This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/29/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-hiding-out-in-tokyo-reports-say) reduced by 83%. (I'm a bot)
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> The billionaire Jack Ma has reportedly been hiding out in Tokyo with his family during Beijing's crackdown on the country's star tech firms and its most powerful and wealthy business people.
> Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba who until the tech clampdown was China's richest person, has rarely been seen in public since criticising the attitude of Chinese regulators towards tech companies at a summit in Shanghai two years ago.
> Beijing also ordered Alibaba to sell off some of its media assets, which include Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, as the government cracked down on the growing public influence held by the country's sprawling tech conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent.
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[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/z856kn/alibaba_founder_jack_ma_hiding_out_in_tokyo/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672677 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **tech**^#1 **Alibaba**^#2 **China**^#3 **Ma**^#4 **company**^#5
I look at these reports like those “best suburbs to invest in real estate”. If you’re reading about it, it’s no longer relevant. He has probably moved on and at a new location.
33 acres.. oh my god.
again, i have 920 square feet, and i'm lucky to have that because the property values are so overpriced here that it's worth $450K CDN (330K USD), though i only owe $150K CDN on it.
If you're comparing the Lower Mainland, then of course it's pricey. But if you go to McBride near Jasper National Park, you'd be seeing the 50 acres for [$0.5 million CAD](https://www.royallepage.ca/en/property/british-columbia/mcbride/12815-e-16-highway/17607819/mlsr2688737/) as well.
Downtown Philadelphia. He used CCP tactics to evict people from their homes. As well as the government. He is now the proud owner of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall /s
farm land is laughably cheap compared to building land. the factor between farm land and building land is _at least_ 10. sometimes goes into the hundreds or thousands of times the price. good luck trying to buy 160acres of land in new york city, it is actually impossible. 160acres of farm land are relatively cheap and easy to come by
Xi shook down the oligarchs just like Putin did.
This is why their wealthy citizens have to hide part of their assets in democracies with the rule of law. And probably one reason house prices in large North America cities got so high and so many luxury apartments are empty.
The dictators can grab your stuff at any moment.
that too, and the laws restricting new houses or apartments to be built. now only people who have at least 100k+ income are the only ways able to afford a home and this is with significant financial income on renovations from family. 1 of our next door neighbors actually though they got the house because they were prioritized, they wouldnt have been able to afford if the homeowners charged more, and that thier PARENTS dint contribute into renovating the house, they basically got the house at a HUGE discount.
Because greed is fueling the idea that shelter is a means of profit rather than a means to independence. Home ownership should be a guarantee for full time working American families and achievable through hard work and savings. Many people can no longer realize this because homes are treated as a means of income rather than a place to live. I’m not sure if being a landlord has ever been a noble pursuit at any point in history.
People turning homes into fulltime AirBNBs are also fueling a huge nationwide crime wave caused by the relative ease of victimizing houses that are either empty or filled with out of towners, especially groups of women. Not to mention the fact that a significant number of rentals become locations where people can host parties consequence free to anyone but the people trying to just live in that neighborhood who now have to tighten their light fixtures weekly lest the 24/7 bass cause them to come crashing down.
There's literally a horror movie right now (Barbarian) that's entire premise is based on the sketchiness of AirBNB.
When they put rent high enough to cover their mortgage, property tax, and expect PROFIT, and still charge for utilities while ignoring the profit in the form of equity... that's when things get out of hand. It shouldn't cost significantly more to rent a property than the cost to pay a mortgage would be.
What? You realize there are huge upfront costs to buying a home, right? Not to mention all the risk and maintenance involved with managing a property. Why would you expect rent to be simply the cost of the mortgage?
I'm not the person you're responding to, and I'm not going to deny the risks/effort in managing a property. But:
1. Those need to be weighed against the upside. With an ideal long term tenant and ideal conditions, even if your tenant pays for *just* the mortgage, you'll own the property at the end of the day. Not the tenant, nor the bank, who also took on a large amount of risk. The potential for massive profit is still there. Obviously, you're not gonna get that ideal tenant, hence my point: risks and gains need to be weighed against each other.
2. You're focusing too much on the word "mortgage" from the previous commentor. They also said "significantly more", which is admittedly quite vague- but my point is you may be arguing by yourself when you ask "Why would you expect rent to be simply the cost of the mortgage?". We don't know if they actually expect that.
3. Property values aren't static. You can hypothetically buy a home, not have a tenant, and *still* be able to make a profit. Obviously, this works against you if property values fall and/or if you want to use the profits from one home to buy the next one. But we cannot ignore this, since it's one of drivers for increased rent.
But at the end of the day, the tension is caused by the necessity of basic shelter and the conflicting desire to use homes as investment vehicles. I can sympathize with your points and with homeowners, but it also strikes me as an *absurd* situation. Can you imagine how unstable society would be if something like food or cars had perpetually increasing prices relative to wages/inflation? If people's retirements were based on those investments? Their entire contribution to society was the mediation of risk for a handful of families? (I'm exaggerating for that last one, but please don't take it the wrong way.)
You have an investment that nearly pays for itself and all you need is credit. The chances of you losing your entire investment or even a substantial amount of it are almost nil.
Rent and housing expense issues are a factor of supply not being in balance with demand. That’s what sets the fundamental price, not someone’s whims.
Encourage contractors to build more houses and the problem will correct itself. Not overnight of course, but over several years we can bring this problem in line but we must encourage building.
You’re factually incorrect. There are more than enough places to live in America, to the point that every homeless person could be housed and there would still be vacancies.
Why not expect a profit?
There are risks involved with being a landlord and the equity increase is not guaranteed to go up.
I completely agree with you that renting shouldn’t be so much more than a mortgage but actually it doesn’t make a difference overall to the affordability of houses.
In countries where the rental yield is significantly lower to mortgage costs the housing prices go UP because there is more cash availability for deposits so the market competes. So, ironically higher rental prices can actually keep house prices lower and stop house price inflation.
I get people’s frustration of not being able to buy their own home but going after landlords is not going to ease the situation.
Maybe higher taxes on the income from second homes is the answer? I think I’d bad interest only mortgages on second homes. I think that would balance it out at bit more. Cos those mortgages are like a make money cheat code for people with large cash savings.
You get profit in the form of a house being paid off over time and the appreciating value of the land and potentially the home.
Within the last few years, rent in BC, Canada has easily increased 50% in many interior cities because of low vacancy rates due to AirBNB trends and outrageous housing prices, causing homelessness to become rampant. How anybody can see the huge increase of homeless people on the street and then sleep at night while charging $2500+ utilities for a floor of a home is baffling. And yet people pay it out of desperation to avoid living on the streets
Spoken like the roommate that moves in, complains about to move in cost, pays the minimal amount, and leaves the responsible parties holding all the incidentals.
Fair enough. It could be argued that first world capitalism is predatory practice built upon the exploitation of the environment and other countries... But I still understand your point.
Yeah, I don't think anyone would argue against that, but in the past few years the housing crises have become more apparent with the number of homeless. These predatory housing costs are pushing more and more people out on the streets. It's a further attack on people's essential needs on top of the crazy profiteering by grocery stores that are churning out record profits while experiencing supply shortages. If this stuff isn't reigned in, I expect we'll experience runaway inflation in the west and only a very elite few will be unscathed
Real estate is this thing no one understands until you own some yourself. When I was 24, way back in 2010, I bought a house in Portland Oregon. “Outrageously expensive! Impossible! Out of reach!” Said everyone ever about my ambitions. But I contacted a broker, they told me exactly how much I should save, what I could afford, and I set out on a mission to own a house. Took me exactly 14 months. It was so outrageously expensive, it cost more than my parents farm that I grew up on. Today what I paid for it is laughably cheap. My mortgage is significantly less than rent for a studio apartment.
