16 January 2021
It was curious to read that President Xi was asking the boss of Starbucks to play good samaritan and renew high level contacts with incoming Biden administration to ‘ease the US China economic relations’! This tall request from Xi comes at a time when Biden may not exactly reset the button for China, while the probability of such reset is much better across the foreign relations landscape. Particularly an embattled Xi would want to not be singled out, isolated in the rejig of US policy after 20 January 2021!
It led me to wonder why Jack Ma the boy wonder from Chinese ‘corporate affairs’ if one can call anything Chinese that, as head of AliBaba and Ant, whose big IPO ran into headwinds unexpectedly with Chinese regulatory authorities and who has ‘disappeared from the scene’ was appraised by Xi as not being an asset in the same class of Schultz.
Jack Ma and PayTM founder VS Sharma had what could be called a coach player relationship, where the coach bestowed resources indulgently on his player! We know how PayTM was very crucial in the days when Demonetisation was announced and those full page advertisements with Mr Modi as the mascot, reveal a strategic synergy that was rare between a private player and a government! We also know that in other startups in India that have over the last few years grown and established themselves, Chinese financing, that too through AliBaba’s Ant Group, will now face new challenges and may even switch to western financiers if they were to survive a growing struggle over India’s domestic economic woes that can be traced back to 8 November 2016 and earlier. In fact, we are aware of how Mr Modi has allowed his personal prestige to be staked in the manner in which India handled the financial aspect of this pandemic story of 2020, far removed from the welfare state that was enshrined into the polity by successive Supreme Court affirmations as well as political grandstanding. Like how UP in 2017 was taken to affirm that electorally Demonetisation was a success, Bihar in 2020 was taken to mean the same. Yet from the street up, Mr Modi who was seen as a deliverer for the downtrodden, is now being viewed with a fracture unlike previously, where the agrarian community is now leading an agitation seeking repeal quite like they did with the Land Reforms Act in 2015, only this time, the anti government sentiment is strategised by targeting companies perceived to be close to the government, in which PayTM is also tagged prominently! Some commentators like Mr Arijit Barman have called for PayTM and Mr Sharma to strategise and to seek funding from Amazon through ‘potential merger’.( Economic Times Friday 15 January 2021)
So this is another surprise, how President Xi operates in a fashion where he cripples his own homegrown corporate honcho who had actually showcased Chinese medical management of the Pandemic by releasing books about his hospital’s performance and reviewing local procedures, which is perhaps the solid Chinese soft power projection of 2020, and who was eminently suited to seek an early appointment and meet with President Biden and set the tone for SinoUS trade relations to some extent! Was Ant Group initial offer seeking to raise nearly 40 billion $US in China and to later list the company in NYSE halted because of the Indian start up scene where the group plays such a key role? Of course, China watchers feel that Ma was the target, that like Fan Bingbing https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/fan-bingbing-appears-to-thank-china-for-disappearing-her-for-4-months-it-has-made-me-calm-down-and-think-seriously/articleshow/70510826.cms who was held in mysterious custody for ‘calming her’, when she disappeared from public view for several months in 2018, Ma has been dealt with likewise.
The understanding of CNP ( Comprehensive National Power) is something the Sun Tzu originating Chinese polity is supposed to have at a level which baffles Western watchers. Still if President Xi seeks to obtain global dominance without fighting World War III, then this aspect of ‘peoples power’ or ‘soft power of cultural icons’ is one that his China does not want to employ. If you have noticed like I have, even Jackie Chan the first of the great icons operating from Chinese system, seamlessly transiting from Hong Kong, has choreographed a more retiring persona abroad, with Mr Chan famously appearing in promotional video round his birthday in April last year, and who spent several opportunities promoting ‘Peace’ even in 2013 https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/jackie-chan-calls-for-indiachina-peace/article4827565.ece when India and China were involved in a border confrontation ever Eastern Ladakh, was conspicuously absent once the Galwan Valley clash heightened the awareness of the current border situation in that region in 2020.
Super power status is not just some title that is given to a country based on stockpiles of nuclear fissile material, or weapon platforms or even technology, without the secret ingredient of this ‘soft power’ which America has managed with her embrace of ‘popular culture’. In India the death of MF Doom https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/mf-doom-masked-rapper-with-intricate-rhymes-is-dead-at-49-7128663/ a British origin, the hiphop version of Bob Dylan was mourned the most across regions by youth, an icon who was always masked in public, https://rollingstoneindia.com/mf-doom-hip-hop-dead-obituary/ which is only explained by the phenomenal success a movie on rap ‘Gully Boy’ of 2019 enjoyed. Of course, the continued dominance of US & by extension the West, is not just in popular culture, but in pure science, as Ajith Parameshwaran the winner of the first Young Scientist award for Frontier Science by The World Academy of Sciences in partnership with Chinese Academy of Sciences, revealed in his interview to The Hindu on Sunday of 17 January 2021. So does Ajith talk ‘China’ in his chat? No. He talks about the literary culture and scientific temperament in Kerala, how he accidentally came into the field of gravitational research in Astrophysics and how his teacher Professor Indulekha and Professor Durandhar and then his post doctoral guide was Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne ( famously associated with the movie “Gravity”). Even a Caltech PIO astrophysicist Rana Adhikari gets a mention as inspiration, but the deep personal impact that Thorne had for Parameshwaran bordered on idolatry! That is an example of soft power.
So it is puzzling, if not explained as a personality kink of President Xi who is China’s sole decision making authority today, consolidating his power across all CCP platforms, who has removed the two term tenure clause on his rule, who has consolidated the Central Military Commission’s executive powers under him, as to why China would do this first to a Hollywood actress like Bingbing and now to Jack Ma, while I can also add Jackie Chan to this list of icons who have become ‘calmed’ by the CCP. It is a chink that Chinese have revealed which will be exploited by the Democratic Alliance https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/16/carbis-bay-in-cornwall-to-host-g7-summit-in-june that has gathered in concert against China and which meets as G7 plus including India, South Korea and Australia. While we know how innovation, enterprise and much of capitalist instincts flower under open societies, China seemed to come up with a model of being both a Party with a Country and a Country for its People till President Xi appeared on the scene. The Disappearance of Jack Ma has called this premise to question!https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/tech/jack-ma-china-tech-intl-hnk/index.html
indiarubberman.com 