The hounding of Alibaba and Jack Ma by the Xi Jinping government is far from over. The Chinese government has now asked Alibaba Group Holding Ltd to dispose of its media assets, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Alibaba and Jack Ma's media portfolio spans investments in broadsheet newspapers, BuzzFeed-style online outlets, Twitter-like social platforms and TV production companies—a constellation that informs and entertains about a billion consumers.
China's Twitter equivalent Weibo is among the most prominent investments of Alibaba with its 500 million-plus monthly users. Alibaba’s 30 per cent stake as of April last year made it the platform’s biggest shareholder after Weibo’s parent Sina Corp.
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In 2015, Alibaba bought out the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s largest local English newspaper; and took a 30 per cent stake in mainland news provider Yicai Media Group. Ant followed with an undisclosed investment in China’s most influential business magazine publisher Caixin Media. “The private press holdings were the beginnings of an empire that could have overshadowed the party and the state’s media,” Bloomberg quoted Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute and author of “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Ruler” in a report in February. “The fact that Ma is also effectively a media magnate, on top of his financial holdings, makes his growing power even more sensitive within the system.”
The fact that a special license is needed in China to generate original news content makes the holdings in Caixin and Yicai more valuable for Alibaba.
Reportedly, it is this expansive investment in the Chinese media that the Jinping government sees as a threat. Such influence is seen as posing serious challenges to the Chinese Communist Party and its own powerful propaganda apparatus, the Journal's sources were quoted as saying.
