Interconnected

This incident seems to be a mark in the column of the old argument that authoritarianism is bad for economic growth because of the ever-present potential for capricious action such as this.

While we should take the WSJ's preliminary reporting with a grain of salt, the Ant IPO halt was shortly followed by the announcement that Beijing was going to be looking at antitrust and monopolistic behavior by big tech. [0] The 'angered Xi and the old guard' narrative seems very plausible.

Also, if anyone's interested, here's a translation [1] of the speech Jack Ma gave that set off the commotion. Interesting bits about what he thinks of incumbent financial powers (or at least, what he says to that audience). It's also interesting to see what relatively mild comments could trigger this kind of reaction when power is so centralized.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-11/china-s-antitrust-rules-will-threaten-alibaba-tencent-rivals

[1] - https://interconnected.blog/jack-ma-bund-finance-summit-speech/

Kevin Xu of Interconnected wrote an interesting analysis post about Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business[1] its worth a read, he points out that they have the tech for it but they don't seem interested and even if they were the hard part isn't necessarily the technical aspect its building the human part

>>"The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product."

He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals.

[1]https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud-business/

That's a great share thanks - interesting to consider all the ways the English speaking world has exerted an edge indirectly.

The observations don't necessarily have to be geopolitical (although it seems talk about China always is these days).

For example, PinDuoDuo hit 800M users in 6 years[1]

And from Kevin's InterConnected blog, the Chinese CBDC's initial "small-scale" testing did 70M transactions[2]

Seems like Chinese dev needs to be prepared for scale in ways most of us never have to dream of - would be interesting to know if they're adopting best practices we could learn from.

[1] https://stories.pinduoduo-global.com/articles/pinduoduo-intensifies-agriculture-modernization-drive-as-users-surpass-800-m

[2] https://interconnected.blog/e-cny-players-dcep-e-rmb/

He didn't seem scared to me, and the "video tape out of nowhere" was a speech at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai : https://interconnected.blog/jack-ma-bund-finance-summit-speech/

Why would one of the richest men in China openly defying the most basic financial regulations, and then trying to strong-arm the regulators by IPOing as fast as possible before regulations could be finalized, thus making them hurt a lot more people, and almost getting away with it, scare the CCP? I don't know, you ask me. I have no idea how an authoritarian government could be threatened by one of the most powerful people in their society openly calling them incompetent, defying them, and trying to make laws ineffective. None at all.

Apparently, this: https://interconnected.blog/jack-ma-bund-finance-summit-speech/

To my western ears, the speech doesn't seem all that shocking. Over here it's normal for the CEOs of financial services companies to argue they should be subject to fewer regulations, for 'innovation' and 'growth' (but they still want the taxpayer to bail them out when they gamble and lose).

I don't know if that stuff is just not allowed in China, or if there was other stuff going on too.