The School in the Countryside
On a cold Sunday in January 2021, a black car pulled off a provincial road and wound through the hills of Tonglu county, about ninety minutes southwest of Hangzhou, toward a small elementary school whose playgrounds were empty and whose handful of on-duty teachers were not expecting visitors. The man who stepped out stood roughly five feet tall, wore a dark jacket, and carried with him the particular kind of nervous energy that attaches to people who have recently learned the limits of their own power. Jack Ma — China's most famous entrepreneur, controlling shareholder of Ant Group, spiritual founder of an e-commerce empire processing roughly $1 trillion in annual merchandise, unofficial goodwill ambassador to kings and prime ministers, the person whose Alipay app was swiped open hundreds of millions of times each day to pay for coffee and dumplings and electricity — had driven hours into the Chinese countryside to prove to the world that he was still free.
His team stage-managed the visit with the fastidiousness of a diplomatic advance crew. Teachers who approached for selfies were turned down. Only Ma's own camera crew was permitted to film. He spent an hour listening to staff discuss education, signed his name on a dormitory wall — "We can only say Teacher Ma does not have very good handwriting," the vice-principal later told the Financial Times, though friends insist Ma is actually a talented calligrapher — and promised to return someday when the children were present. "Things have not been so smooth for him lately," principal Chen Jianqiang explained, "so he doesn't want to appear publicly."
The clip, when it surfaced, made global headlines. Alibaba regained $47 billion in market value. A planned bond sale was put back on track. That the most consequential entrepreneur in modern Chinese history had been reduced to this — a furtive drive through winter hills, a brief, carefully monitored appearance at an out-of-the-way school, a scribbled signature left as proof of life — tells you everything about what happened to Jack Ma, and everything about what it means to build a private empire inside a one-party state.
Three months earlier, he had been at the pinnacle of global business. Morgan Stanley's top technology banker, Michael Grimes, had hailed the imminent $37 billion initial public offering of Ant Group as "a truly landmark and historic transaction." Then Ma took a stage in Shanghai and said the wrong things to the wrong people, and within days the IPO was dead, his fortune had shed roughly $10 billion, regulations designed to dismantle a pillar of Ant's business were unveiled, and the limelight-addicted, globetrotting billionaire who had dined with
Bill Gates and done magic tricks for the president of Rwanda simply vanished.
By the Numbers
The Ma Empire at Its Peak
$37BAnt Group IPO valuation before cancellation (Nov 2020)
~$1TAnnual merchandise volume across Alibaba marketplaces
$25BAlibaba's 2014 NYSE IPO — then the world's largest
711MAlipay monthly active users at time of Ant IPO filing
$61.7BJack Ma's peak net worth (2020)
$2.8BAntitrust fine levied on Alibaba (April 2021)
~$877BCombined market cap loss for Ant and Alibaba after crackdown
The English Teacher's Ear
Ma Yun was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province known for its West Lake and silk trade, to parents who performed pingtan — a form of traditional musical storytelling that offers clues to the source of his son's outsized flamboyance and the salesman's instinct for narrative that would eventually carry him from a lakeside apartment to the New York Stock Exchange. His grandfather had been a local official under the Nationalist Party, the kind of background that during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution meant persecution, shame, and the systemic erasure of a family's social standing. Ma grew up in a China still convulsing from Mao's campaigns — his parents' art form was banned, his relatives suffered — and the scars of that era would later inform both his pragmatic distance from the state and his instinctive understanding that in China, the Party's tolerance is the oxygen every private enterprise breathes.
What distinguished the young Ma was not academic talent. He failed his college entrance exam twice — mathematics was his nemesis — and was rejected from job after job. At a new KFC franchise in Hangzhou, twenty-four people applied and twenty-three were hired; Ma was the sole rejection. What he possessed instead was a peculiar, almost compulsive curiosity about the world beyond China's borders. Beginning at age twelve, he would rise before dawn and bicycle forty minutes to a hotel near West Lake to practice English with foreign tourists. He did this every morning for eight or nine years, offering himself as a free tour guide, absorbing not just vocabulary but an entirely different way of seeing. "China was opening up, and a lot of foreign tourists went there," he later recalled. "Those eight years changed me deeply, as I became more globalized than most Chinese. What foreign visitors told us was different from what I learned from my teachers and books."
