The ugly fight between Xi Jinping’s CCP and billionaire Jack Ma has taken a symbolic yet threatening turn where the state-sponsored media is now issuing veiled threats to the Alibaba founder that he will be blown to smoke ( horse in the clouds). According to a Nikkei Asia report, a cryptic column was posted on Xinhua’s official WeChat account after Ma was summoned to a round of questioning by the Chinese authorities.
The article, headlined, “Don’t speak thoughtlessly, don’t do as you please, people can’t act on their free will,” was accompanied by a Japanese artist, Kaii Higashiyama’s popular 1972 painting titled ‘Fleecy Clouds’ (horse in the clouds) which showed a white cloud in the sky shaped like a horse. At first glance, the image might look harmless but when the reader understands that Ma’s Chinese name Ma Yun literally means Horse and Clouds, then it doesn’t take much time to connect the dots that it is Jack Ma who is being targeted in the article.
Speculation quickly spread that the column, which hints that the horse could be blown away like a cloud, must have been published with the blessing of China’s top leadership.
The line immediately above the horse in the clouds painting in the article reads, “Everything has its costs, if you do not have the capital, please do not do whatever you want.”
As reported previously by TFI, the once crown jewel of CCP—Jack Ma–invited the wrath of Xi Jinping and the entire Politburo of Beijing after he made scathing remarks about the outdated financial regulations of the country. His observations were the ignition point that led to the entire Chinese machinery to turn against him.
“China does not have a systemic financial risk problem,” Ma had said at the Bund Summit where he further added, “Chinese finance basically does not carry risk; rather, the risk comes from lacking a system.” Good innovation is not afraid of regulation but is afraid of outdated regulation. We shouldn’t use the way to manage a train station to regulate an airport.”
It was after this meeting that the Shanghai Stock Exchange gave a major shock to Jack Ma and announced that it had suspended the fintech solutions company’s IPO on its STAR market, also prompting Ant to freeze the Hong Kong leg of its dual listing that was supposed to take place on Thursday. As a result, Jinping started his purge by halting Ma’s Ant Group Co.’s $35 billion IPO in Shanghai and Hong Kong which really hurt Ma’s business.
Analysts remarked that the move to shatter Ant’s IPO was done so to teach Jack Ma a lesson that he might be the richest man in the country but if he wants to ply his trade within the sovereign boundaries of the country, then he will have to adhere to CCP’s line and not speak ill of the party or the regulators, out in the public.
The Chinese Communist Party for long has promoted Chinese tech giants as national champions. But now these national champions are facing global outrage and want to expand themselves within China. They want China to relax its regulatory burden in order to promote its expansion.
Within China, there is a growing fear that the Xi Jinping administration could go after the biggest of tech companies. Such fears are leading to Chinese tech giants losing hundreds of billions of dollars in their stock market value. Last week, Alibaba (BABA) and JD.com (JD) went down more than 10 per cent in Hong Kong trading within a day. The publication of the painting is another message to Ma that he needs to quickly yield the ground and lie prostrate in front of the CCP high command.