SunstarTV Bureau: Alibaba and Ant co-founder Jack Ma on Wednesday morning resurfaced after months and met with 100 rural teachers in China via video conferencing during an annual event.
With this meeting, for the first time Jack Ma appears in public since a late-October forum in Shanghai, where he blasted China’s regulatory system in a speech that set him on a collision course with officials.
According to a circulated online video, Ma talked about how he’ll spend more time on philanthropy. The co-founder of Alibaba and Ant didn’t mention his recent run-ins with Beijing during his address, which was first reported in a local blog. Ant confirmed the authenticity of the video in an email.
“Recently, my colleagues and I have been studying and thinking. We made a firmer resolution to devote ourselves to education philanthropy,” Ma said in the video.
Alibaba’s shares gained more than 4% in Hong Kong. While it’s still unclear where Ma is, his emergence in a public forum may help quell persistent rumors about his fate while Beijing pursues investigations into online finance titan Ant Group Co. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The executive had kept out of public view since early November, when Chinese regulators torpedoed Ant’s $35 billion IPO, tightened fintech regulations, then ordered an overhaul of Ant and launched a separate antitrust probe into Alibaba — all in a span of days.
The assault on Ma’s trillion-dollar corporate empire encapsulates a broader campaign to rein in a generation of Chinese tech giants that Beijing now views as wielding too much control over the world’s No. 2 economy. The flurry of actions against his twin companies drove home how Beijing has lost patience with the outsize power of its technology moguls, perceived now as a threat to the political and financial stability President Xi Jinping prizes most.