One of those tourists, an Australian family, befriended the scrawny teenager and later hosted him in Australia — his first trip abroad. The apartment in Hangzhou from which Ma would eventually launch Alibaba was purchased with money loaned by that same family, a detail that rhymes almost too neatly with the central theme of Ma's life: that the capacity to bridge cultures, to be an interpreter between worlds, can be both the source of extraordinary power and the origin of extraordinary danger.
He was finally admitted to the Hangzhou Teachers College on his third attempt, in 1984, graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1988, and spent the next five years teaching English at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronics and Engineering. He was, by every account, a gifted and beloved teacher — an identity he would cling to long after becoming a billionaire, insisting that employees and the public call him "Teacher Ma." It was not affectation. Teaching was the first thing at which he excelled, and the pedagogue's instinct — the need to narrate, explain, inspire, win over a room — would prove to be his most formidable business tool and, ultimately, his most dangerous liability.
Black Cat, White Cat
In 1994, Ma founded his first business: the Haibo Translation Agency, a modest Hangzhou outfit providing English interpretation. It was a small-bore enterprise, but it planted the seed of a conviction that would define his career — that the gap between China and the outside world was not just a cultural fact but a commercial opportunity of staggering proportions.
The following year, while traveling to the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou city government, Ma encountered the internet for the first time. The story has been told so many times it has calcified into myth, but the details retain their charge. In Seattle, a friend encouraged him to search for something online. Ma was initially afraid — computers were expensive, and if he broke it, he couldn't afford to replace it. He searched for "beer." Results appeared from Germany, the United States, Japan. Nothing from China. He searched for "China" itself. Still nothing. He and his friend made a crude web page for the translation agency. Within hours, he received five emails. "I said, 'What is email?'" Ma later recalled. He knew, with the certainty of the convert, that he had found the thing.
He returned to Hangzhou and founded China Pages, one of the country's first internet companies, creating web pages for Chinese businesses. It was a visionary bet placed in a country that had barely heard of the internet — Ma, lacking technical credentials, resorted to fabricating a quote from Bill Gates ("The internet will change every aspect of people's lives") to lend credibility to his evangelism. But China Pages ran headlong into a problem that would recur throughout Ma's career: the state. Hangzhou Telecom, a government-backed entity, launched a copycat service and outmuscled Ma's startup. He sold out and left, powerless. "The experience shaped his relationship with the state — respectful, but distanced," the Financial Times later noted.
From 1997 to 1999, Ma worked at the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing, a stint that gave him an inside view of how China's bureaucracy ticked. His knowledge of English and the internet made him useful — he was assigned to escort Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang to the Great Wall when Yang visited China in 1997. "I was immediately struck by how inquisitive and how curious he was about the internet," Yang said later. "He clearly was not your typical government person."
The ministry job confirmed for Ma what the China Pages experience had already suggested: that the government was a force to be navigated, not joined. Deng Xiaoping's famous aphorism — "Black cat or white cat, if it can catch mice, it's a good cat" — had launched the private sector, but the Party's embrace of entrepreneurs remained conditional, transactional, liable to be withdrawn without warning. Ma internalized a paradox: you needed the state's tolerance to build anything of scale, but proximity to the state was its own kind of trap. He told employees, later, to "be in love with the government, but don't marry them." He also said he would hand over his entire company "to the nation" at any time if asked. Both statements were probably sincere. That was the paradox.
