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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

#361

Post by thu2111 »

kennywinker wrote: post #270
cbozeman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Microsoft revenue increased a lot when Steve Ballmer was in charge. I don't think anyone would claim MS was a great organisation during that period though, given how many major industry trends they just totally missed. Ballmer didn't trash the business but the action moved elsewhere.

As for Apple, putting the questionable meaning of the stock market to one side for a moment, when was the last time they did anything truly exciting, that cut their competitors legs out from under them? The M1 chip? That's the only thing I can think of for a long time, and it's a bit unclear how much consumers will care vs geeks.

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

#362

Post by loosescrews »

orange_tee wrote: post #32

The West thought once China is full of billionaires, the billionaires having all that wealth would then have the power to oppose and dissolve the CCP. Didn't go as planned.

One thing Chinese billionaires have is the freedom to leave (at least until they get in trouble). This precedent seems to make it clear that once you have amassed that much power and wealth, it would be crazy to stay in China.

Or maybe in order to archive such success in China one must have connections to people in high places and people with said connections can't imaging their connections turning on them.

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

#363

Post by marcus_holmes »

rorykoehler wrote: post #350
marcus_holmes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but I understood that those were more "diplomatic" investments. The ports in Sri Lanka, for example, are impractical and unused, their function fulfilled as soon as the deal was agreed.

They've bought over a dozen existing shipping ports in Europe https://www.npr.org/2018/10/09/642587456/chinese-firms-now-h...

That's interesting, I didn't know it was that widespread. Thanks :)

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

#364

Post by Ericson2314 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #355
Ericson2314 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Chinese household debt was absurdly low, but I guess that's changed. Still, I would prefer to "quotient out the money", and say either the demand is met or it isn't? To the extent it is met, perhaps there are imports of material goods or domestic labor (nurses?) I don't think it makes sense to worry about "domestic debt" in the same way, given the non-liberal political economy. Of course that doesn't mean t…

So, Lost Decade Japan on steroids. A massive debt hangover after an asset bubble pop, deflation for a decade, and worse employment prospects and economic conditions for young people.

It's silly to think that smaller portion of working age population -> worse employment prospects. That process is very possible but relies on higher order effects.

You can't just blindly apply the economics of traditional liberal economies to a 21st century high tech illiberal economy.

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

#365

Post by SZJX »

Simply sad to see such a garbage-quality piece of fear-mongering "journalism" (published more than 2 weeks ago, no less), with only wild anti-CCP speculations from a single random commentator for Radio Free Asia (spoiler: not exactly known for their neutrality), and practically non-existent factual information, getting so many upvotes here. If one applies the least bit of logic, one could immediately grasp the absurdity of such a "proposal", which would only do every party involved immense harm.

Then again, maybe this is no longer anything surprising at all, given the multiple recent precedents, including e.g. the ridiculous "chromeisbad.com" post.

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

#366

Post by jonplackett »

threatofrain wrote: post #132
jonplackett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a discussion a while back between Musk and Ma. I think you do a disservice to Musk to compare them. He really didn't seem able to keep up.

There’s a lot of reason why Jack Ma might not want to say anything interesting, esp with asymmetrical stakes where for Elon this is just fun banter and brand building, but missteps by Jack Ma could be severe.

This was quite a while back when he didn’t seem that worried. It wasn’t that he wasn’t speaking. I just thought Musk came across A LOT better.

Just my opinion though.

Here’s the video if you want to form your own: https://youtu.be/WSKYWu-S2G0

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

#367

Post by jonplackett »

mssundaram wrote: post #84
jonplackett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a discussion a while back between Musk and Ma. I think you do a disservice to Musk to compare them. He really didn't seem able to keep up.

Wouldn't it be a disservice to Ma if you're saying Musk couldn't keep up?

I’m saying it’s a disservice to compare them, since I felt like thy were in different intelectual leagues.

But I’d say it’s a bit unfair to compare musk to most people

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

#368

Post by zigh »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #93
free_rms wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not covert, but it's quite literally a propaganda machine. The reason Radio Free Europe/Asia were founded was to broadcast the benefits of 'freedom' into communist-governed areas. You might think that we're qualitatively the good guys, and I'm all for freedom, but that's definitionally 'propaganda'.

The question at issue here is whether RFE/RFA's reporting is known to be reputable. As far as I can tell, it is. (Funding a reputable journalistic organization is entirely consistent with "broadcasting the benefits of freedom", and doing the opposite would probably undermine those goals.) The person who started this thread is trying to discount an RFA report solely because of the source. That seems unwarranted.

Unfortunately, this particular report does not seem to be reputable, based on the way unsubstantiated rumour and uncredible source were solely used to draw an eye-catching title.

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

#369

Post by scarmig »

thu2111 wrote: post #359
scarmig wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abili…

Can you evidence that? I've seen absolutely no evidence of the CCP being dynamic or creative. Chinese history forked the day Taiwan became independent, and Taiwan has been well ahead of China in basically every way for my entire life. The CCP seems to hold China back quite drastically. It gets praised as having brought about some sort of Chinese economic miracle in certain western circles, but the evidence from Taiwa…

Note that dynamic/creative doesn't mean good, just that it's able to develop novel solutions to problems and implement them in a way that brings it closer to its goals.

In recent times, its response to the COVID outbreak is a good example. It's the only "continental" country which has successfully contained COVID, by leveraging its ability to put the whole of China on a wartime footing. That's despite the disease originating in China; them being the first government to have to figure out an approach, with limited biological knowledge of the disease; and initial missteps that led to a full scale disaster in a major city. Today, amazingly, the CCP has more domestic support than it did a year ago, having received credit for defeating COVID.

Other examples of successes: pioneering a way for a government to harness the Internet to increase its own power; the subjugation of rebellious regions (which, by contrast, many countries including the USSR failed at) while mitigating international fallout; wresting control of the South China Sea from competitor states.

Its richness vs SK's and TW's is an interesting discussion, and Maoism set mainland China back decades. But mainland China was a poorer area in 1920 than either SK or TW, with a more rural and isolated population, and SK and TW avoided the worst of WW2 and the ravages of the Chinese Civil War while reaping the benefits of being maritime states and allied to rich countries. A better comparison would be to India, which is a country with a similarly large landmass, massive rural peasant populations, and isolated inland villages. In 1950, it had a similar GDP per capita as China, but today China's GDP per capita is almost 4x that of India. (SK and TW, by contrast, started at a ~50% higher GDP per capita in 1950 than either, though they're now both ~200% higher per capita). It's actually pretty shocking that India did so badly for half a century, considering how badly China mucked things up for three decades.

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

#370

Post by majani »

orange_tee wrote: post #32

The West thought once China is full of billionaires, the billionaires having all that wealth would then have the power to oppose and dissolve the CCP. Didn't go as planned.

The one true power in the world is the ability to physically harm others. Therefore given how modern civilization is structured, a head of state with a loyal military and police is always the most powerful person in the country.
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