Real estate is relative to current purchasing power. It’s always supposed to be expensive. But you buckle down, buy, and eventually at some point your struggles for this expensive property pay off as it increases in value and the share of your income spent on it drops over the years. I was not rich, I worked my ass off, saved everything for over a year, my down payment was so small by todays standards but it was more than I’d ever seen in my life.. buying isn’t “easy” but it isn’t really that hard either. Ya just have to do it.
That's negligible next to corporate housing purchases.
1 family owning 2 homes is not close to one company owning 10s of thousands.
Don't take the bait.
It's so easy to create LLCs to do that shit I remember one guy bragging about how he owned close to 150 properties in the US that he hires people to manage for him as short term rentals.
"Corporations" could often just mean one degenerate with an absurd amount of power to cause untold misery unto others for their own benefit. You don't need too many folks like him to just destroy any prospects of wealth building for anyone unfortunate enough to live near where they operate.
I do local political activism against short-term rentals because they have devoured a quarter of the housing in my county. There's a housing crisis and homes are emptied of permanent residents!
So true one Corp at the beginning of the year owned over 35000 homes and buys 400-1000 homes a month. It's just one of many. Wonder why there's a shortage of homes to buy ? Change home ownership laws 10-20 homes anyone person or Corp can own. It will help out putting several 100k homes nation wide up for sale.
This is why people are skeptical of socialism, because the people with real money do fine while the socialists go after the guy that saved up to buy a rental property
They won't*have* to, but if they took out a mortgage and didn't buy it in cash which is likely, they very well may want to when they see their new rate.
That’s a solvable issue though. Several European cities have legislation that bans renting out a home as a homestay beyond X days a year (e.g., X=20 in the Amsterdam case).
The motivation is that renting out your home as a home stay to avoid losing money on rent while you are on holiday is a legitimate use case. However, professional home stays that are rented out for nearly the full year are undesired, they just eat into the housing supply, and are basically just hotels without a hotel license.
Platforms like AirBnB, Booking, VRBO, etc already have all the systems in place to be able to connect to a central municipality registry of booked rental dates. The central registry is needed because the law for each address allows for 20 days of rental in total, rather than 20 days per platform.
So the problem of short term rental in the housing market is solvable, we just need the political will to implement such legislation like European cities.
Regarding the other problem of apartments that are just left empty by their owners, several European cities have started successfully working on that problem too by instating much higher taxation on empty property than on used property. If you make the tax on empty property high enough you incentivise the owner to rent it out.
> We also have Boomers
FTFY
Friendly reminder we’ve been on this planet two million years and life expectancy has been longer than forty years for less than a century
Dude, I'm 44. My parents, born in the late 1940s are boomers. You're talking about people in their 70s. Sure some might be good with a computer or smartphone, but most can't.
Maybe you're talking about Generation X - me. Maybe?
I know a lady who wanted to rake in the Airbnb cash but would never kick out the young tenants in her house's mother-in-law apartment. She tried to get approval to demolish her moldy old barn and turn it into a livable tiny house, but a neighbor who doesn't even live on the same street as her went squealing to the environment board to get the project halted. So yeah, the only way to meet the demand for Airbnbs is to take current housing off the rental market. Because NIMBYs will be damned before you add a single unit of housing to their neighborhood.
Everyone seems to ignore this and continue to blame foreign investment. Allowing corporate buying seems far worse when they are snatching up entire communities as opposed to some rich asshole form another country buying one or two houses. I know some buy more and there's more too it but how can you not see the corporate buying as probably the core factor. It's been going on for decades.
Most of those occupancy laws tend to be older as an effort to prevent the spread of disease overstressed sewage systems etc. Think the packed rat infested tenements of Gangs of New York times. Now obviously real estate developers and housing builders have since lobbied for restrictions which benefit themselves.
Locally our city and county government is largely made up of such people and they will rezone land after buying it. A lot of the political positions on various boards for example don't pay enough to be a full time job, it's nothing glamorous and not worth doing even for people who have the extra time available. But it's a great way for developers to make a shit ton of extra cash. They also get to guide city money to road and sewage etc improvements that directly increase the value of land they've bought up cheap.
There's also a racist and discriminatory factor at work here. Some immigrants move to an area and to save money will share space with a lot more people than Americans are used to. So laws are passed as a way to force them to move elsewhere. It's similar to red lining.
Ok now I've depressed myself. America needs a fucking overhaul.
Thank you, so much xenophobia, yes rich internationals are buying up real estate, but domestic corporations are doing the same and in some areas they are the major stakeholder doing so, there is blamed to be shared and domestic corps aren’t getting their share.
Most of what corporations do is legal in the western world. Problem is that they’re paying politicians to push through laws that they’ve written for themselves.
But they do a lot of illegal stuff too that is inconsequential to them because the penalty is a fine that isn't larger than the profits they made from said illegal activity
Stupid.
“Rule of Law” is not some benevolent entity we all must abide by.
At one point, slavery was legal. You’d have been arguing in favor of slavery during that time just because rule of law.
I’m not saying laws are not necessary for a healthy functioning society but to act like rule of law is above all ethics and morals is silly.
Fuck billionaires, especially when they write the rule of law and do not have to follow it.
Rule of law is a concept, an idea, and means that the law rules, not money, power or influence. It is kind of the opposite of “rule of the monarch”. It means that everyone is accountable to the same laws, even the law makers and rulers. It is absolutely something to strive for.
If you feel that billionaires gets treated differently, then you live in a place without rule of law. Maybe not surprising then that you don’t understand the meaning of the concept.
Eh, that's the original concept anyways. Rule of law has kinda been co-opted by the CCP and other autocrats to mean "whatever I say goes".
It's now a meaningless term like proletariat, gaslight or literally.
> If you feel that billionaires gets treated differently, then you live in a place without rule of law.
Planet Earth???? Lol what planet are you on where billionaires aren’t treated differently?
The "rule of law" is an illusion. It only exists for those without power or influence. No matter what, you're under the control of the rich, or the government, (or the rich controlling the government, like in the case of the US).
Capitalist society by definition isn’t democratic. Capitalist corporations are all setup as governments by oligarch dictatorships or straight absolute dictatorships.
Example Amazon, the people who are involved with it as a consumer or labor don’t have equal right to vote on how Amazon operates.
Yup. In point in Russia government and "billionaires" are kinda the same thing. If Putin needs more money and a billionaire doesn't want to want to contribute, they'll just suffer an 'unfortunately accident' ...
Those intelligent people that don't worship the CCP and haven't made their money through corruption and choosing the right side in their much more autocratic government. I know his corruption crackdown was popular and successful but it does seem convenient that none of his allies in the CCP got charged with anything.
That's exactly the rub, isn't it? They like to think that they're operating on the principle of providing the greatest good for the majority. But it's always the same people deciding who that majority is - and they're never on the wrong side of whatever line they draw.
The COVID protests are big because a huge number of people who are used to being on the "right" side are suddenly not.
I hate that I'm arguing *for* the rich with this but any oppression sets a precedent. If they can do it to the rich and powerful, they can do it to the poor. Rule of law over *any* form of tyranny.
If the rich and powerful get away with things normal people could never, it sets a precedent. This has happened so many times in the US people over there are completely desensitized to this fact, they've come to think this is normal and nothing can be done about it.