Eighteen Friends in a Hangzhou Apartment
In early 1999, Ma quit the ministry and returned to Hangzhou. He gathered seventeen friends in his apartment — the number eighteen, including Ma, would become mythologized in Alibaba lore the way Apple's garage or Facebook's dorm room has been in Silicon Valley — and persuaded them to invest roughly $60,000 total into a new venture. The pitch was simple and, in the China of 1999, almost absurdly ambitious: build an online marketplace to connect Chinese manufacturers with buyers around the world.
He named it Alibaba, after the character in the One Thousand and One Nights who discovered a fortune by uttering a password, because, as Ma later explained, "everyone knows the story of Alibaba — he's a young man who's willing to help others." The name was also easily spelled in English, searchable globally, and carried the unmistakable promise that something valuable lay behind the door. It was a salesman's choice.
The company's first years were characterized by the scrappy desperation common to startups in countries without established venture capital ecosystems. Ma's salespeople, nicknamed "Iron Soldiers," went door-to-door with leather backpacks — sometimes used to fend off guard dogs — persuading skeptical factory owners that the internet was not a scam. When those Iron Soldiers eventually left the company, they wrote books about their experiences, set up consultancies, became evangelists for a philosophy of entrepreneurial endurance that Ma had channeled from his own biography of rejection and failure.
Joseph Tsai arrived early and proved indispensable. Born in Taiwan, educated at Yale Law School, Tsai had been working in private equity in Hong Kong when he met Ma. Tsai took a massive pay cut to join as Alibaba's CFO, bringing the legal and financial sophistication that Ma lacked. Together, they courted Goldman Sachs and Japan's SoftBank as early investors. Goldman and a group of venture capitalists took a 50 percent stake; Masayoshi Son's SoftBank subsequently accumulated roughly 30 percent. The money kept the company alive but progressively diluted Ma's ownership to a sliver — a structural vulnerability that would later drive one of the most brazen corporate maneuvers in Chinese business history.
We had 18 people in my apartment and now we have four big campuses. Fifteen years ago, we were big but 15 years later, we are still a baby.
The Pawnshop and the Payment
In 2003, as Alibaba's business-to-business marketplace gained traction, Ma confronted a fundamental obstacle: trust. Chinese consumers had almost no access to credit cards, and buyers and sellers on a nascent e-commerce platform needed some way to ensure that goods would actually arrive and payments would actually clear. Ma tasked his finance team with building a solution. Alipay launched as an escrow service — it held the buyer's money and released it to the seller only after the buyer confirmed receipt of the goods.
"When I started Alipay, everyone said: 'Jack, this is the most stupid model we've ever seen, nobody will use it,'" Ma later told 60 Minutes. "I said I don't care if this model is scientific, whether it's fancy-looking, or not. As long as it works, it helps to build up the trust."
It worked. By the time smartphones arrived and QR codes transformed daily life in China, Alipay had positioned itself as the default payment infrastructure for an entire economy. By 2020, the service — now housed within the rechristened Ant Group — had 711 million monthly active users and processed 118 trillion yuan ($17.2 trillion) in annual payment volume, dwarfing PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard individually. Ant had evolved far beyond payments into consumer lending (its Huabei and Jiebei products, whose names literally translate to "just spend" and "just borrow"), wealth management (the Yu'e Bao money market fund attracted 81 million investors and $40 billion under management within months of its 2013 launch), insurance, and credit scoring. It had become, as one analyst put it, "a financial supermarket." Ant issued roughly one-tenth of all consumer credit in China, mostly replacing credit cards entirely — a fact that made investors salivate and regulators deeply uneasy.
The twin entities — Alibaba for commerce, Ant for finance — formed an ecosystem of extraordinary density. Taobao ("treasure hunt") offered nearly a billion products; Tmall hosted the online shops of the world's biggest brands. Together they sold approximately $1 trillion worth of goods annually, roughly double Amazon's estimated throughput. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people used these products every day, swiping open Alipay to pay for everything from coffee to electricity meters, often spending their money in Alibaba's own marketplaces. The circularity was the point. It was a closed loop that generated more data, more transactions, more lending opportunities, more power.
