- Yahoo Finance reported that Jack Ma, a Chinese billionaire and founder of Alibaba and Ant Group, has not been seen publicly for more than two months.
- At the end of last year, Chinese regulators launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba and introduced new regulations that interrupted Ant Group’s initial public offering.
- Other prominent entrepreneurs, such as retired real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang and former asset manager Xiao Jianhua, also disappeared after facing criticism from Chinese regulators.
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Chinese billionaire and founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, has been remarkably absent from public life.
Yahoo Finance reported on Monday that Ma has not been seen publicly for more than two months. Ma missed a scheduled TV appearance in November on a talent show he founded. Another Alibaba executive replaced Ma, and the TV site removed Ma’s photo, the Telegraph reported.
His public absence follows the Chinese regulators’ antitrust investigation into e-commerce giant Alibaba. Ant Group, Ma’s financial services firm, has drawn the ire of Chinese banks for stealing business from them. The country introduced a series of new regulations in November that interrupted Ant Group’s initial public offering.
Ant Group and Alibaba were not immediately available for comment.
Read More: China’s antitrust investigation of Alibaba could be an opportunity for other cloud players – including Amazon, Microsoft and Google – to join
Ma was said to have criticized global financial regulators at a conference in Shanghai in late October, calling them an “elderly club” inadequate to oversee Chinese technological innovation. Duncan Clark, president of BDA China, a Beijing-based technology company, speculated that Ma might have been instructed to “shut up” due to the new rules, Reuters reported.
While Ma may be trying to stay out of the public eye during the investigation, his notable absence is a reminder of other Chinese businessmen who disappeared from the public after fighting with regulators.
Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate tycoon, left the radar in March 2020 after criticizing the Communist Party for mishandling the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Times reported. Beijing later sentenced Ren to 18 years in prison, a possible life sentence for the 69-year-old.
The country is said to have arrested other public critics of China’s response to the pandemic, including law professor Xu Zhangrun and human rights lawyer Zhang Xuezhong.
Chinese police kidnapped Xiao Jianhua, a former asset manager, from a Hong Kong hotel in January 2017, Reuters reported. Since then, Xiao has disappeared into Chinese custody and the country has confiscated parts of his company Tomorrow Group, the Times reported. Chinese regulators have criticized Xiao and other tycoons for alienating potential investors from Chinese stock markets, according to The Guardian.
Meng Hongwei, the former head of the International Criminal Police Organization, disappeared from the public in September 2018 during a trip from France to China, according to the BBC.
China sentenced Hongwei to 13 and a half years in prison on bribery charges in January 2020. But Meng’s wife, who reported her husband’s disappearance, told The Guardian that she believed her husband was innocent and that his detention was motivated. policy.
“It’s not justice,” Meng’s wife told The Guardian about her husband’s detention. “I think the anti-corruption campaign in China has already been undermined. It has become a way of attacking people who are your enemies.”
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