Jack Ma steps out from the shadows with morale-boosting post
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.nbim.no/en/publications/podcast/alibaba-co-found...
Alibaba co-founder and Chair: China, Jack Ma, AI and basketball
And while smart and sympathetic, I cannot help to think that Alibaba is a company of the past belonging to a time of a certain US-China order that is no more. The future of Chinese tech belongs to companies that are much more fast moving, fearless, and aggressively deep tech than what Alibaba aspires to be.
Most of the people I know in the industry think Alibaba is one of the least efficient big tech company in China compare to e.g Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, Huawei. They all have somewhat similar bureaucracy burden as big corp but not at the level of Alibaba. Their problem is much complex than pointing the finger at Chinese government to explain everything.
At that time PDD is promoting the idea you buy what they think you will buy. PDD's search is barely functioning at that time and their bussiness model is solely relying on recommending system.
Though I'm not sure how much Alibaba's decision is affected by PDD because the story I heard is more driven by their internal politics. I feel like that's really a weird product decision for Alibaba and to me doesn't make a lot of sense.
I spend many hours trying to make sense of it. Usually I fail and buy elsewhere.
Truly an impressive feet of stupidity.
Someone should do a paid search engine for it. $50 per month seems well worth the preservation of sanity.
Anyway. If you listen to the Tsai interview he seems more concerned about US regulators than Chinese.
Being all of that is exactly why Jack Ma got beat down by the party. The party doesn't want fast moving, fearless, aggressively deep tech, they want control, compliance, and stability.
And alibaba was not "deep tech", more like derivative tech. It's just a ecommerce site. It takes a lot of technical expertise to operate that at a large scale for sure, but at the end of the day, it's not the kind of fundamental tech free from sanctions that the chinese government wanted to pivot its tech industry to.
However this doesn't mean China's GDP will get back to fast growth. Its economy is constrained by demand, not supply. Anyone who has experience with Chinese elders would know how thrifty they are no matter how much wealth they have.
Not at all. The future of Chinese tech is state owned enterprises [1]. Just like other Chinese industries, such as state owned real estates [2] or state run communal restaurants [3]. Just like Soviet Union, before it fell.
"The Peterson Institute for International Economics analyzed the market capitalization of China's top 100 companies. It found that the share of total market capitalization held by state-controlled enterprises, in which the government holds a stake of 50% or more, rose to 50% by the end of 2023, the highest proportion in five years"
[1] China's favored state-owned companies squeeze private sector https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-s-favored-sta... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-state-owned-devel... [3] https://www.thinkchina.sg/not-everything-has-be-run-state-th...
Sometimes state-owned enterprises might be able to outperform a private structure!
They can ... until they don't and there's no market correction in place anymore to keep them in check.
It's going to take another decade to feel this effect but it'll be there in full force.
The profit driven system is supposed to self-correct. We see this today, with Boeing for example (yes /s).
Now beyond snark, we can ask is the same thing happening to us that happened to the "commies" with the 'defense and national security' establishment raising troubling doppelgangers of "state industry" from the body of "market driven" neo-liberal capitalist societies?
So, we see issue is not really "ownership" but rather establishments ..
At least that’s the idea, I think. May as well steel man the argument.
Or are you more complaining about the lack of honesty in these defacto situations?
In China, any company larger than a tiny one is state controlled anyway - someone from the CCP needs to have a board seat, and everyone knows what happens if you anger the party.
But it's extremely unlikely, given how often the opposite occurs instead in historical data.
The more important question is if it is worth it, since money spent is zero sum.
Also, we could use more zero sum that redistributes wealth towards huge masses, even if that means some billionaires will have fewer billions...
“This thing goes against my orthodoxy therefore I refuse to see it” is exactly the sort of attitude that gets you far away from success.
For the record, I was merely saying it’s possible for a state owned enterprise to do things quickly, even if in practice most of them don’t. So much of the world is just about having the right kind of people at the right place, and that’s true in the public sphere and the private one.