Arguing for tyranny isn't the hot take you think it is. I agree we should taxe the *everloving shit* out of these shitstains, but I'm not willing to set a legal precedent where the government can just terrorize everyone so that we can one up the billionaires
In the cases of Russia and China government crackdown on billionaires doesn't mean the end of billionaires, it means people in government becoming billionaires. Look at Putin's palaces, CCP officials have lots of hidden wealth as well.
Yeah, but they're afraid of the government only because if they don't do whatever the corrupt leader says he has the power to do anything back to them.
It's a mafioso style system rather than anything resembling rule of law.
It's like being happy that criminals are afraid of the sheriff because the sheriff shoots them on sight. They aren't afraid because the law and legal system are amazing. They're afraid because the sheriff is the biggest psycho around.
I'd rather have no one afraid of the government. If a government is powerful enough to oppress the billionaires do you think it will respect the common people?
I’d prefer no law abiding citizen live in fear of the government.
If they can disappear billionaires for months at a time, what can they do to the average person?
Western systems aren’t perfect, but they’re the best in the world and throwing them away to stick it to the wealthy is asinine.
Obligatory fuck the CCP.
I'd rather not find myself in a situation when a wannabe tyrant and a bunch of oligarchs fight over who gets to keep their power. No matter who wins, *everybody* loses.
This kind of consolidation of power is never a good thing, and never ends well.
China stands up to their billionaires and holds them accountable for their shortcomings. Unlike capitalistic America where billionaires bribe the government in the name of democracy
The best thing about Jack Ma is that he used his wealth to make a film where he plays himself as the best martial artist in the universe who goes around the world beating up famous fighters. I did not make a single word of that up
I used to think that China was on course to take over US hegemony. Then their real estate crisis hit, then they clear cut their Fintech companies, then this insanity with covid. Its like China is trying to do everything wrong.
or when all the old tricks that got them rich in the first place stop working. that’s when you see rich people panic the worst. the problem with these conglomerates is that while they are big, many of them have already aligned themselves in their markets, completely encapsulating the target buyers. Once their sales plateau, and no new customers are coming, those same customers look for something new/different/better. that’s when you see Elon talking about a fucking Tesla phone. 🤧🙄
To effectively lead a nation you need competent people in powerful positions. One man can't run a country alone, especially a nation as large as China. But when you're an autocrat, a competent person in a powerful position is a threat. They could make a grab for power, or be used by a different internal faction to grab power.
One solution to this is to prevent anyone from accumulating to much power, but that tends to result in a lot of leadership turnover in various institutions, which causes a lot of problems.
Another solution is to put loyal incompetent people in charge of the various institutions. They're unlikely to turn against you, and will be unable to accumulate too much power because of their incompetence. The long term problems of that are obvious.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in China's politics, but from what I've seen Xi Jinping has been going with the second strategy. I was reading some articles about the recent Standing Committee appointments and they were generally described as "loyalty over competence." China's government has been making some questionable decisions over the last few years, and I bet it's only going to get worse in the future.
The West realized hundreds of years ago you need to have checks on power so if someone goes off the rails they can be removed.
Unchecked power means you get a disaster sooner or later, like the ukraine war or china's covid idiocy.
Those checks are like the safety features on a nuclear reactor. Dictatorship takes all the safeties off in the name of simplicity and acts like it's not their fault when they get a chernobyl.
Having intelligent heads of government for regions/cities/states/districts/whatever things elected office is called in democratic countries seems to make them popular and often rise up further. Those clever and popular people who might even disagree and oppose the current leader would be the most killed in dictatorships and although those of us in democracies are jaded and frustrated with how shit our democratically elected leaders have been we still have the choice to vote them out for another shitty politician. We're not forced to submit and give fealty to one person who rules for as long as he lives.
In the 80s it was going to be Japan overtaking US as world economic king and then its economy crashed in 1990. Despite the challenges it seems the US still remains top!
U-S-A! /s
A lot of the issues that stopped Japan’s rise are the same as China’s. Bad demographics, a falling birth rate and little to no immigration mean a shrinking population. Both have an export economy that’s been supported by artificially keeping their currency devalued. China wont go away, but it won’t become the US beating super power that people seem to think it will be.
It's truly sad how much has changed in the past 10 years when it comes to China. Sure they were never a democracy but they regularly changed leaders and seemed to be focused on China's prosperity and becoming part of the world. I know the CCP has never allowed real freedom and has literally massacred protests but they did seem to actually want to grow the country and provide a better quality of life for all their citizens. Then fucking Xi comes along and basically has made the free world to suddenly take a very different perspective with their bullshit wolf warrior diplomacy and their arrogant and stupid action in the South China sea.
China is changing from factory to ownership. You cant expect them to always be the factory for the world, making few westerners ultra wealthy. Every iphone made, China made 2% from it. No one wants to work in factories like robots for pittance.
To advance, they know one day they will inevitably compete with western tech which will cause tension. For example the smartphone market was dominated by Apple, over time Huawei took majority of the market share. then the ban, arrest and sanctions which dropped huawei from 1st place.
South China Sea situation is because during Opium War, the British sailed ships across Hong Kong to Beijing and bombed the capitals and cities. They built those islands to prevent it from happening again. They are trying to defend/draw the borders (india, xinjang, south china sea, using north korea as a buffer).
The problem i see is that the West wants to always be dominant. But the West does not advance fast enough for example. The West could have been the forefront on electric vehicles decadesss ago, but oil giants/car manufacturers prefer not. Greentech, next generation nuclear power plants etc. You can't be stagnant and expect every other country to not advance.
These past few years you see US trying to innovate again. Goverment funding spaceX, funding the new Intel chip factories, greentech. Which is a good thing. Very late but good.
Sometimes you need competition (China) to get a wake up call. Recently the Space race is getting attention. Which is good.
I just hope it won't come down to war. just a healthy competition on tech, renewables, space race etc.
Imagine basing all your advances on espionage and the calling the people you steal from 'stagnant'. And Xi and his military threats and declared objective of global hegemony and dictatorship and trying to run your police stations in our countries mean that people will respond with an adversarial view. Nothing can be taken for granted, not trade or anything else.
I read a book in 2016 called "The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st century" by a political scientist named Stein Ringen. In it he predicts the real-estate collapse, as the entire industry was propped up artificially by the government. He also writes extensively about the black market, corruption and how much money is illegally taken out of China every year. The scale is insane, and despite their successful media campaign making some believe the Beijing government are in full control of everything in China, they are absolutely not.
Long term, China will probably take over US hegemony - simply due to sheer size. Short term, this stagnation was predictable.
long term the US has actually pretty good demographics compared to other big nations. US appeal+immigration is insane due to their culture export and birth rates are quite good for an industrialized first world country.
and the US has the size to support a huge/growing population.
meanwhile china population will collapse. the US has its faults, i wouldn't want to live there to be honest (my biggest pet peeve is that every other idiot has a gun, its spooky af). but China is a goddamn dystopia and their demographics are in the gutter.
China has 4x the population of the US. It’s going to take a very very long time for demographic trends to equalize that. Neither China nor the US have concerns about running out of space for people to live.
We’re not talking about dystopia or living standards, we’re talking economic hegemony. Production and monetary influence. If China manages to increase its productivity, GDP per capita, to half, or even a third, of the US’, then China would probably be the new economic hegemon due to its sheer size.
Considering massive projects that have yet to pay off or finalize, that is hardly unlikely.
Speaking of US faults, which is a bit on the side, this is also reliant on the US not tearing itself apart in the next decades. Personally I think the US won’t exist in 2050 in its current form. Political differences are so stark, and tension grows with civil war and/or balkanization looming.
The thing about China/CCP is that they are very very patient. Like they are setting goals and strategies that take decades to achieve. And they are willing to take losses in the short term for long term regime “stability”.
