Good morning. We are excited to release this special edition of The Wire China. For more than a year, our staff writers, Katrina Northrop and Eliot Chen, have been working with Mike Forsythe at The New York Times to look into leaked documents from Xiao Jianhua’s Tomorrow Group. What they found was Xiao’s repeated and obscured entanglements with Jack Ma’s empire. In other words: China’s most celebrated billionaire and its most notorious billionaire were secretly involved on business deals worth at least $1 billion.
To round out this special edition, the rest of our magazine this week is devoted to some of the questions or thoughts you may have after reading the investigation: a timeline of Jack Ma’s whereabouts since his infamous 2020 speech; an interview with Victor Shih on the fallout from Xi Jinping’s tech sector crackdown; a great video about how the investigation was done as well as more background information on Xiao’s empire; and an op-ed from Graham Webster on China’s tech turnaround. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to The Wire, please sign up here.
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The Billionaire Criminal Who Secretly Profited Off Jack Ma’s Deals
Confidential documents show that Xiao Jianhua, a corrupt investor tied to China’s political elite, backed the country’s most successful and revered entrepreneur. Michael Forsythe, Katrina Northrop and Eliot Chen report.
7 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into a Secret Investor in Jack Ma’s Companies
Behind the scenes, China’s most celebrated and its most notorious billionaires were linked through investments worth at least $1 billion.
The Big Picture: Where’s Jack?
For a man once often seen hobnobbing with presidents and other global leaders, the last few years have seen a comparative slide into obscurity for Jack Ma. This week’s infographics by Aaron Mc Nicholas consolidate the main events and sightings in recent years of China’s most storied businessman.
A Q&A with Victor Shih
Victor Shih is a professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, where he is also director of the 21st Century China Center. A well-known and prolific commentator on China’s political and financial scene, his most recent book, Coalitions of the Weak, describes how elite Chinese politics has worked since the late-Mao era until the present day. In this week’s Q&A with Andrew Peaple, he talks about how Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive upset the Party’s equilibrium and signs of splintering within the leader’s ruling faction.
Victor Shih
Illustration by Kate Copeland
Making Sense of Xiao Jianhua’s Empire
Watch how reporters traced China’s most notorious businessman back to Jack Ma, and learn more about Xiao Jianhua and his conglomerate, The Tomorrow Group.
China’s Tech Turnaround
Graham Webster, who leads the DigiChina Project at Stanford, writes that Beijing’s crackdown on the tech sector, followed by recent huge investments in AI and other areas, are part of a long pattern of shifts in the way the government has approached tech development.
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