Excursion or defection? At the end of November was Financial Times revealed that Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been living in Tokyo for six months with his wife. The British diary describes a man who leads a lavish but very discreet lifestyle between business clubs and provincial resorts. According to our information, Jack Ma lives just behind the Roppongi Hills shopping complex in the Hiro-o district, a five-minute walk from the Chinese Embassy. A neighbor describes him surrounded by five bodyguards as soon as he leaves his home. In particular, he visited the general manager of Laox, an electronic equipment distribution chain bought by a Chinese foundation.
This resort is not surprising in itself. In addition to the endless historical-diplomatic disputes (about Japanese colonization, about the sovereignty of certain islands and their space) between the two neighbors, Japan retains a formidable attraction over the Chinese upper class, also visible as tourists (in 2019, the last year before the Covid- 19, they had represented a third of arrivals and expenses) than discreet as investors, from the Shanghai household buying a pied-à-terre in Tokyo to the fund participating in a huge real estate project in a Hokkaido ski area. According to figures from the Ministry of Finance, China accounts for about 15% of Japan’s total foreign investment holdings. It is the second largest investor in the archipelago after the United States.
Early media retirement
Jack Ma himself embodies this business closeness between the two countries: it was the Japanese tycoon Masayoshi Son who, in 1999, bet on the man, who was still only an ambitious young foreigner, and provided him with the first capital to found what became Alibaba , the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, twenty years later. And who made Jack Ma today the fifth richest in China and the 67th richest in the world, according to the magazine Forbes.
The person in question, a symbol of a conquering, open and dynamic China, embodied a “Chinese dream” of social ascent. Since then, it has reluctantly become an authoritarian China that no longer tolerates counterfeit notes, led by Xi Jinping. In October 2020, Jack Ma sharply criticized the financial regulatory authorities in his country in public. “We cannot manage the future with the means of the past… There is no systemic risk in Chinese finance because there is no Chinese financial system”, he asserts. .
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Power will not forgive him these little sentences. A few days later it freezes his die the then impending huge IPO of Ant, his insurance group. Banned his business school from taking new students. And forced the one who was the most prominent businessman in China into early retirement from the media. In the month of July The Wall Street Journal revealed that Jack Ma planned to opt out of Ant. Last week, he stepped down as president of the Zhejiang Entrepreneurs Association, the region of China where he is from and where he founded Alibaba. Will China’s prodigal son become its most famous expatriate?
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