Jack Ma's Tyranny

David Quintieri is right. If he goes on like this Jack Ma is going to have to install suicide nets, like the ones in the Apple iPhone factories in China (2 mins 8 secs), in the stairwells of all the Alibaba offices to catch the employees who try to quit their contract without giving a month's advance notice.

But, maybe Jack Ma pays his people more than the maximum US$450 per month including overtime that Apple paid this guy? And maybe working for Jack Ma is more interesting than working for Tim Crook?  At least Jack Ma is Chinese, and Alibaba is a Chinese company. These people in Shanghai are killing themselves to work for an American company like Apple or Tesla, that probably doesn't pay any corporation tax in China. I had hopes that Jack Ma was a bit smarter than the rest, but I have learned to expect that my hopes will be dashed to bits on the rocks of capitalist economics sooner than later.

My Wikipedia access has just been temporarily shut off, for some reason. Try looking up this LA Times Story on Hong Kong Tai Pans.

Simon Murray, a feisty Scotsman in the long tradition of British colonial traders here, reluctantly handed over his job last fall as managing director of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., the venerable British merchant trading house, to Canning Fok, a low-profile Chinese accountant from Hong Kong.

The look up the Whampoa Treaty and see if there is not a connection that is more than accidental, perhaps via the British Concession at Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. See also the Nanking Treaty, which was ratified in Hong Kong on 26th June 1843:

The Qing government was obliged to pay the British government six million silver dollars for the opium that had been confiscated by Lin Zexu in 1839 (Article IV), 3 million dollars in compensation for debts that the Hong merchants in Canton owed British merchants (Article V), and a further 12 million dollars in war reparations for the cost of the war (Article VI). The total sum of 21 million dollars was to be paid in installments over three years and the Qing government would be charged an annual interest rate of 5 percent for the money that was not paid in a timely manner (Article VII).

And have a look at the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation building they built to keep it in:

The Whampoa Treaty

Based on the terms of the accord, China granted the same privileges to the Kingdom of France as it had done to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking and subsequent treaties. These privileges included the opening of five harbors to French merchants, extraterritorial privileges French citizens in China, a fixed tariff on Sino-French trade and the right of France to station consuls in China.

And in return, Chinese people get to work for Tim Cook and Elon Musk:

See this London Financial Times piece on corruption in the Communist Party:

“I don’t see any clear political will” to seriously punish corrupt officials at the grassroots level, said Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. “Maybe they understand that is probably very destructive if China does that in every county, every district,” he said. “The whole country would probably be in chaos.”

9 mins 7 secs. The labour shortage in China is now so acute that some companies are illegally bringing in workers from Vietnam.

See this post Étienne de la Boétie on Slavery and Revolution.