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Comment by pigsty | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if cheering an oppressive billionaire who got rich off being a borderline slave driver is a thing to do. A man who has more wealth than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes expects people to work 12 hours a day, six days a week to barely make a living so they can provide a more extravagant lifestyle for himself.

For all the bad things happening in China, attempting to crack down on a borderline comic book villain and spread a little of his wealth isn’t one of the things I can criticize them for.

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The man is a product of his country. If you'd like to show me where Chinese workers make as much as they made working for Jack Ma, and for shorter hours, I'd be interested to see it. It doesn't exist.

The government in China, while marginalizing figures like Ma, have done nothing but encourage the status quo. At least Ma challenged it.

If the CCP had not liberalized 30-ish years ago, sure, we'd have no Jack Ma. But we'd have no modern China either, would we?

Clearly, we have a long way to go towards life being livable in a place like China for the average person.

Jack Ma could have 10% of his wealth and that much more could be in the pockets of his workers, and he’d still be one of the richest men ever on earth.

Plus, knowing people who’ve done 996 in China, they were basically sitting in an office with their brains being numbed by pretending to look busy so they could feed the ego of some insanely rich guy who’d use their hours of life wasted as a talking point for international speeches in which he praises himself.

Jack Ma didn’t build China. He’s been out of the country for apparently a long time but things are still trucking along there. So it seems like things would also be fine if he gave a little more back and gave employees an extra hour a day of their life back.

And he’s not really a product of his country. Every single country has insanely wealthy people who accumulate their wealth by exploiting those under them. This guy just packed his bags and cowardly ran when the government said it’s time for him to pay something back.

Baba workers are not underpaid, they are the main property speculators.

Yup, things are really "trucking along" in Xi's China. More like a train wreck IMO.

It's probably isn't actually helping him to be a slavedriver. It's unlikely you're getting your money worth making people work 12 hours six days a week.

Stronger labor laws will likely increase wealth generation and create a more powerful economic engine.

For all the bad things happening in China, attempting to crack down on a borderline comic book villain and spread a little of his wealth isn’t one of the things I can criticize them for.

Just because he's getting cracked down doesn't mean that the CCP is a good guy either. To me, it looked more like a consolidation of power, likely making inequality worse not better.

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