Jack Ma's disappearance - an Alibaba mystery

As a thousand maternal puns bloom in India after the western media realised that Chinese business magnate Jack Ma has been missing since November 2020, a sigh of relief has broken out among India’s business class — none has gone missing because none lives in China. Phew-shew.

The People’s Daily, official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, reportedly stated that Ma is now ‘embracing supervision’ at an undisclosed location — although a search on the daily’s English website responded with: ‘‘Jack Ma’ not found’.

So, what has prompted the country north of Tibet to swing Alibaba’s Ma’s poster-boy status to that of a ‘vampire’? Apparently, his open criticism of China’s banking system and banking officials, whom he had described as having a ‘pawnshop mentality’.


What was he thinking! That he was in India where businessmen freely and regularly air constructive criticism? Ma’s Ant Group’s $37 billion initial public offering was infamously suspended in November when authorities didn’t like the idea of Ma getting too big for his boots.

His joining the likes of Chinese-Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua, who mysteriously disappeared in 2017, was perhaps not anyone’s cards, as Ma was seen as ‘too big to vanish’. But single-party systems characteristically don’t like monopolistic behaviour. So, Mao is taking care of Ma.