One might start trying to say "well a bunch of money from the state isn't enough to consider it a state owned enterprise", but then the contention is a bit more specific than just about being state owned.
We did get to the moon with "state owned enterprises" anyway...
For some reason I thought it was a quasi-private company owned partially by the government.
You may find insight after reflecting on why a non-American knows this detail about the USPS while you don't.
I'm wondering why you know an obscure fact about postal service in a country you don't live in?
There have been far many more economic and capital systems on this rock than just American capitalism.
The other day a guy was complaining about being in jail for a time and how unfair it was that he had a criminal record. Lots of open minded people praising him.
Then a new user called him out for trying to get with a 12 year old. Yikes.
However, Deng also introduced China's 1-child policy (decidedly not capitalism), which is now beginning to seriously strain the system. The future is indeed uncertain.
Maybe state ownership will collapse it all, maybe the coming demographic implosion will do it. But it does not seem like your daddy's communism....more like a capitalism-communism fusion that combined with nationalistic pride and a desperation to account for all the over production might lead to surpassing what the soviet union could only dream of.
If you just want English language go for SCMP: https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/lifestyle/article/3194858/l...
The money has already been made by those in power and the only way to make more is to follow the government gravy train. For the last decade that has meant batteries, EVs, semiconductors, displays are all so heavily subsidized (factories are built with free government loans) that doing anything else (other than buying property) makes no sense. That doesn't mean the people aren't motivated, smart, and ingenious, but they won't be making back the $T in loans.
This is all news to me.
Ignoring the age issue in the far right (not enough young people replacing the dying elders in the movement), we have repeated losses in special elections due to their stance on abortion indicating their current plan of action is not in sync with where the country is. That does not look long term promising for the movement. Either they move left or they will continue to cede power at all levels of the government.
That’s speculation though. What we do know is that the CCP is changing the way of managing the economy. Between 1992 and 2019 they leaned heavily on the private sector for growth. They would do anything they needed to help private enterprise succeed. That approach paid rich dividends, it’s obvious.
Xi Jinping is going a different way now though. He reckons he knows better than Deng, the architect of the Chinese economic miracle. His approach is to pick winners and losers. It may succeed because he’s picked good horses so far - EVs, solar panels, AI, semiconductors. And state led capitalism has had success in China, with major players like Huawei doing well despite major headwinds.
Because of this shift in approach you can’t extrapolate from the success of 2001-19 and say China’s future success is inevitable.
Which is less likely (one would hope) than via other methods, but the correlation is not as strong as we’d all like.
It'd be interesting to know how much this phenomenon would explain the stability of otherwise culturally ossified regimes that stood for four or five centuries before collapsing, where government was built almost entirely out of extreme nepotism in which the ruling potentate had 50 or 60 kids to choose from, and thus had a shot at picking the most capable from the, er, top of the class.
Or the most ambitious /ruthless pick themselves, taking the old man and/or their dangerously competitive siblings out of the picture.
Either way there is a little more competition involved then what we normally think of with a modern family unit.
Training makes up a lot for stupidity and other gaps.
At some point, it doesn’t matter enough, but that can go quite awhile.
Doing those things at scale is ‘work’ even if it isn’t what most people consider work.
Learning how to sweat a pipe is useful if that’s what you’re going to need to do to put food on the table.
Learning how to placate powerful sponsors, not get caught doing naughty things, and networking among other power brokers is how you put food on the table as a ruling elite isn’t it? Or at least avoid being burned at the stake.
And not something they’re going to teach effectively at your neighborhood public school.
Seems like a clear link.
Working long hours isn't necessarily efficient.
I’ve not really observed it myself, and I’d suspect that part of it might be very different styles or ways of working. But maybe there’s a grain of truth there.
We're talking about "the people doing the day to day work are fiercely competitive and they want it all".
Do you really think those people's main goal is "to live a calm and good life".