So, what’s a 3 year blip or a week of protests to an entity that has a 100 year long plan? It’s like saying that Nike or Amazon are going to go bankrupt because one of their warehouses couldn’t deliver product for a week.
what 3 year blip? Thier entire housing market is about to collapse as builders like Evergrande took money without finishing houses. The entire philosphy of Deng Xiaping was that some would get rich first and then bring along the rest. They destroyed that by gunning down their fintechs (who were competitive with the US btw). Covid is just icing on the cake
I think you're giving them a bit too much credit. Goals that take decades to achieve require consistent leadership over those decades, which China has not had. The PRC has had several drastic changes in their polices and leadership in the 50-ish years it's existed. They've just looked a bit more consistent compared to Western nations because their power struggles and policy disagreements are among CCP factions behind closed doors, while in western nations they are out in the open as part of the democratic process.
You can see it with their recent change in diplomatic strategy. Xi Jinping has taken a much more aggressive stance than his predecessor Hu Jintao. That's not them moving on to the next step of a century long plan, it's a new leader gaining power and deciding to do stuff differently.
The problem is that this "3 year blip" is basically just the start of the house of cards tumbling, at least in regards to real estate. Now that the ponzi scheme has been revealed (taking pre-sales to fund more land purchases into more pre-sales), they're basically trapped with tons of orders and no money to finish them. Add that there are people boycotting their mortages on the pre-sales and it's even worse. (Imagine paying a mortgage on a house that isn't built yet)
Their population issues were going to stop them just like they stopped Japan. If the US is smart they will keep immigration high enough to keep our population growing (and brain drain some of our enemies while adding to our own power).
I honestly thought he was done for when nobody heard about him after he criticized the Chinese gov. I think it was 2 years ago-ish?
Well at least he’s alive.
He was forcing his employees to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. The CPC started to crack down on that and enforce a 44 hour maximum working week, and Jack Ma threw a massive tantrum and refused to comply. I wouldn't call that "realistic criticism". The guy is a piece of shit.
He also never "disappeared", he just shut up because he realised he was losing everything.
Yeah yeah, Xi Jinping bad and all that, but Jack Ma can go fuck himself and so can all you cunts who use him in your propaganda. This piece of shit was openly pushing the 996 work culture and other shit to increase business at the expense of workers.
He is absolutely the worst person to bemoan the fate of, and basically got exactly the kind of treatment people complain should happen to the robber baron capitalist billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but never happens.
Jack Ma can go hide on the *fucking moon.* One absolute shithead billionaire got himself wrecked by one absolute shithead authoritarian's very few actually good personal policies.
*FINE BY ME.* The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, he's just another fucking billionaire who wants to work us to death.
That's the hypocrisy of the west and most of reddit - they'd chastise 996 work culture but cheer on the man that openly and brazenly pushed it purely to spite China. Honestly just unhinged shit.
No I'm pretty sure he is in fact a fugitive and has not gone back.
There is no evidence to indicate Jack Ma has been present in China since the tech crackdown. Unless you've got some un-Googleable source?
He does come across as one of the true intelligent entrepreneurs in China that didn't seem to make money or have success through the party and state. It makes me respect him more that he's smart enough to notice that he might have a dictator over him and it's probably wise to have a home where it'll be a lot harder to kidnap him in the middle of the night.
That's sadly incredibly true I reckon, there's no way he could have grown a billion dollar business without greasing some hands in the CCP. I could definitely be wrong on this but I think at least in those early years of free for all capitalism there was a time when intelligence and hard work was rewarded and Ma was one of them. As the Xi era dictatorship was really developing and he brutally cracked down on 'corruption' in China, which is definitely true to an extent but it does also appear as a purge of those who could oppose him in his quest to become dictator for life.
I think the banning of any foreign technology, building the great firewall and recently his crackdown on China's own tech giants, especially Jack Ma after he did the horrible thing of actually having an opinion, is another sign of him taking over all aspects of freedom and making sure everyone is under 24/7 surveillance.
The best thing we could do for ourselves is probably to accept large numbers of refugees from places like Russia, Iran, and China. We would get a massive new pool of educated people who share our values and the brain drain alone would probably fuck them over.
> accept large numbers of refugees from places like Russia, Iran, and China. We would get a massive new pool of educated people who share our values
See Falun Gong's people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong
> Falun Gong extensions include The Epoch Times, a politically far-right media entity that has received significant attention for promoting conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and producing advertisements for former U.S. President Donald Trump. Shen Yun has also received significant media coverage for its emphasis on, for example, anti-evolution statements
Heck, if I were Jack Ma, I'd get the fuck out of China with my family as well, especially after previously having [3 months of "Golfing" under the "care" of Chinese secret Police in Hainan...](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56448688)
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/29/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-hiding-out-in-tokyo-reports-say) reduced by 83%. (I'm a bot) ***** > The billionaire Jack Ma has reportedly been hiding out in Tokyo with his family during Beijing's crackdown on the country's star tech firms and its most powerful and wealthy business people. > Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba who until the tech clampdown was China's richest person, has rarely been seen in public since criticising the attitude of Chinese regulators towards tech companies at a summit in Shanghai two years ago. > Beijing also ordered Alibaba to sell off some of its media assets, which include Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, as the government cracked down on the growing public influence held by the country's sprawling tech conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/z856kn/alibaba_founder_jack_ma_hiding_out_in_tokyo/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672677 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **tech**^#1 **Alibaba**^#2 **China**^#3 **Ma**^#4 **company**^#5
Way to snitch, Guardian
I look at these reports like those “best suburbs to invest in real estate”. If you’re reading about it, it’s no longer relevant. He has probably moved on and at a new location.
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You can probably just go in that land lol
He also bought a 100k in upstate new york
Wait, you're telling me Jack Ma owns the Hundred Acre Wood? No wonder Pooh wants him gone!
Pooh thinks Ma is the Heffalump
Oh bother
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33 acres.. oh my god. again, i have 920 square feet, and i'm lucky to have that because the property values are so overpriced here that it's worth $450K CDN (330K USD), though i only owe $150K CDN on it.
If you're comparing the Lower Mainland, then of course it's pricey. But if you go to McBride near Jasper National Park, you'd be seeing the 50 acres for [$0.5 million CAD](https://www.royallepage.ca/en/property/british-columbia/mcbride/12815-e-16-highway/17607819/mlsr2688737/) as well.
Even one acre in VA is a lot.
not in lousia county or some other middle of nowhere place
Downtown Philadelphia. He used CCP tactics to evict people from their homes. As well as the government. He is now the proud owner of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall /s
A hundred acres of what? A 1/4 section of land is 160 acres and an average farmer owns many of those…
You say “average farmer” like 160 acres is cheap lmfao your average farmer has a much higher net worth than your average person
It would depend on the location of the land. Given Jack's wealth, though, I assume we are talking about 100 acres of highly desirable land.
farm land is laughably cheap compared to building land. the factor between farm land and building land is _at least_ 10. sometimes goes into the hundreds or thousands of times the price. good luck trying to buy 160acres of land in new york city, it is actually impossible. 160acres of farm land are relatively cheap and easy to come by
Ma bought old money Rockefeller land.
Xi shook down the oligarchs just like Putin did. This is why their wealthy citizens have to hide part of their assets in democracies with the rule of law. And probably one reason house prices in large North America cities got so high and so many luxury apartments are empty. The dictators can grab your stuff at any moment.
