Life after Jack Ma
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What next for China's giant tech companies? Ed Butler speaks to China watcher Richard McGregor at the Lowy Institute in Sydney about why China's leaders have clipped the wings of Jack Ma, the country's most famous business leader and founder of the tech giant Alibaba. Chinese tech sector analyst Rui Ma argues that closer regulation of China's giant tech companies will be good for competition, while Rebecca Fannin, author of Tech Titans of China, worries about the impact on innovation. Eswar Prasad, economics and trade policy professor at Cornell University in the US, outlines the challenge China faces in balancing its desire for control over its tech entrepreneurs with its need for innovation and growth.
(Photo: Jack Ma pictured in Paris in 2019, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.0 | Today, what message is China's government sending by imposing record fines and penalties on its best-known businessman? |
| 0:13.8 | It has implications for all Chinese entrepreneurs. You better make sure you're working for the state, not the other way around. |
| 0:22.2 | Jack Ma has seemingly been slapped down to size by the Beijing regulators. What will this |
| 0:27.4 | do for China's tech revolution? If you restrict these Chinese tech companies so much that |
| 0:33.3 | we stop seeing the innovation that has come out of China over the past two decades. |
| 0:38.4 | You could slow China's advancement overall. |
| 0:41.2 | The humbling of Jack Maugh, Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:47.4 | So how would you characterize your relationship with the government right now? |
| 0:51.3 | In love with them, but don't marry them. |
| 0:54.1 | The charismatic, witty, spiky billionaire. |
| 0:58.1 | Jack Ma, China's richest man, speaking there, at a public event back in 2015, five years |
| 1:03.6 | before his latest most dramatic run-in with Beijing's authorities. |
| 1:08.7 | Government does not need you to say, I love you. |
| 1:11.1 | The government wants to know that you can solve their problems. |
| 1:13.8 | We created 14 million jobs for China. |
| 1:16.3 | We are making all the banks to change. |
| 1:19.0 | So the government finally realized that we are helping them. |
| 1:21.6 | But it sounds like, at least as it is now, |
| 1:23.5 | they're willing to tolerate the changes you're bringing |
| 1:25.4 | to the financial system and the overall |
| 1:28.0 | commercial environment. |
... |
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