The Brazen Act
By 2011, Ma's ownership stake in Alibaba had been diluted to a fraction of what it once was. Yahoo had acquired 40 percent of the company in 2005; SoftBank held roughly 30 percent. Together, the two foreign shareholders owned a majority. Ma, who felt they had been amply rewarded as Alibaba's valuation soared, began badgering both to return more shares to management. "These past years we've always been fighting," he said that summer of his relationship with SoftBank's Masayoshi Son.
Then, in the spring of 2011, Ma made a move that would define his reputation — for better and worse — for the next decade and beyond. Without Alibaba's board approval, he unilaterally transferred Alipay from Alibaba's corporate structure to a domestic Chinese company he personally controlled. "Both Yahoo and SoftBank were stunned," a former executive involved in the situation told the Financial Times. "Jack had been sabre-rattling for a couple of months, but no one expected anything related to Alipay — nor anything of such magnitude. They obviously had big plans for Alipay, so it was a pretty brazen act."
The mechanics, as documented in Chinese business records and legal filings reviewed by the FT, were surgical. Starting in May 2009, Alibaba had restructured its holdings so that Alipay moved from being a direct subsidiary to a domestic Chinese entity majority-owned by Ma personally. Because Ma simultaneously entered into a series of contracts with Alibaba — the variable interest entity, or VIE, structure that underpins virtually every Chinese tech company's relationship with foreign capital — Alibaba continued to treat Alipay as a subsidiary on its books. Ma then cancelled those contracts without board approval, severing the link.
On May 10, 2011, Yahoo slipped an "innocuous line" deep into its earnings report informing investors it had lost Alipay. Its share price plunged. Ma's justification was regulatory: Alipay needed a crucial payments license from China's central bank, which could have been denied if the company remained under foreign ownership. At the People's Bank of China, reactions were split. Some officials felt Ma had demonstrated loyalty to China over foreign shareholders. Others saw a man personally profiting from regulatory ambiguity while deflecting blame onto them.
The public backlash in China was fierce and unexpected. Entrepreneurs feared Ma had undermined the entire VIE financing structure they depended on to raise foreign money and eventually cash out in overseas markets. Hu Shuli, China's most respected news editor, ran an editorial in Caixin denouncing the move. "Originally it wasn't a big deal," Ma told a Chinese reporter. "The pressure on me comes from critics and media here."
The episode ended in a negotiated settlement — Ma kept control of Ant; Alibaba received a profit-sharing arrangement later converted to the 33 percent stake it held at the time of the aborted IPO. But many regard the Alipay transfer as Ma's original sin. Duncan Clark, whose
Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built remains the definitive account of the company's rise, puts it bluntly: "Jack is always playing three-dimensional chess, but it can end up irritating people."
Jack is always playing three-dimensional chess, but it can end up irritating people.
The Largest IPO in Human History
If the Alipay seizure was Ma's defining transgression, it did not diminish investor appetite. On September 19, 2014, Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol BABA, raising $21.8 billion in the largest IPO in American history and valuing the company at $168 billion. Ma, standing on the NYSE floor alongside Joe Tsai, allowed himself a rare moment of visible triumph.
The float used the same VIE structure Ma had undermined three years earlier. That investors were willing to look past this — indeed, to pile in at a record premium — spoke to the overwhelming gravitational pull of what Alibaba represented: a gateway to the Chinese consumer, the fastest-growing middle class in human history, and a technology ecosystem that was beginning to prove China could innovate, not merely copy.
Ma became, almost overnight, the symbol of Chinese entrepreneurship on the world stage. He was already Asia's richest person. Now he was something more — a figure who embodied the narrative that China's leaders wanted to project: that private enterprise, properly channeled, could drive the country's transition from a low-cost manufacturing economy to a consumer-led innovation powerhouse. For a while, his ambitions and Beijing's overlapped almost perfectly. He accompanied Xi Jinping on a visit to Microsoft's campus in Washington in 2015. He sat on UN committees. He spoke at Davos about connecting two billion consumers with ten million small businesses outside China. He was, as Bill George wrote in Discover Your True North, "China's first truly global leader."