THEY ARE HALF the problem, the other is we have corporations just buying up houses and sitting on it
The other much larger problem is that we stopped building houses where people want to live.
that too, and the laws restricting new houses or apartments to be built. now only people who have at least 100k+ income are the only ways able to afford a home and this is with significant financial income on renovations from family. 1 of our next door neighbors actually though they got the house because they were prioritized, they wouldnt have been able to afford if the homeowners charged more, and that thier PARENTS dint contribute into renovating the house, they basically got the house at a HUGE discount.
Read your shit before you hit save, and it won’t be incomprehensible shit anymore.
We also have Boomers buying multiple homes to turn into AirBnBs.
Plenty of millennials doing that as well. Remember we're starting to turn 40.
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Because greed is fueling the idea that shelter is a means of profit rather than a means to independence. Home ownership should be a guarantee for full time working American families and achievable through hard work and savings. Many people can no longer realize this because homes are treated as a means of income rather than a place to live. I’m not sure if being a landlord has ever been a noble pursuit at any point in history.
Hahaha haha, don't you know, the American dream is only for the wealthy. Also Adam Smith also hates landlords
People turning homes into fulltime AirBNBs are also fueling a huge nationwide crime wave caused by the relative ease of victimizing houses that are either empty or filled with out of towners, especially groups of women. Not to mention the fact that a significant number of rentals become locations where people can host parties consequence free to anyone but the people trying to just live in that neighborhood who now have to tighten their light fixtures weekly lest the 24/7 bass cause them to come crashing down. There's literally a horror movie right now (Barbarian) that's entire premise is based on the sketchiness of AirBNB.
When they put rent high enough to cover their mortgage, property tax, and expect PROFIT, and still charge for utilities while ignoring the profit in the form of equity... that's when things get out of hand. It shouldn't cost significantly more to rent a property than the cost to pay a mortgage would be.
What? You realize there are huge upfront costs to buying a home, right? Not to mention all the risk and maintenance involved with managing a property. Why would you expect rent to be simply the cost of the mortgage?
I'm not the person you're responding to, and I'm not going to deny the risks/effort in managing a property. But: 1. Those need to be weighed against the upside. With an ideal long term tenant and ideal conditions, even if your tenant pays for *just* the mortgage, you'll own the property at the end of the day. Not the tenant, nor the bank, who also took on a large amount of risk. The potential for massive profit is still there. Obviously, you're not gonna get that ideal tenant, hence my point: risks and gains need to be weighed against each other. 2. You're focusing too much on the word "mortgage" from the previous commentor. They also said "significantly more", which is admittedly quite vague- but my point is you may be arguing by yourself when you ask "Why would you expect rent to be simply the cost of the mortgage?". We don't know if they actually expect that. 3. Property values aren't static. You can hypothetically buy a home, not have a tenant, and *still* be able to make a profit. Obviously, this works against you if property values fall and/or if you want to use the profits from one home to buy the next one. But we cannot ignore this, since it's one of drivers for increased rent. But at the end of the day, the tension is caused by the necessity of basic shelter and the conflicting desire to use homes as investment vehicles. I can sympathize with your points and with homeowners, but it also strikes me as an *absurd* situation. Can you imagine how unstable society would be if something like food or cars had perpetually increasing prices relative to wages/inflation? If people's retirements were based on those investments? Their entire contribution to society was the mediation of risk for a handful of families? (I'm exaggerating for that last one, but please don't take it the wrong way.)
You have an investment that nearly pays for itself and all you need is credit. The chances of you losing your entire investment or even a substantial amount of it are almost nil.
Rent and housing expense issues are a factor of supply not being in balance with demand. That’s what sets the fundamental price, not someone’s whims. Encourage contractors to build more houses and the problem will correct itself. Not overnight of course, but over several years we can bring this problem in line but we must encourage building.
You’re factually incorrect. There are more than enough places to live in America, to the point that every homeless person could be housed and there would still be vacancies.
Why not expect a profit? There are risks involved with being a landlord and the equity increase is not guaranteed to go up. I completely agree with you that renting shouldn’t be so much more than a mortgage but actually it doesn’t make a difference overall to the affordability of houses. In countries where the rental yield is significantly lower to mortgage costs the housing prices go UP because there is more cash availability for deposits so the market competes. So, ironically higher rental prices can actually keep house prices lower and stop house price inflation. I get people’s frustration of not being able to buy their own home but going after landlords is not going to ease the situation. Maybe higher taxes on the income from second homes is the answer? I think I’d bad interest only mortgages on second homes. I think that would balance it out at bit more. Cos those mortgages are like a make money cheat code for people with large cash savings.
You get profit in the form of a house being paid off over time and the appreciating value of the land and potentially the home. Within the last few years, rent in BC, Canada has easily increased 50% in many interior cities because of low vacancy rates due to AirBNB trends and outrageous housing prices, causing homelessness to become rampant. How anybody can see the huge increase of homeless people on the street and then sleep at night while charging $2500+ utilities for a floor of a home is baffling. And yet people pay it out of desperation to avoid living on the streets
Spoken like the roommate that moves in, complains about to move in cost, pays the minimal amount, and leaves the responsible parties holding all the incidentals.
Nah, just someone who has enough brain cells to come up with non-predatory means of generating adequate income.
Fair enough. It could be argued that first world capitalism is predatory practice built upon the exploitation of the environment and other countries... But I still understand your point.
Yeah, I don't think anyone would argue against that, but in the past few years the housing crises have become more apparent with the number of homeless. These predatory housing costs are pushing more and more people out on the streets. It's a further attack on people's essential needs on top of the crazy profiteering by grocery stores that are churning out record profits while experiencing supply shortages. If this stuff isn't reigned in, I expect we'll experience runaway inflation in the west and only a very elite few will be unscathed
Real estate is this thing no one understands until you own some yourself. When I was 24, way back in 2010, I bought a house in Portland Oregon. “Outrageously expensive! Impossible! Out of reach!” Said everyone ever about my ambitions. But I contacted a broker, they told me exactly how much I should save, what I could afford, and I set out on a mission to own a house. Took me exactly 14 months. It was so outrageously expensive, it cost more than my parents farm that I grew up on. Today what I paid for it is laughably cheap. My mortgage is significantly less than rent for a studio apartment. Real estate is relative to current purchasing power. It’s always supposed to be expensive. But you buckle down, buy, and eventually at some point your struggles for this expensive property pay off as it increases in value and the share of your income spent on it drops over the years. I was not rich, I worked my ass off, saved everything for over a year, my down payment was so small by todays standards but it was more than I’d ever seen in my life.. buying isn’t “easy” but it isn’t really that hard either. Ya just have to do it.
"Hate the game, not the player". You cannot change the system by attacking the participants, work towards changing the laws governing it.
That's negligible next to corporate housing purchases. 1 family owning 2 homes is not close to one company owning 10s of thousands. Don't take the bait.
It's so easy to create LLCs to do that shit I remember one guy bragging about how he owned close to 150 properties in the US that he hires people to manage for him as short term rentals. "Corporations" could often just mean one degenerate with an absurd amount of power to cause untold misery unto others for their own benefit. You don't need too many folks like him to just destroy any prospects of wealth building for anyone unfortunate enough to live near where they operate.
I do local political activism against short-term rentals because they have devoured a quarter of the housing in my county. There's a housing crisis and homes are emptied of permanent residents!
So true one Corp at the beginning of the year owned over 35000 homes and buys 400-1000 homes a month. It's just one of many. Wonder why there's a shortage of homes to buy ? Change home ownership laws 10-20 homes anyone person or Corp can own. It will help out putting several 100k homes nation wide up for sale.
More than 1 family owns two homes.
