Contact: Nate Sullivan at nate.sullivan@wirescreen.ai
A bombshell investigation by The New York Times and The Wire China has uncovered that Jack Ma, China’s most successful entrepreneur, was joined in business deals by Xiao Jianhua, a notorious Chinese billionaire who made fortunes for Beijing’s elite and who is now serving a 13-year jail sentence. The undisclosed alliance resulted in deals worth at least $1 billion and sheds light on Ma’s business in the years leading up to Beijing’s decision to cancel the I.P.O. for Ma’s mobile payment giant Ant Group as well as the sudden disappearance of Ma from public life.
Xiao Jianhua himself was abducted from his apartment in Hong Kong in 2017 and brought to Beijing, where authorities investigated and dismantled his financial behemoth, Tomorrow Group. Thousands of confidential documents from the company were obtained by the Times and show he secured lucrative shares in an array of Ma’s companies over the course of a decade.
China watchers say the overlap between Ma and Xiao is both shocking and revealing of China’s unique brand of catch-as-catch-can capitalism. “Finding them connected this way,” said Meg Rithmire, a professor at Harvard Business School, “shows that the Chinese system is so murky that everyone gets caught in the same web.”
No one understands the complexities of China’s business world better than David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who founded The Wire China as well as its sister company, WireScreen. While serving at the Shanghai bureau chief of The Times, David interviewed and profiled Jack Ma and Xiao Jianhua. In 2019, he co-founded WireScreen, a corporate intelligence platform, in part because of the work he did as a reporter trying to understand China’s opaque business landscape. WireScreen was used in this investigation and does in seconds what it used to take David months to do, including identifying the ultimate owners of Chinese companies who are often hidden behind layers of shell companies.
David and the two Wire China reporters on this story, Katrina Northrop and Eliot Chen, are available to talk with you about any part of this story that is of interest to your audience, including:
• The surprising alliance between Ma and Xiao, business icons who are bookends for China’s unique brand of capitalism;
• The critical insights this alliance offers about Beijing’s crackdown on its golden boy entrepreneur as well as the broader private sector;
• The challenges that China’s impenetrable private sector present to Xi Jinping as well as to global investors, businesses and regulators.
The full report can be found on the Times’ and The Wire China’s websites. Information about WireScreen, which is a Sequoia-backed corporate intelligence platform used by governments, law enforcement and global corporations, can be found at https://www.wirescreen.ai.
For more information or to arrange an interview about this investigation, please contact Nate Sullivan at nate.sullivan@wirescreen.ai or Kenna Camper at kenna.camper@wirescreen.ai.