Yet even as he ascended, the structural tension was visible to anyone willing to look. Ma was a party member who had never joined the National People's Congress or its consultative body, unlike rivals Pony Ma of Tencent and Robin Li of Baidu — a deliberate distance that unsettled officials. "The party doesn't know if they can trust him," said one person who worked with him in Hangzhou.
The Dinner He Wasn't Invited To
In November 2017, on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, sixteen of the country's leading technology executives squeezed around a table for what became known simply as "the internet dinner." Pony Ma of Tencent was there. Richard Liu of JD.com. Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance and the company behind TikTok. The picture pinged around the Chinese internet.
Jack Ma was not among them. And he was furious. "He threw a temper tantrum," a person who worked closely with him told the Financial Times. "He has an ego bigger than he can afford."
Asked by reporters about his absence, Ma deployed the salesman's instinct: deflect, minimize, then escalate. "I didn't think about attending — anyhow, no one invited me. Even if they had, I probably wouldn't have had time," he said. Then the pivot: "Believe it or not, if I really wanted to put on a dinner, I could invite the whole world, the very richest, the world's elite, not many would get an invitation. But these dinners are meaningless."
A few months later, at Davos in January 2018, Ma proved it. He put on a world-class dinner and seated Bill Gates to his left and Norway's prime minister to his right. His PR department flooded Chinese media with images: Ma doing magic tricks for Rwanda's president Paul Kagame, posing with Canada's Justin Trudeau. Noticeably absent from the guest list was Liu He, Xi Jinping's economic tsar, who was in Davos to speak the following day on China's campaign against financial risk.
The stunt grated in Beijing. A private businessman was speaking to the world on China's behalf — in fluent English, no less — dining with heads of state while the Party's own representative sat uninvited in a neighboring hotel. Gonggao gaizhu, as one of Ma's international collaborators put it to the FT: "A subject's achievements make the king feel uneasy." The Chinese proverb captured a tension that had been building for years but was now becoming acute. "They don't like him representing China on the world stage," the collaborator added.
After Davos, Ma's private jet headed to Bordeaux, where he was buying up châteaux and vineyards. He met the Thai prime minister in April, Israel's Netanyahu and Jordan's King Abdullah in May, then embarked on a summer circuit of world capitals. Flight records suggested he spent more than half of 2018 outside China. Meanwhile, at home, Xi Jinping's government was dismantling overleveraged private conglomerates — Wanda, HNA, Fosun, Anbang — whose founders had feasted on debt to go on global shopping sprees. Some went quiet. Others went to prison. A new rule had emerged among China's billionaires: lie low.
Ma did not lie low. "One of the reasons why Alibaba grew so fast was because the government didn't realise it," he told one forum. "When they started to realise it, we became very slow." Official uneasiness deepened. "What he was saying both publicly and privately could be embarrassing for China," a person close to the Hangzhou government told the FT. "After he returned home, they always had to go debrief him and ask about his trips."
Yesterday's Methods
China was changing, but Ma appeared not to have understood how much. Constitutional amendments had removed term limits on the presidency, making Xi Jinping the most powerful Chinese leader in decades. Any form of public dissent was risky. Xi had made reducing financial-sector risk a top priority, driven by the fear that a U.S.-style systemic crisis could shake not just the economy but the Party's hold on power.
When Ant Group filed its prospectus in August 2020, regulators got their first comprehensive look at the financial details that had made the company the most anticipated IPO in history — and those same details alarmed them. Ant's consumer loan issuance eclipsed every state-owned bank. Its annual payment volume surpassed China's
GDP. "Ant's business is inherently risky," one employee admitted. "We can't count how many meetings executives have had with officials to get us through to today."
Then, on October 24, 2020, Ma walked onto the stage at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai and delivered the speech that would cost him roughly $230 billion, his public freedom, and his place at the center of Chinese business life.
