The slowly unravelling saga surrounding Alibaba boss Jack Ma has now, apparently, reached down into his media holdings. What’s happening should be closely studied by all those who have been busy burying their heads in the sand while proclaiming that the only people who need to fear the dictatorship are ‘a very limited number’ of political opponents.

Ma, arguably China’s richest person, a member of the Communist Party and a willing participant in the Party’s propaganda efforts, has learned the brutal lesson that no one can be loyal enough once the people at the top get it into their heads that they have stepped out of line.

Ma is hardly a political dissident and had gone the extra mile to protect his business by answering the Party’s call to spread the message through his company’s media outlets.

Now, according to media reports, he is being instructed to ditch his media holdings, not because of any specific reason to do with their output but as part of Beijing’s drive to bring Ma’s influence under control.

A significant addition to the Alibaba media portfolio was made in 2016 with the acquisition of the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post newspaper. Following the acquisition the Post stated that it had a mission to explain China to the rest of the world and to this end beefed up its overseas operations, notably in the United States, launched a portal targeted at the North American youth audience and embarked on an impressive program of launching forums to bring its message more directly to overseas audiences.

For obvious reasons these in-person events have been suspended. Meanwhile Ma’s plan to make the paper more widely available by removing its paywall has given way to the reality of mounting losses at the SCMP, leading to the re-imposition of a paywall.

It should be noted that intense secrecy surrounds the paper’s performance as it has withdrawn from the independent body that audits circulation and no longer publishes accounts as it was obliged to do when SCMP was a separately listed company. Specific information about the paper’s sharply deteriorating financial performance is therefore not in the public domain but staffers at the paper have been repeatedly briefed about the need for belt-tightening and told that this once immensely profitable paper is now in the red.

On the plus side, at least as far as the paper’s new mission is concerned, it has shifted emphasis, especially in the area of commentary, to a pro-Beijing position and in the reporting arena it has more subtly shifted to news coverage to make it more amenable to Beijing. However the paper retains pockets of impressive independent reporting bestowing a degree of credibility that directly-state controlled news outlets lack.

In this sense the Post serves the classic united front function of being apart from the Communist Party while providing support from a supposedly independent position. Alibaba’s Mainland media assets are, of course, under even tighter state control.

So, it may be imagined that the Party has no cause whatsoever to be dissatisfied with Ma or the media outlets he controls. However this is not how things work in dictatorships because the seemingly self-confident people who sit at the top of the Party tree are perpetually paranoid, seeing threats to their control coming from every quarter.

It is a mystery why this is not understood by those who claim that they have nothing to fear because they make it their business never to challenge the authorities.

They may even be so stupid as to assert that Ma only got into trouble because he stepped out of line. What actually happened was that he made critical remarks suggesting that those who regulate China’s financial sector were holding back new technology development. By no standards can this be classified as a fundamental critique of the dictatorship.

However in a system where all forms of criticism are seen as undermining the ruler’s authority it is hard to tell how they will react to even the mildest expression of doubt.

There is much talk in Hong Kong today about how red lines should not be crossed. The fact that the red lines are never spelled out makes life difficult but the chilling reminder of the Cultural Revolution increasingly hangs over society. Those who suffered at the hands of the rampaging Red Guard mobs would repeatedly ask, “what have I done wrong?’. The invariable answer was, “you should know what you’ve done wrong”.

Is Jack Ma asking what he has done wrong? Almost certainly.

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse”

Vines’ latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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