China is now Soviet Union, but with horrendous demographics, mind-numbing debt, and wealth flooding out of the country. China is old and broke. China is fucked.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg
Unless you want to keep your head in the sand and pretend this is the soviet union all over again, you better start paying attention to how fast they are iterating.
>China is now Soviet Union, but with horrendous demographics, mind-numbing debt, and wealth flooding out of the country. China is old and broke. China is fucked.
Yeah this is the Peter Zeihan thesis but you know what, it might take a while for this to play out and in the meantime, China may not leave the arena until after they have taken out a large chunk of the western incumbents.
Nio Loses $35,000 A Car. https://www.carscoops.com/2023/10/nio-loses-35000-a-car-that...
BYD lost its EV crown to Tesla after just one quarter as China’s EV market slumps https://fortune.com/asia/2024/04/03/byd-loses-ev-crown-to-te...
The EU just got a step closer to hitting Chinese EVs with additional tariffs—and may even apply them retroactively https://fortune.com/2024/03/07/eu-nears-hitting-chinese-evs-...
I'd rather listen to Elon in this regard, this is one thing he does have experience in.
[1]:https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
>The EU just got a step closer to hitting Chinese EVs with additional tariffs—and may even apply them retroactively
The EU having no major tech giants to call their own has pivoted to regulation and tariffs against both China and the US.
You seem to be ignoring how they literally created and led this market over the last 15+ years. I get how you are so blinded by your hate of one man that you completely ignore the facts on the ground but do you have to make it so obvious?
> Maybe this is obvious to me coming from a world where all banks have their own analysts and all but the idea of trusting a market leader is just insane. Information asymmetry is so important to capitalism he's obviously not going to provide the full picture.
This would be a plausible statement if it hasn't been disproven time and time agin over the last 10 years. See the entire short industry that got burned by their analysts. I was there on day 1 of the /r/Realtesla a subreddit dedicated to pushing the thesis of following industry experts and analysis. In 2019 they were convinced that Tesla was structurally bankrupt.
The hard lesson I learned after years of failed predictions based on analysis is that banks and analysts only have a snapshot of a current moment in time and do not consider the fast moving nature of innovation led companies.
They have gotten this wrong with many tech companies but especially Tesla. Just to give you one example: all the analysts and shorts were certain that Tesla would fail in 2018 due to their live up to the minute counts of materials going in and out of the factories. They had live video feeds of everything happening outside the factory. They failed to predict Musk using a loophole in California laws to set up a giant tent and get production levels increased. That changed the entire calculus.
Musk has repeatedly proven the analysts wrong and so I'd ask why would you continue to trust them? Their motivation is to get people to pay their fees yet it seems as if they suffer no major consequences for continually getting it wrong.
Going back to what Musk said(which you obviously didn't even bother reading): "If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world," he said. "They're extremely good."
You might be able to make the argument that he is self serving in his comments but this quote is a poor hill to die on.
In addition, they've been trying to massively increase their military capacity, but throwing money at it only does so much: you also need young men, and there's not that many that think being in the military is a great idea, and people aren't having kids any more. At least in the old Soviet Union, there was no lack of young men being raised.
Good thing democratic countries regularly build up their foes in the name of market forces. Couldn't have worldwars without that..
It is interesting to compare-and-contrast Jack Ma and Elon Musk who seems to me the nearest analogue in the US. How their host countries treat them says a lot about the real cultural differences between Washington and Beijing. For all America's problems - at least up to Trump level annoying the politicians - it is safe to build wealth in the US.
Being a Venetian banker or Chinese tea exporter wasnt that safe. What about prospecting for gold in Colorado river valleys where bears hang out? Moving trains of camels thru the Sahara? Chasing whales around for years at a time without going home.
Today is way better.
That's bad for entrepreneurs, but also means that they can have the entire power of CCP behind them. There are tons of example where a small company started by stealing from western competitors then suddenly produced a huge pile of cash out of nowhere to bought those competitors and took over their marketshare in the west.
