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China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

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Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#261

Post by drieddust »

f430 wrote: post #95

Guo Wengui said back in September 2019 that "Jack Ma would be jailed or killed" on Kyle Bass's youtube channel. [1] At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this: 1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed" 2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized 3) Rinse & Repeat Everybody who isn't familiar w…

Well at least west have cheap iphones and other necessities, isn't it?

Corporate geed is the reason CCP is so powerful today.

Every single corporation I have worked with is willing to comply with China,it's censorship laws, and it's atrocities on the work force.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#262

Post by bigpumpkin »

bosswipe wrote: post #226
hungryhobo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So chinese people should just sit down and live low class life. Got it.

You can be aggrieved, blame the west, assign whatever morality you want, it doesn't change the fact that the planet doesn't have enough resources for everyone to live a middle class lifestyle.

Rather let the Chinese continue to ride on bicycles than the west give up on SUVs.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#263

Post by echelon »

bosswipe wrote: post #226
hungryhobo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So chinese people should just sit down and live low class life. Got it.

You can be aggrieved, blame the west, assign whatever morality you want, it doesn't change the fact that the planet doesn't have enough resources for everyone to live a middle class lifestyle.

Yes it does. As we automate more, there will even be an opportunity for everyone to work less.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#264

Post by ogre_codes »

scarmig wrote: post #235
ogre_codes wrote: post #89

Wow.. this is like a giant gift to Amazon. Obviously they aren't getting more Chinese business, but they've struggled there already. But it makes it a lot easier for them to compete everywhere else. Competing against CCP is going to be a lot easier than competing against Jack Ma.

Let's play this out. Suppose the CCP does nationalize BABA, and as a result Amazon starts beating it. Over time Amazon comes to dominate Chinese ecommerce, with hundreds of billions of yuan flowing from Chinese consumers to Bezos' pocket. Bezos then says something critical of the CCP. How is this scenario likely to develop after that point?

> billions of yuan flowing from Chinese consumers to Bezos' pocket

I started my post with the assumption that Amazon is never going to get big in China. Regardless of whether Bezos is nice to the CCP or not, the CCP is not going to allow Amazon to displace Alibaba.

My comment is referring competing for business in the rest of the world. Other countries where Alibaba and Amazon are both trying to gain marker share.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#265

Post by scarmig »

SoylentYellow wrote: post #229
scarmig wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions > It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party. This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that is getting the West into trouble. There is no dictatorship system. At most, it points to a non-democratic system. But that term covers an incredibly wide variety of regimes, from 1920s Portugal to Latin American Cold War authorita…

How is calling the CCP a dictatorship getting the West into trouble?

Reductive thinking of how Chinese politics works gets the US into trouble. Particularly, the idea that the CCP is primarily a sclerotic, nonfunctional tumor on society, operating through sheer force of malign will, and that a democratic transition would be enabled as soon as the US helped cultivate alternative domestic institutions to the CCP.

The reality is that the CCP is a dynamic organization, which has the ability to react to new situations and effect new goals in creative ways, in some ways better than Western liberal democracy. "Dictatorship" rhetoric obscures that reality and encourages lazy thinking about liberalism reigning triumphant at the end of history.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#266

Post by throw_m239339 »

aeternum wrote: post #243
throw_m239339 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Billionaires can be held more accountable than government because they must continually compete for people's dollars. I don't know what to answer that except that it's the quickest way to get a fascist regime that doesn't even try to hide it's fascist. Monopolies don't need to compete with people's dollars. > Movements like the Chick-Fil-A boycott and #deletefacebook do hurt companies None of these movements really…

We can and should break up monopolies, or structure taxes and regulations to be unfavorable to monopolies. Current government policies favor large corporations due to both tax incentives and regulatory capture. Chick-Fil-A stopped donating to anti-LGBTQ groups. #deletefacebook did work but most users just switched to instagram so it had a minimal effect on revenue.

> We can and should break up monopolies, or structure taxes and regulations to be unfavorable to monopolies. Current government policies favor large corporations due to both tax incentives and regulatory capture.

And putting unelected billionaires in charge is going to do exactly that? No.

