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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

So in China, you can work super hard, but if you actually become successful the good ol' CCP will come and take your wealth from you?

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One view of the Chinese system is that they run their country like a company. With that analogy, it's expected for a company to profit off the rewards of their employees' labour, and therefore it's within a country's right to rein in their business leaders as their success was facilitated by the country's resources.

This is a very fertile perspective. Explains so much about CCP.

That would explain taxes, and to some degree regulations, not taking away control entirely.

In this view companies like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and their founders could be said to be/have been beyond control of the US government. China’s government does not permit this to happen.

I studied at a Chinese university for a semester and as part of the program they put on seminars on things like the media, demographic issues, etc.

One of them was about the economic system and they explained that while small businesses (think street shops, small restaurants, etc) are hands-off as there's not much value in being hands on. Large businesses are at the state's control. They explained that you can see the party serving a similar role as the "board of directors."

I think it's a mistake to attribute all the success to hard work and all the headwinds to state intervention. More realistically, Jack Ma was seen as "on side" for the CCP and so it was acceptable for his companies to succeed. There were always some questions around what he said in interviews - but it's impossible to argue with a billionaire. Now he's "off side" -he's not an ally of the regime and so he can't succeed.

If he really is the genius that we all know he is, he'll build a billion dollar company in Japan. If he was just in a good spot with the government in China, then maybe not.

I took GP as saying that the current chinese system, whatever it is (socialism, state-managed capitalism, whatever) is removing incentives for entrepreneurs. Perhaps entrepreneurs are not necessary in the first place, or perhaps it is still worth it to become an entrepreneur in China even if you have to check out in the end (I'm sure he's still well off, please correct me if I'm wrong). Only time will tell, but I don't think GP is saying that Ma's success was inevitable, only that his exit has shown future businessmen in China what the new* terms of the game are.

*one might say these were always the terms

I would kinda argue that the regime changed more than Ma did, since 2017-ish the CCP has cracked down especially hard on all kinds of things that seem strange to me and on things they were kinda lax about before.

Private entrepreneurship was possible, but now Xi has been turning the clock back and clawing the control back to Bejing. More authorian, more central, lead China seems to be the way, with the extended third term for Xi.

My understanding is that you don't get to play politics with your success. Had he kept his nose only in his business he probably would have been better off.

Yes. They're communists.

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