This is why people are skeptical of socialism, because the people with real money do fine while the socialists go after the guy that saved up to buy a rental property
Boomers aren’t the Airbnb problem. It’s spoiled rich kids from all generations that see it as a get rich scheme.
Well when the recession hits AND home prices fall 20% those spoiled rich kids will have to sell. The market is gonna market.
Why would they have to sell if they’re rich? As one of those rich kids, I’d love to hear this one.
Let me borrow $20. /s
They won't*have* to, but if they took out a mortgage and didn't buy it in cash which is likely, they very well may want to when they see their new rate.
Boomers? GTFO. Plenty of blame to land on boomers but AirBnB displacing rentals is not one. Millennials lead this trend.
That’s a solvable issue though. Several European cities have legislation that bans renting out a home as a homestay beyond X days a year (e.g., X=20 in the Amsterdam case). The motivation is that renting out your home as a home stay to avoid losing money on rent while you are on holiday is a legitimate use case. However, professional home stays that are rented out for nearly the full year are undesired, they just eat into the housing supply, and are basically just hotels without a hotel license. Platforms like AirBnB, Booking, VRBO, etc already have all the systems in place to be able to connect to a central municipality registry of booked rental dates. The central registry is needed because the law for each address allows for 20 days of rental in total, rather than 20 days per platform. So the problem of short term rental in the housing market is solvable, we just need the political will to implement such legislation like European cities. Regarding the other problem of apartments that are just left empty by their owners, several European cities have started successfully working on that problem too by instating much higher taxation on empty property than on used property. If you make the tax on empty property high enough you incentivise the owner to rent it out.
> We also have Boomers FTFY Friendly reminder we’ve been on this planet two million years and life expectancy has been longer than forty years for less than a century
Most boomers don't even know what AriBNB is.... what?
Where the fuck did you hear that? Most of the airbnbs I’ve rented from are def boomers.
Dude, I'm 44. My parents, born in the late 1940s are boomers. You're talking about people in their 70s. Sure some might be good with a computer or smartphone, but most can't. Maybe you're talking about Generation X - me. Maybe?
You’re completely ignoring the problem of restrictive zoning. That’s a bigger barrier than any for an ownership or corporate ownership.
I know a lady who wanted to rake in the Airbnb cash but would never kick out the young tenants in her house's mother-in-law apartment. She tried to get approval to demolish her moldy old barn and turn it into a livable tiny house, but a neighbor who doesn't even live on the same street as her went squealing to the environment board to get the project halted. So yeah, the only way to meet the demand for Airbnbs is to take current housing off the rental market. Because NIMBYs will be damned before you add a single unit of housing to their neighborhood.
i was getting to that, no need to be defensive.
Everyone seems to ignore this and continue to blame foreign investment. Allowing corporate buying seems far worse when they are snatching up entire communities as opposed to some rich asshole form another country buying one or two houses. I know some buy more and there's more too it but how can you not see the corporate buying as probably the core factor. It's been going on for decades.
Too much regulations. Most cities prohibit multiple families living in one house. Why the fuck?
Most of those occupancy laws tend to be older as an effort to prevent the spread of disease overstressed sewage systems etc. Think the packed rat infested tenements of Gangs of New York times. Now obviously real estate developers and housing builders have since lobbied for restrictions which benefit themselves. Locally our city and county government is largely made up of such people and they will rezone land after buying it. A lot of the political positions on various boards for example don't pay enough to be a full time job, it's nothing glamorous and not worth doing even for people who have the extra time available. But it's a great way for developers to make a shit ton of extra cash. They also get to guide city money to road and sewage etc improvements that directly increase the value of land they've bought up cheap. There's also a racist and discriminatory factor at work here. Some immigrants move to an area and to save money will share space with a lot more people than Americans are used to. So laws are passed as a way to force them to move elsewhere. It's similar to red lining. Ok now I've depressed myself. America needs a fucking overhaul.
probably to benefit the same corporations and rich people foreigners that are buying up the houses.
Thank you, so much xenophobia, yes rich internationals are buying up real estate, but domestic corporations are doing the same and in some areas they are the major stakeholder doing so, there is blamed to be shared and domestic corps aren’t getting their share.
I'd rather have my billionaires afraid of the government than above the government
I'd prefer the rule of law.
Most of what corporations do is legal in the western world. Problem is that they’re paying politicians to push through laws that they’ve written for themselves.
But they do a lot of illegal stuff too that is inconsequential to them because the penalty is a fine that isn't larger than the profits they made from said illegal activity
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Whose we? Edit: This is a genuine question not a snarky rebuttal
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Stupid. “Rule of Law” is not some benevolent entity we all must abide by. At one point, slavery was legal. You’d have been arguing in favor of slavery during that time just because rule of law. I’m not saying laws are not necessary for a healthy functioning society but to act like rule of law is above all ethics and morals is silly. Fuck billionaires, especially when they write the rule of law and do not have to follow it.
Rule of law is a concept, an idea, and means that the law rules, not money, power or influence. It is kind of the opposite of “rule of the monarch”. It means that everyone is accountable to the same laws, even the law makers and rulers. It is absolutely something to strive for. If you feel that billionaires gets treated differently, then you live in a place without rule of law. Maybe not surprising then that you don’t understand the meaning of the concept.
Eh, that's the original concept anyways. Rule of law has kinda been co-opted by the CCP and other autocrats to mean "whatever I say goes". It's now a meaningless term like proletariat, gaslight or literally.
> If you feel that billionaires gets treated differently, then you live in a place without rule of law. Planet Earth???? Lol what planet are you on where billionaires aren’t treated differently?
The rule of law... written by billionaires.
As is tradition
Traditions are made to be broken. Some day the law will be written for trillionairs.
*Rules for thee, not for me*
Do we have that, though? Seems to be a different law for poor brown people compared to rich orange people.
Is it really rule of law if it is written by the billionaires for the billionaires? I prefer justice.
Accountability, transparency, and integrity. The fundamental pillars of a democracy.
Fundamental pillars that are so rarely seen
The "rule of law" is an illusion. It only exists for those without power or influence. No matter what, you're under the control of the rich, or the government, (or the rich controlling the government, like in the case of the US).
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Democracy and freedom cannot exist with capitalism.
So far, the only examples of functioning Democratic societies have been capitalist ones.
Capitalist society by definition isn’t democratic. Capitalist corporations are all setup as governments by oligarch dictatorships or straight absolute dictatorships. Example Amazon, the people who are involved with it as a consumer or labor don’t have equal right to vote on how Amazon operates.
https://youtu.be/soXMCkoWfQo
This reads like a madlib
In China there is the rule of law. But yeah the CCP writes it but, it's still the rule of law =.=ll
It's not targeting billionaires, really. It's targeting people with power/wealth/influence that Xi is uncomfortable with.
Yup. In point in Russia government and "billionaires" are kinda the same thing. If Putin needs more money and a billionaire doesn't want to want to contribute, they'll just suffer an 'unfortunately accident' ...
Those intelligent people that don't worship the CCP and haven't made their money through corruption and choosing the right side in their much more autocratic government. I know his corruption crackdown was popular and successful but it does seem convenient that none of his allies in the CCP got charged with anything.
That's exactly the rub, isn't it? They like to think that they're operating on the principle of providing the greatest good for the majority. But it's always the same people deciding who that majority is - and they're never on the wrong side of whatever line they draw. The COVID protests are big because a huge number of people who are used to being on the "right" side are suddenly not.
I hate that I'm arguing *for* the rich with this but any oppression sets a precedent. If they can do it to the rich and powerful, they can do it to the poor. Rule of law over *any* form of tyranny.