> #deletefacebook did work but most users just switched to instagram so it had a minimal effect on revenue

No it didn't. Neither case the bottom line of both companies was impacted in any meaningful way.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#267

Post by ethbr0 »

daemin wrote: post #211
f430 wrote: post #95

Guo Wengui said back in September 2019 that "Jack Ma would be jailed or killed" on Kyle Bass's youtube channel. [1] At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this: 1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed" 2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized 3) Rinse & Repeat Everybody who isn't familiar w…

I remember an episode of Planet Money podcast where they went to the village where a secret agreement was signed by some farmers to divide up the communal land and farm it individually, so they could sell the surplus and make some profit. In the podcast they managed to talk to one of the original signatories to the agreement, and he lamented that fact that after his farming days he had started many businesses but the…

Or another way of putting it, and always one of the weaknesses of over-powerful government and an impotent judiciary -- political skill trumps business skill.

Play that out long enough, and you have all the "China {X} Industries" being owned by someone whose chief qualification was working their way up the CCP hierarchy. To the detriment of the company's functioning, and the alternate candidates who could perform better in the position.

And that, ultimately, hurts China more than anyone else.

Anti-corruption drives are no substitute for constant, actual market pressures, because weasels will always corrupt the very vehicles you use to implement anti-corruption campaigns. Or equally inevitably, end up in charge of the entire apparatus.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#268

Post by baybal2 »

brabel wrote: post #171
marcinzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who is praising the CCP's economic rise? A majority of Americans until relatively recently? China was seen favorably by most Americans until the last decade. An economic world power that we should strengthen relations with if polls are to be believed. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...

We need to get things straight: everyone should praise the rise of Chinese people's living standards, which has been astonishing in the last 45 years or so, and has taken 850 million people out of poverty[0]! This is not something a reasonable person can argue against! The increase in human wellbeing in the whole planet has been almost entirely due to the Chinese in the last 50 years. That doest' mean we should prais…

> I honestly believe that even the CCP highest party members want to see the improvement of the Chinese people's lives, it would be completely irrational to believe otherwise...

It's completely rational to, especially now, when Chinese analogue of bolsheviks are now in power in the party.

USSR's elites lived in the most obscene luxuries, and the CPC has beaten that few times over.

Their raison d'etre was to get more of that.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#269

Post by scarmig »

ogre_codes wrote: post #264
scarmig wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's play this out. Suppose the CCP does nationalize BABA, and as a result Amazon starts beating it. Over time Amazon comes to dominate Chinese ecommerce, with hundreds of billions of yuan flowing from Chinese consumers to Bezos' pocket. Bezos then says something critical of the CCP. How is this scenario likely to develop after that point?

> billions of yuan flowing from Chinese consumers to Bezos' pocket I started my post with the assumption that Amazon is never going to get big in China . Regardless of whether Bezos is nice to the CCP or not, the CCP is not going to allow Amazon to displace Alibaba. My comment is referring competing for business in the rest of the world. Other countries where Alibaba and Amazon are both trying to gain marker share.

I didn't see the part including and following "Obviously they aren't getting more Chinese business..." when I made my comment. I don't think we disagree, then.

Re: China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report

#270

Post by kennywinker »

cbozeman wrote: post #14
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am most surprised about how surprised everyone is about these events. Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is? China is executing an executive for bribery and corruption [1] (a lot of bribery and corruption though!). Perhaps it's simply the Overton Window [2] delta between the US and China. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/china-sentences-ex-banker-to-death-for... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton…

> Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is? Yes, I did actually. There's every reason to believe that the people installed to run Alibaba / Ant after Jack gets sent off to "re-education camp" will be unable to propel it to further heights. Stagnation is likely as good as it'll get and there's every reason to believe it'll be run into the ground eventually. I see Jack Ma as a sort of Chinese Elon Musk…

Like how Apple has crashed and burnt since Steve Jobs' death? Oh... wait, their stock is up 11x and their revenue is up 2.5x. Seems like things are actually going fine. Maybe we attribute the success of companies almost entirely to the one man at the top, instead of to the thousands of workers who make up the company.
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