He knew regulations were being drafted to rein in Ant and other fintech companies. He intended to lobby aggressively. But he made the fatal choice to do it publicly, in front of an audience that included former central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan and other senior officials. "Today's financial system must be reformed," he lectured from the podium. "Right now our capacity for 'control' grows stronger and stronger, while our capacity to 'monitor' is obviously lacking." He compared the Basel Committee of global banking regulators to "an old man's club." He accused China's state banks of operating with a "pawnshop mentality." He argued that "innovation doesn't fear regulation, but it does fear regulation by yesterday's methods." Unlike most of his speeches, Ma repeatedly looked down at his notes, suggesting the words were finely calculated.
They were received as a declaration of war. Top officials in Beijing saw the episode as Ma attempting to win public opinion to his side and influence policy. Within days, regulators summoned Ma to Beijing for what the Financial Times described as "a terse dressing-down." New rules targeting online micro-lending were unveiled almost overnight. On November 3, 2020, two days before Ant was scheduled to begin trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai — with shares already priced, $34.4 billion ready to flow — the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the listing, citing "changes in the regulatory environment."
The combined wealth destruction was staggering. By mid-2023, Ant's valuation had fallen from over $310 billion to approximately $78.5 billion — a 75 percent collapse. Alibaba's market capitalization shed hundreds of billions more. Ma's personal fortune declined from a peak of $61.7 billion to roughly $30 billion. In April 2021, Alibaba was fined a record $2.8 billion for antitrust violations and ordered to "rectify" its behavior. Ant was fined an additional $984 million in 2023 for consumer protection and governance violations. Ma was eventually pressured to give up his controlling voting rights in Ant entirely, his stake in the company he had taken from Alibaba a decade earlier now functionally decorating someone else's books.
Innovation doesn't fear regulation, but it does fear regulation by yesterday's methods.
The Moat of Ponds and Levees
After the speech, Ma dropped out of judging an African talent show he had created. The General Association of Zhejiang Entrepreneurs that he chaired called off its annual conference; there was talk of him stepping down. Rumors spread that he was under house arrest, or had fled to Singapore. For nearly three months, no one saw him. Then came the drive to the school in Tonglu.
In the months and years that followed, Ma was spotted in the manner of a cryptid — a grainy photograph on a yacht, a sighting at a private club in Tokyo, a brief appearance at an art fair in Hong Kong. He reportedly spent more than a year overseas, much of it in Japan, near his old friend and investor Masayoshi Son. He took a visiting professorship at the University of Tokyo. He studied agricultural technology in various countries. He donated millions of masks and medical supplies during the pandemic. He was alive, he was free, but he was no longer Ma Baba — Daddy Ma, the folk hero of Chinese capitalism. On social media, the affectionate nicknames had given way to a new kind of commentary: "Proletariat of the world, come together!"
One place Ma was occasionally seen was an artists' colony in Hangzhou, where he had built a compound surrounded by the workshops of famous directors and movie studios. Inside, a warren of moss-covered cobblestone footpaths and wooden bridges snaked between ponds and patches of land. Ma's retreat formed an island of its own, ringed by a moat of ponds and levees with a couple of guards at the foot of the main bridge. Nearby sat the Jack Ma Foundation and his tai chi studio, which in better times had been a place for receiving visitors but had become, as the Financial Times described it, "a shrine to his former life" — magazine covers, photos of the Alibaba listing, and for-purchase mementos including a replica of the orange electric guitar he had strummed while belting a Chinese rock song to 60,000 screaming employees at the company's twentieth anniversary celebration.
"As a private entrepreneur it's very important to find the right degree of publicity and Ma hasn't yet mastered this," said a former Hangzhou official who had dealt with Alibaba for a decade. "It didn't matter before. Now it is necessary to start learning."