Take "fines" for example. They are the cost of doing business and never actually dissuade the behavior (in the USA). This in effect allows the government to act as a shareholder (fines = dividends) under the guise of domestic legal enforcement.
Then they turn around and protect the same corporations intellectual and physical property abroad.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-semiconductor-heist-of-th... https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ousted-arm-china-...
They would force CCP member into the board and setup CCP organizations within the companies. Anyone who deals with China's companies would need to understand this. You are always dealing with CCP behind it
They are solidly state capitalist since Deng, and since Xi I would classify them as far-right revisionist and even possibly fascist, with a strong focus on order, aesthetic, collective responsibility towards nation, and restoring the homeland, where homeland is defined on ethnonationalist not civic nationalist lines.
The only societies where communism works without authoritarianism are communes like the Longo Maï where people come by choice, not by force.
All new systems are introduced by force, even capitalism. Do you think that at one point in the past everybody in Britain decided that the state should be capitalist and so everyone, on their own accord, moved from communal land so it can be passed in to private hands?
Also, what is natural in me owning a factory on the other side of the world when I never left the city I live in?
Since we're already knee-deep in nitpicking terminology, this is describing the general philosophy of anarchism, not capitalism.
That is correct, and I was pointing out that it isn't specific to communism: any government or economic system will have at least 1 person who doesn't like it, but the system being created nonetheless requires imposing it by force, and maintaining it by force, which nearly every government does to this day.
And my original comment clearly shows that capitalism also had to be imposed for what once was communal needed to be confiscated in order to be redistributed.
> Almost all of the Soviet states transitioned to market economy democracies without any conflict at all
Indeed, a state capitalist society transitioned to market capitalism. Nothing needed to be taken from any one person but the state. Not really a new system, just new owners.
Though clearly what happened in the USSR in the 20s was something different from what he wrote. What you saw in Russia in that period was a response to an ongoing civil war, followed by the rise of Stalin.. who, yes, really did believe in brutal authoritarianism.
All these Stalinist states (and I would classify China this way too) will pay lip service to Leninism as a way to seek ideological legitimacy. But their "official" readings of Marx and Lenin are very... creative... shall we say.
But it's 1:30am and I should no be getting into this argument.
Stalin rose through the ranks by being a seemingly "competent" administrator who restored the power of the old Tsarist bureaucracy to "get things done."
But in general, Lenin gets a bad rap for the awful things his successor did.
You'll note that Putin admires Stalin but loathes Lenin. Even bizarrely singling Lenin out for his positions on Ukraine and the national question etc in his crazy speech justifying their aggression on the eve of their invasion.
It's a horrible tragedy of history in which millions died and all of eastern Europe fell under a terrible dark iron curtain which took the name "communism" but the name is effectively irrelevant. What it really was was a broken down highly authoritarian single party state that used the badge of "socialism" to lend itself legitimacy while doing very awful things in the name of Russian nationalism, certain individuals, the Party, etc. etc. Kleptocratic clique under the guise of a revolutionary state.
As we can see in China today the actual economic political model doesn't even matter. They'll use the name "communism" even when what they're doing is absolutely savagely market driven, or something else, like the quasi-theocracy in North Korea.
What they labelled as socialism in the East bears almost no resemblance to what socialists in the West advocated. But the label of "communism" will forever be marred by what these people did.
EDIT: A good classic book on this topic is "Leninism under Lenin" by Marcel Liebmann (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/908-leninism-under-leni...) -- now, whether that old book can stand the test of time now that more historical records from that period are open, I don't know. I'd be curious to see a (non-ideologically motivated) Russian historian with access to records from the Revolution take it apart.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1975/xx/liebman.html
Achieving communism necessarily entails authoritarianism because you need an authoritarian state to seize the property of existing landholders and business owners, and to prevent the creation/operation of new private businesses.
To me there's nothing 1984 or dystopian about this. The guy was building a company that was hurting the people. If anything we need more of this in the US.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/07/07/tech...
