Capital Economy, Business and Finance
A little over four years ago Xi Jinping brought China’s best-known entrepreneur down to earth with a thud: he forced Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, the online sales site, to abandon plans for what would have been London’s biggest ever IPO.
The optics were bad for London, Ma and Alibaba, but mainly for Xi, who seemed to be ready to clip tech’s wings for the sake of Communist Party dominance.
Four years on, there’s talk of a Xi-Ma meet-up that would re-establish Ma as an in-favour tech titan, draw a line under Xi’s damaging ideological preference for control over innovation, and serve as a second boost in little over two weeks to China’s tech sector.
The first was Deepseek’s announcement that it could do nearly as much as Chat GPT with many fewer chips.
The UK’s Labour Party isn’t alone in having to rethink once-vital questions of probity in a headlong search for growth.
