The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to

journalists, experts and long-time China

watches about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history

to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the Chinese see

these issues? Back in November, I did an episode of Chinese Whispers with Duncan Clark, a biographer of Jack Ma, China's richest man.

At that point, Jack Ma's IPO for Ant Financial, a fintech company that he founded, was stopped at the very last minute by the Chinese Communist Party.

It would have been the largest IPO in the world.

It's been widely seen in the West as a way in which the CCP is controlling its

leading entrepreneurs, but actually a lot of people in China were cheering. This episode is a follow-up

to that to find out exactly why the Chinese public had such a different view, and partly

is because of what one part of Ant Financial's business model has been doing. It's been giving out

consumer loans through its app, AliP It's been giving out consumer loans through

its app, Ali Pay, which means that consumer loans are now able to be got at the click of a button

just through an app. Sounds great, right? But many Chinese blame it for spiraling credit culture,

leading to horrifying stories of mental health problems and even suicides. I'm joined now by Ray Ma, a former

venture capitalist and co-host of the podcast, TechBus China, to find out exactly what's

going on and how legitimate this backlash against FinTech is in China. Ray, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me again. To start with, can you give us an idea of the scale of things? For example, AliPay, which hosts the Hua Bei Just Spend function. How many people use AliPay? About a billion people in China use AliPay. So that's two-thirds of the population, pretty much. And that's pretty much everyone who's online in China. Right, right. And so

off that, around half of them use Huawei. And the way that the system works seems to be that at

checkout, when you're paying with AliPay, you can either choose to pay it for yourself in your debit account,

or you can borrow some money from and financial through the Hua Bay system, is that right?

...