{"id":45224,"date":"2022-06-10T18:21:23","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T18:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/a-chinese-entrepreneur-who-says-what-others-only-think\/"},"modified":"2022-06-10T18:21:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T18:21:23","slug":"a-chinese-entrepreneur-who-says-what-others-only-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/a-chinese-entrepreneur-who-says-what-others-only-think\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chinese Entrepreneur Who Says What Others Only Think"},"content":{"rendered":"
China’s entrepreneur class is grappling with the worst economic slump in decades as the government’s zero Covid policy has shut down cities and kept would-be customers at home. Yet they can’t seem to agree how loudly they should complain – or even whether they should at all.<\/p>\n
A tech entrepreneur wrote in a big group chat in May that many members were too critical. \u201cWhat people here do every day is criticizing the government and the system,\u201d she wrote. “I can’t see any entrepreneurship in this.”<\/p>\n
A top venture capitalist told his nearly 9 million social media followers that as much as everyone had suffered from the pandemic, they should try to stay away from negative news and information<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Their approach, the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, doesn’t make sense to Zhou Hang. Mr. Zhou, a tech entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, has questioned how his peers can pretend it’s business as usual, given the political and economic upheaval. Stop putting up with the ridiculous reality, he urged. It’s time to speak up and seek change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Zhou is rare in China’s business community for being openly critical of the government’s zero Covid policy, which has put hundreds of millions of people under some kind of lockdowns in the past few months, costing jobs and revenues. He’s saying what many others are whispering in private but fear to say in public.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe questions we should ask ourselves are,\u201d he wrote in an article that was censored within an hour of posting but shared widely in other formats, \u201cwhat caused such widespread negative sentiment across the society? Who should be responsible for this? And how can we change it? “<\/p>\n
He said that the lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities made it clear that wealth and social status mean little to a government determined to pursue its zero Covid policy. \u201cWe’re all nobodies who could be sent to the quarantine camps and our homes could be broken into,\u201d he wrote. “If we still choose to adapt to and put up with this, all of us will face the same destiny: trapped.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For Mr. Zhou, staying out of politics is no longer an option for China’s business leaders. But some of his peers di lui are reluctant, given the potential penalties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Chinese Communist Party has always been wary of the influence of the business class, even as it tried to co-opt its members to help strengthen the country’s economy. Under China’s current top leader, Xi Jinping, the party’s attitudes toward the private sector took a more hostile turn and made the entrepreneur class the boogeyman for social ills.<\/p>\n
In the past few years, the government has steered away from the market economy and cracked down on some industries. It demonized entrepreneurs and went after some of the most prominent of them. Then when the mild, albeit contagious, Omicron variant emerged in China this year, it meddled with free enterprise as it hadn’t in decades.<\/p>\n
The lockdowns and restrictions have done so much damage to the economy that Premier Li Keqiang summoned about 100,000 cadres to an emergency meeting in late May. He called the situation \u201csevere\u201d and \u201curgent,\u201d citing sharp drops in employment, industrial production, electricity consumption and freight traffic.<\/p>\n
Many business leaders believe that it will be hard to reverse the damage if the government doesn’t stop the zero Covid policy. Yet they feel that there’s nothing they can do to make Beijing change course.<\/p>\n
The chairman of a big internet company told me that with all the pandemic restrictions, he and others are operating as if dancing with shackles on while expecting the sword of a lockdown to strike at any moment. With a big public company to run, he said, it would be too risky to be vocal. He hoped the economists could be more outspoken.<\/p>\n
The chairman of a publicly listed conglomerate with many consumer-facing businesses said that he had to shut down a few of his companies and let people go as revenues dropped off a cliff. He’s not a Christian, he said, but he’s been praying to God every day to help him get through this tough period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
There are good reasons to fear speaking out. Mr. Zhou’s post was censored, as were a couple of others by entrepreneurs who argued for a more balanced approach between pandemic control and economic activities. James Liang, the chairman of travel site Trip.com as well as a trained economist, wrote a few articles that compared the pros and cons of different pandemic policies. Then, in mid-May, his social media Weibo account was suspended.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Stakes could be much higher than a few censored articles and suspended social media accounts. <\/p>\n
Jack Ma, the founder of the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, largely disappeared from the public view after he criticized banking regulators in late 2019. The regulators quashed the IPO of Ant Group, the tech and financial company controlled by Mr. Ma, and fined Alibaba to record $ 2.8 billion last year.<\/p>\n