Tue 05 January 2021:
Speculation is mounting over the whereabouts of the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, who has not been seen or heard in public for more than two months.
A former English teacher, Mr Ma, 56, founded what would become China’s primary e-commerce platform in 1999, five years after Amazon was founded in the US.
There has been speculation that his disappearance could mean he was detained by the authorities, although there is no evidence of this.
Others say the regulatory response to his incendiary speech would be reason enough for him to avoid additional attention.
The Financial Times reported that Ma was recently replaced as a judge in the final of TV show ‘Africa’s Business Heroes’.
“His photograph was removed from the judging webpage, and he was conspicuously left out of a promotional video,” the report claimed.
Ma’s plans to list Ant Group on the stock market were apparently forcibly shelved after he publicly criticised Chinese regulators in October – warning them they were too conservative and calling for them to support innovation.
Ma has not been heard from during the controversies. His last public appearance appears to have been at a livestreamed event on 31 October, an opening ceremony of the annual Chinese shopping event Double 11.
In November, he reportedly did not appear in his role as a judge for the final episode of entrepreneurial game show Africa’s Business Heroes, which Alibaba has since blamed on a scheduling conflict.
Ma was replaced with another Alibaba executive and his photo removed from the website. He also did not appear at this year’s Shanghai Zhejiang chamber of commerce meeting, where he has delivered a speech every year since 2016.
Ma is not the first Chinese tycoon to face a government crackdown.
In 2018, Wu Xiaohui, who founded Anbang insurance, was convicted of fraud and abuse of power, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In March, the property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang went missing after writing an essay critical of China’s Covid response and appearing to call Xi a clown. In September he was sentenced to 18 years in jail for corruption.
