is?

The thing is that [even allowing for the fact that any news coming out of China that we get in the west is heavily spun to make China look bad] what Jack Ma is alleged to have said seems very mild to me, to be provoking such a massive response. Apparently he said "Chinese banks operate with a pawnshop mentality"[0] --hardly calling for the overthrow of the state, is it?

It all seems so over the top that I'm almost convinced that the US has infiltrated the higher echelons of the CCP and is working hard to make China shoot itself in the foot economically. Is that any crazier a notion than the pretty widely held belief that Donald Trump's election was a Russian plot to undermine the US on the world stage?

Because, the only results of this over-the-top crackdown by China are likely to be that:

* More Chinese entrepreneurs are going to 'get the hell out of Dodge' as soon as they can, rather than risk the same fate. By emigrating from China and setting up elsewhere.

* Western businesses are going to be extremely reluctant to enter into any partnerships / large contracts / investments with Chinese companies, for fear of the rug being pulled from under them.

* AliBaba & Ant will stagnate under government management

It just doesn't make sense to me:

* Lots of reports recently predicting China will become the world's no.1 economy before the end of this decade.

* China's economy first out of the starting blocks on the road to recovery, after the Coronavirus pandemic

* Chinese companies outdoing technologically & commercially their US counterparts [so much so that it led to Trump's spurious sanctions against HuaWei et al].

All of this should have led to the CCP becoming more pro-capitalist in outlook and more supportive of Chinese entrepreneurship from people like Jack Ma. Why suddenly shoot yourself in the foot, when you're finally 'winning'? I just find it really hard to believe that the leadership of the CCP which, if nothing else, has demonstrated itself to be extremely pragmatic over recent decades, is so thin skinned as to risk massive and ongoing damage to their economy over such an innocuous remark.

As I say, in my tinfoil-hatted opinion either the CCP has been infiltrated by the US who are attempting to destroy the Chinese economy from within, or there's a lot more to what Jack Ma has actually done than we're being told.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/ant-group-ipo-suspension-reg...

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