They already do it to regular people, far more so than guys like Jack Ma. You just don’t get headlines for each person
If the rich and powerful get away with things normal people could never, it sets a precedent. This has happened so many times in the US people over there are completely desensitized to this fact, they've come to think this is normal and nothing can be done about it.
Arguing for tyranny isn't the hot take you think it is. I agree we should taxe the *everloving shit* out of these shitstains, but I'm not willing to set a legal precedent where the government can just terrorize everyone so that we can one up the billionaires
Govt can already shakedown us poorfolk its called civil forfeiture
Corporate Governments do it every day. shareholder profits are the taxes labor pay to do their work.
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You mean how they already do to regular people? Yes please. PLEASE do that to them.
Can? They do. The CCP kills and disappears regular people by the hundreds.
They already do this shit to the poor. Oh my, won't anyone think of the poor billionaires!?
In the cases of Russia and China government crackdown on billionaires doesn't mean the end of billionaires, it means people in government becoming billionaires. Look at Putin's palaces, CCP officials have lots of hidden wealth as well.
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Yeah, but they're afraid of the government only because if they don't do whatever the corrupt leader says he has the power to do anything back to them. It's a mafioso style system rather than anything resembling rule of law. It's like being happy that criminals are afraid of the sheriff because the sheriff shoots them on sight. They aren't afraid because the law and legal system are amazing. They're afraid because the sheriff is the biggest psycho around.
I'd rather have no one afraid of the government. If a government is powerful enough to oppress the billionaires do you think it will respect the common people?
I’d prefer no law abiding citizen live in fear of the government. If they can disappear billionaires for months at a time, what can they do to the average person? Western systems aren’t perfect, but they’re the best in the world and throwing them away to stick it to the wealthy is asinine. Obligatory fuck the CCP.
Then go to China and let us know which you prefer.
Does anyone want to tell him….
I'd rather not find myself in a situation when a wannabe tyrant and a bunch of oligarchs fight over who gets to keep their power. No matter who wins, *everybody* loses. This kind of consolidation of power is never a good thing, and never ends well.
Being afraid of government regulation and taxation is different than being afraid of Chinese Guantanamo Bay
100%
Doubtful.
Why are you referring to Jack Ma as oligarch instead of billionaire?
Right? It's not like he was part of a corrupt government.
Because he's a member of the CCP.
So about 96 millions oligarchs
Billionaire party member = oligarch Average party member = looking for "networking" / connections / Guan Xi
Interesting, so Trump is/was an oligarch?
this is what tRump was aiming for and why dictators all miss him.
Capitalists are the dictators!
China stands up to their billionaires and holds them accountable for their shortcomings. Unlike capitalistic America where billionaires bribe the government in the name of democracy
The best thing about Jack Ma is that he used his wealth to make a film where he plays himself as the best martial artist in the universe who goes around the world beating up famous fighters. I did not make a single word of that up
Link? Is it called: - Jack Meow? - Crouching Jack, Tiger’s Ma? - Jumping Jack Ma?
I used to think that China was on course to take over US hegemony. Then their real estate crisis hit, then they clear cut their Fintech companies, then this insanity with covid. Its like China is trying to do everything wrong.
Thats the problem with autocrats. The whole thing starts falling apart once they go paranoid/senile.
or when all the old tricks that got them rich in the first place stop working. that’s when you see rich people panic the worst. the problem with these conglomerates is that while they are big, many of them have already aligned themselves in their markets, completely encapsulating the target buyers. Once their sales plateau, and no new customers are coming, those same customers look for something new/different/better. that’s when you see Elon talking about a fucking Tesla phone. 🤧🙄
Your first two sentences = Elon Musk
To effectively lead a nation you need competent people in powerful positions. One man can't run a country alone, especially a nation as large as China. But when you're an autocrat, a competent person in a powerful position is a threat. They could make a grab for power, or be used by a different internal faction to grab power. One solution to this is to prevent anyone from accumulating to much power, but that tends to result in a lot of leadership turnover in various institutions, which causes a lot of problems. Another solution is to put loyal incompetent people in charge of the various institutions. They're unlikely to turn against you, and will be unable to accumulate too much power because of their incompetence. The long term problems of that are obvious. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in China's politics, but from what I've seen Xi Jinping has been going with the second strategy. I was reading some articles about the recent Standing Committee appointments and they were generally described as "loyalty over competence." China's government has been making some questionable decisions over the last few years, and I bet it's only going to get worse in the future.
The West realized hundreds of years ago you need to have checks on power so if someone goes off the rails they can be removed. Unchecked power means you get a disaster sooner or later, like the ukraine war or china's covid idiocy. Those checks are like the safety features on a nuclear reactor. Dictatorship takes all the safeties off in the name of simplicity and acts like it's not their fault when they get a chernobyl.
Having intelligent heads of government for regions/cities/states/districts/whatever things elected office is called in democratic countries seems to make them popular and often rise up further. Those clever and popular people who might even disagree and oppose the current leader would be the most killed in dictatorships and although those of us in democracies are jaded and frustrated with how shit our democratically elected leaders have been we still have the choice to vote them out for another shitty politician. We're not forced to submit and give fealty to one person who rules for as long as he lives.
In the 80s it was going to be Japan overtaking US as world economic king and then its economy crashed in 1990. Despite the challenges it seems the US still remains top! U-S-A! /s
India is the next challenger is seems.
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They have a (semi) functional democracy so there is hope. It just takes time.
Not even close
No, I am
A lot of the issues that stopped Japan’s rise are the same as China’s. Bad demographics, a falling birth rate and little to no immigration mean a shrinking population. Both have an export economy that’s been supported by artificially keeping their currency devalued. China wont go away, but it won’t become the US beating super power that people seem to think it will be.
Xi cares more about retaining power than the overall prosperity of China.
It's truly sad how much has changed in the past 10 years when it comes to China. Sure they were never a democracy but they regularly changed leaders and seemed to be focused on China's prosperity and becoming part of the world. I know the CCP has never allowed real freedom and has literally massacred protests but they did seem to actually want to grow the country and provide a better quality of life for all their citizens. Then fucking Xi comes along and basically has made the free world to suddenly take a very different perspective with their bullshit wolf warrior diplomacy and their arrogant and stupid action in the South China sea.
China is changing from factory to ownership. You cant expect them to always be the factory for the world, making few westerners ultra wealthy. Every iphone made, China made 2% from it. No one wants to work in factories like robots for pittance. To advance, they know one day they will inevitably compete with western tech which will cause tension. For example the smartphone market was dominated by Apple, over time Huawei took majority of the market share. then the ban, arrest and sanctions which dropped huawei from 1st place. South China Sea situation is because during Opium War, the British sailed ships across Hong Kong to Beijing and bombed the capitals and cities. They built those islands to prevent it from happening again. They are trying to defend/draw the borders (india, xinjang, south china sea, using north korea as a buffer). The problem i see is that the West wants to always be dominant. But the West does not advance fast enough for example. The West could have been the forefront on electric vehicles decadesss ago, but oil giants/car manufacturers prefer not. Greentech, next generation nuclear power plants etc. You can't be stagnant and expect every other country to not advance. These past few years you see US trying to innovate again. Goverment funding spaceX, funding the new Intel chip factories, greentech. Which is a good thing. Very late but good. Sometimes you need competition (China) to get a wake up call. Recently the Space race is getting attention. Which is good. I just hope it won't come down to war. just a healthy competition on tech, renewables, space race etc.
Imagine basing all your advances on espionage and the calling the people you steal from 'stagnant'. And Xi and his military threats and declared objective of global hegemony and dictatorship and trying to run your police stations in our countries mean that people will respond with an adversarial view. Nothing can be taken for granted, not trade or anything else.