It's safe to build OBSCENE wealth in the states.
It's safe to build wealth in PRC, plenty of 10-100 millionaires.
It's also safe to build OBSCENE wealth in PRC, but it comes with more political caveats. Like not trying circumvent regulators by launching irresponsible fintech.
Which system is better depends on how much you value checking billionaires.
At low levels people buy politicians, at high levels politicians shake down the wealthy.
"why buy the cow for the milk?" etc. etc.
In the USA you can transfer it out of the country if you want to.
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3212414...
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/china-s-rich-are...
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-banks-waits-072...
https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/getting-money-out-o...
https://www.afr.com/world/asia/smurfing-strangers-how-china-...
https://agbrief.com/news/china/24/01/2024/china-tightens-con...
https://www.uschina.org/china%E2%80%99s-capital-controls-cho...
This is such a beautiful life isn't it? Im not saying China is any better, but come on man. Have some empathy for all the people that have been crushed by this system whether its the poor, the people on the receiving end in Gaza/Iraq/Iran/Pakistan/Venezuela or just the people unlucky to not be born at a competitive level.
"Ma spends much of his time abroad, especially in Japan where he is a visiting professor at Tokyo College, a research institute run by the University of Tokyo"
Jack Ma has no hope for China, as evident by his action. The long internal post may have been requested by the Chinese government, or his staff, to somehow rally Alibaba's failing image. But Jack sees the real pictures on the ground in China. And he chooses Japan.
And the young in China knows it too. That's why the young are laying flat. and sneaking through Mexico into US. and fleeing to Cambodia and Myanmar for work.
Or directly written by them under his name..
The young in China are so disillusioned, they are buying gold in droves this year [1] (instead of putting it in bank, or invest in stock market or real estate)
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240221-youth-appetit...
Could have been written simply out of fear as well. No matter where he goes, he's not safe from the CCP, so better try and stay in their good graces.
No. The difference is the talented and otherwise ambitious are being sacrificed by an older generation to an exceptional degree in China. That's happening elsewhere, too. But because the political systems are not dictatorships, they're able to adapt.
Tang Ping on the other hand is a phenomenon where the individual only produces as much as his environment demands of him. If he contracted with his employer to work 9 to 5, he will work 9 to 5 and not a second more. If his work description is producing Powerpoint slides, he will produce Powerpoint slides and only Powerpoint slides. If he is remote work, he will quit rather than come into the office. He will then use the freed up time and energy on other pursuits he deems worthy.
Emerging PRC analogues to NEETs/Hikikomori are "full time kids". TLDR is high savings rate and culture = kids live with parents and do bumfuck while looking for jobs they think are their level. Some will settle for employment beneath them, some will live off their parents dime if their parents can support it. Cause is PRC went from single digit to 60% tertiary rate in last 20 years, there's too much talent/competition last few years as graduating classes got larger and larger but not enough jobs uni kids want.
If growth stalls but expectations of what "success" looks like in life remain the same then inevitably the more rational amongst them will look and see that just achieving a "normal" life seems incredibly difficult.
I'm not saying it's not serious, it's also not particularly special to PRC. Like the few tanping kids I hear about IRL in PRC are like your typical western kids with comfortably wealthy boomer parents who can afford to fuck around because they got safety net/inheritance down the line. Everyone else grinding while joking about tanping, like antiwork folks in the west bitch about their conditions, but eat continue to eat shit all the same.
and the ability to be extremely vocal about it -- which could get you sent to jail or otherwise ruin your life via social credit scores.
point is, the kids in China have it notably rough.
Historically, no country has survived without paying its government workers for more than 24 months.
China has just entered its 16th month. so roughly 8 months remaining. coincidentally the new US president will be announced around then.
So far the actions of Israel, Russia's confidence suggests Trump re-election. China appears to be waiting and speed running its military re-armament but I wonder if decades of neglect can be overcome within just 3 quarters...