What really happened to Jack Ma?

The poster did not mention ideology or nationalism. Please don't pretend to misinterpret.

The very excellent effect of Ma's downfall is that it will remind wealthy people in the West that democracy has its good points.

Much easier to sympathize with the expropriation of a Billionaire than some schlub from the middle of nowhere.

What happens if Xi kicks the can tomorrow? How smooth is the transition going to be? China is so massive I cant understand how they dont have multiple power centers bumping into each other all the time.

Colour me paranoid.. but I think I'm a realist.

From China's point of view, the creation (and concentration) of (large amounts) of wealth in the hands of individuals, leads to the concentration of power. That power in turn, becomes a threat to the current approach of the CCP, and the messages being shared with society.

In 2019, China began working with PWC in an effort to repatriate, or at least dual-list IPOs, in either Shanghai (Star) or Hong Kong. DIDI publicly want against that goal - by single-listing on the Nasdaq.

By accruing a massive amount of wealth, and freedoms, Ma began to become a thorn in the side of the CCP. It's one thing to have (direct) access to finances, it's another to disparage the state-run financial system. But it's still another to control purchase platforms, chat platforms, and the next-generation of educated, technology executives. This is where he was.

Ma has been silenced, the threat has been eliminated. The CCP has proven, once again that they are adept at addressing both the internal and external threat to their perceived stability.

> There are one billion smartphones in China today. Everyone knows what Jack Ma looks like. Given his notoriety, and the intense vested interest of the financial world in his status and well-being, if he is at liberty today, how could it be that there are no pictures of him in circulation?

This point would be better if it could be demonstrated by showing that there were a lot of ordinary people taking pictures of Ma in public all the way through October 2020 and then that suddenly stopped.

So I decided to check for myself and searched for 马云 偶遇 on DDG. First result was this article about a woman's selfie with him going viral, published on June 2, 2021: https://new.qq.com/omn/20210602/20210602A02NNM00.html

If he'd known about this, there are many ways the author could've attacked its credibility (e.g. maybe it's a deepfake or an old picture) but given that he doesn't mention it, I conclude that he didn't do enough research and his list of sightings is incomplete.

EDIT: Yep, it's an old picture, also appears in this Zhihu post from two years ago: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/57836061

EDIT 2: Also a few semi-recent results on Weibo: https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%... I'm too lazy to check how many of them are reposts of old pictures.