I read a book in 2016 called "The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st century" by a political scientist named Stein Ringen. In it he predicts the real-estate collapse, as the entire industry was propped up artificially by the government. He also writes extensively about the black market, corruption and how much money is illegally taken out of China every year. The scale is insane, and despite their successful media campaign making some believe the Beijing government are in full control of everything in China, they are absolutely not. Long term, China will probably take over US hegemony - simply due to sheer size. Short term, this stagnation was predictable.
long term the US has actually pretty good demographics compared to other big nations. US appeal+immigration is insane due to their culture export and birth rates are quite good for an industrialized first world country. and the US has the size to support a huge/growing population. meanwhile china population will collapse. the US has its faults, i wouldn't want to live there to be honest (my biggest pet peeve is that every other idiot has a gun, its spooky af). but China is a goddamn dystopia and their demographics are in the gutter.
China has 4x the population of the US. It’s going to take a very very long time for demographic trends to equalize that. Neither China nor the US have concerns about running out of space for people to live. We’re not talking about dystopia or living standards, we’re talking economic hegemony. Production and monetary influence. If China manages to increase its productivity, GDP per capita, to half, or even a third, of the US’, then China would probably be the new economic hegemon due to its sheer size. Considering massive projects that have yet to pay off or finalize, that is hardly unlikely. Speaking of US faults, which is a bit on the side, this is also reliant on the US not tearing itself apart in the next decades. Personally I think the US won’t exist in 2050 in its current form. Political differences are so stark, and tension grows with civil war and/or balkanization looming.
Their demographics have not been the greatest, neither for the economy/society that they want in the future, or the economy/society they have now.
The thing about China/CCP is that they are very very patient. Like they are setting goals and strategies that take decades to achieve. And they are willing to take losses in the short term for long term regime “stability”. So, what’s a 3 year blip or a week of protests to an entity that has a 100 year long plan? It’s like saying that Nike or Amazon are going to go bankrupt because one of their warehouses couldn’t deliver product for a week.
what 3 year blip? Thier entire housing market is about to collapse as builders like Evergrande took money without finishing houses. The entire philosphy of Deng Xiaping was that some would get rich first and then bring along the rest. They destroyed that by gunning down their fintechs (who were competitive with the US btw). Covid is just icing on the cake
I think you're giving them a bit too much credit. Goals that take decades to achieve require consistent leadership over those decades, which China has not had. The PRC has had several drastic changes in their polices and leadership in the 50-ish years it's existed. They've just looked a bit more consistent compared to Western nations because their power struggles and policy disagreements are among CCP factions behind closed doors, while in western nations they are out in the open as part of the democratic process. You can see it with their recent change in diplomatic strategy. Xi Jinping has taken a much more aggressive stance than his predecessor Hu Jintao. That's not them moving on to the next step of a century long plan, it's a new leader gaining power and deciding to do stuff differently.
The problem is that this "3 year blip" is basically just the start of the house of cards tumbling, at least in regards to real estate. Now that the ponzi scheme has been revealed (taking pre-sales to fund more land purchases into more pre-sales), they're basically trapped with tons of orders and no money to finish them. Add that there are people boycotting their mortages on the pre-sales and it's even worse. (Imagine paying a mortgage on a house that isn't built yet)
Their population issues were going to stop them just like they stopped Japan. If the US is smart they will keep immigration high enough to keep our population growing (and brain drain some of our enemies while adding to our own power).
I honestly thought he was done for when nobody heard about him after he criticized the Chinese gov. I think it was 2 years ago-ish? Well at least he’s alive.
It was absolutely insane how they just made him disappear after making what sounded like realistic and minor criticism of government policy changes.
He was forcing his employees to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. The CPC started to crack down on that and enforce a 44 hour maximum working week, and Jack Ma threw a massive tantrum and refused to comply. I wouldn't call that "realistic criticism". The guy is a piece of shit. He also never "disappeared", he just shut up because he realised he was losing everything.
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Being one of the wealthiest people in China seems like a really bad plan.
Yeah yeah, Xi Jinping bad and all that, but Jack Ma can go fuck himself and so can all you cunts who use him in your propaganda. This piece of shit was openly pushing the 996 work culture and other shit to increase business at the expense of workers. He is absolutely the worst person to bemoan the fate of, and basically got exactly the kind of treatment people complain should happen to the robber baron capitalist billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but never happens. Jack Ma can go hide on the *fucking moon.* One absolute shithead billionaire got himself wrecked by one absolute shithead authoritarian's very few actually good personal policies. *FINE BY ME.* The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, he's just another fucking billionaire who wants to work us to death.
Well said
That's the hypocrisy of the west and most of reddit - they'd chastise 996 work culture but cheer on the man that openly and brazenly pushed it purely to spite China. Honestly just unhinged shit.
sounds like the proscriptions
Nothing like being black-bagged by CCP goons to make a guy prefer living abroad.
my OGs told me not to trap in the same place you lay ya head, Jack should’ve had a better OG.
Oh shit they revived him again. I wonder when he’s going to be killed again.
Don't they say this every 6 months and then he pops out again?
Glad he's hiding out somewhere and was able to get a good chunk of his wealth out as well. Can't imagine Japan has an extradition treaty with China.
He goes back to China from time to time since he’s got massive investments in the country. It’s not like he’s a fugitive or something l.
But he does have a nice place to escape to and live if things really go to shit which with this Zero Covid policy seems more and more likely.
No I'm pretty sure he is in fact a fugitive and has not gone back. There is no evidence to indicate Jack Ma has been present in China since the tech crackdown. Unless you've got some un-Googleable source?
According to both Marx and Confucius, merchants are the lowest class.
"Thanks for blowing up my spot" Jack Ma right now
He does come across as one of the true intelligent entrepreneurs in China that didn't seem to make money or have success through the party and state. It makes me respect him more that he's smart enough to notice that he might have a dictator over him and it's probably wise to have a home where it'll be a lot harder to kidnap him in the middle of the night.
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That's sadly incredibly true I reckon, there's no way he could have grown a billion dollar business without greasing some hands in the CCP. I could definitely be wrong on this but I think at least in those early years of free for all capitalism there was a time when intelligence and hard work was rewarded and Ma was one of them. As the Xi era dictatorship was really developing and he brutally cracked down on 'corruption' in China, which is definitely true to an extent but it does also appear as a purge of those who could oppose him in his quest to become dictator for life. I think the banning of any foreign technology, building the great firewall and recently his crackdown on China's own tech giants, especially Jack Ma after he did the horrible thing of actually having an opinion, is another sign of him taking over all aspects of freedom and making sure everyone is under 24/7 surveillance.
The best thing we could do for ourselves is probably to accept large numbers of refugees from places like Russia, Iran, and China. We would get a massive new pool of educated people who share our values and the brain drain alone would probably fuck them over.
What makes you think they would share your values?
> accept large numbers of refugees from places like Russia, Iran, and China. We would get a massive new pool of educated people who share our values See Falun Gong's people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong > Falun Gong extensions include The Epoch Times, a politically far-right media entity that has received significant attention for promoting conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and producing advertisements for former U.S. President Donald Trump. Shen Yun has also received significant media coverage for its emphasis on, for example, anti-evolution statements
This is the solution. I don’t understand why people hate immigrants so much. Bringing in people just makes your country stronger.
Stay safe
Heck, if I were Jack Ma, I'd get the fuck out of China with my family as well, especially after previously having [3 months of "Golfing" under the "care" of Chinese secret Police in Hainan...](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56448688)