After cleaning up at the head of the Communist Party and in the police and judicial apparatus, the Chinese president is working to weaken the threat to his power posed by the big entrepreneurs of the digital economy.
The last of Xi Jinping’s ten-year tenure as party and state leader began like the first: with an offensive in the fight once morest corruption. Next October, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), it is with a strengthened security record that Xi Jinping will succeed himself, having broken the institutional lock that prevented him. But now, following the bigwigs of the party and those of the police and judicial apparatus, it is the great entrepreneurs of the digital economy who bear the brunt of this campaign.
The Ant Group, the parent company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, is in the hot seat, as is the communication giant Tencent, writes the webzine Asia Sentinel. The electronic payment systems of the two entities, Alipay and WeChat Pay, hold more than 90% of this activity in China and irritate the authorities, especially their respective bosses, Jack Ma and Pony Ma (no family connection). An anonymous expert clarifies this in the article :
Xi fears the threat that entrepreneurs pose to the CCP. The weight of this new generation of capitalists is such that they threaten its power.”
Already, Ant’s IPO in Shanghai had been blocked in 2020, and Jack Ma had disappeared from the public scene for three months, following offending the authorities with his iconoclastic statements regarding the inefficiency of the Chinese banking system.
“Xi Jinping explicitly talked regarding the threat posed by the world of technology companies in an article [paru en janvier] in the theoretical review Qiushi”,
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