The Subject's Achievement Makes the King Uneasy
Ma's fall was never simply about one speech. The speech was a detonator, but the charges had been laid over years — by Ma's global profile, his media acquisitions (after the Alipay backlash, he'd used Alibaba to buy stakes in Chinese media companies to exert some control over coverage), his willingness to challenge regulators publicly, his conspicuous absence from the institutions of power that other tech billionaires cultivated, and above all, by the sheer scale of what Ant Group had become. A private company issuing one-tenth of consumer credit in a country where the financial system is an instrument of state control is not merely a business. It is a rival center of power.
Xi Jinping's crackdown extended far beyond Ma. Tencent's Pony Ma proposed tighter regulation of his own business. JD.com cancelled the IPO of its finance unit. Colin Huang of Pinduoduo exited the company he founded altogether, giving away a large chunk of shares in what one friend described as a move designed to keep his name from topping the rich list. Wang Jianlin of Wanda fell silent while shrinking his empire. Wu Xiaohui of Anbang ended up in prison, his insurance conglomerate taken over by the state. The message was comprehensive: any private enterprise, no matter how strategically important, would be brought to heel if it was perceived to jeopardize the Party.
"For the past four decades the relationship between the private sector and the Chinese Communist party has been contingent and tenuous, with undulations between control and autonomy," said Jude Blanchette of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We're in another cycle of control and I expect this one to be enduring."
Yet by February 2025, something shifted. Ma appeared in Beijing alongside other business leaders at an event hosted by Xi Jinping himself. He shook hands with the president. "Jack Ma has come back" trended on Weibo. Duncan Clark, who had first met Ma in the Hangzhou apartment in 1999 and had watched the arc from English teacher to richest man in Asia to cautionary tale, was characteristically measured: "To be in the front row of a group of China's leading tech executives and actually shaking hands with President Xi Jinping clearly signals a new approach by the government to him and perhaps to the broader tech sector." The reason, Clark suggested, was straightforward: China's economy had slowed dramatically — the property sector had cratered, zero-COVID had exacted a punishing toll, trade tensions with the United States had intensified, GDP growth was anemic — and Xi was turning to the tech sector for help.
Ma responded by purchasing $50 million worth of Alibaba shares. Tsai's family office added another $150 million. On Alibaba's internal forums, under his pen name Feng Qingyang — borrowed from a reclusive martial arts master in a Jin Yong novel — Ma posted a letter praising the company's new leadership and urging employees to treat the restructuring as a return to startup mentality. "We are starting to operate on the diseases of a big company," he wrote. "This path of reform and innovation has never been accompanied by applause."
The Empire of Interpretation
The thread running through Ma's life is not commerce but translation — the act of standing between two worlds and rendering each intelligible to the other. He began as a literal translator: a boy on a bicycle riding to a hotel to interpret English for tourists, then a professional linguist running a translation agency. He became a cultural translator, explaining the internet to a China that had never heard of it, and explaining China to Western investors who could not fathom its scale. He became a financial translator, building Alipay to bridge the trust gap between strangers in a society without credit cards. And he became a political translator, speaking on China's behalf to global audiences in perfect English — until the government decided it had not authorized the translation.
Every act of interpretation carries risk, because the interpreter occupies a position of power that neither side fully controls. Ma's genius was in exploiting that liminal space. His undoing was in forgetting that the space existed at the sufferance of a power that does not share.
In June 2025, a departing fifteen-year Alibaba employee posted a nearly ten-thousand-character letter on the company's internal site, criticizing "big company disease" — bureaucratic sclerosis, failed acquisitions like Ele.me and Lazada and Youku, talent dilution, performance inflation. Ma responded publicly, one of his rare interventions: "Just as a person grows, Alibaba's development inevitably involves many paths and processes. The company is undergoing changes." The company he had built was now a thing he could only comment on from outside, a father whose children had grown beyond his reach.
On an internal wall somewhere in the Hangzhou campus, there is still a scribbled signature from that cold Sunday in Tonglu — hasty, uncharacteristically messy, the handwriting of a man in a hurry to prove he existed. It is, in its way, the most honest thing Jack Ma ever wrote.
