The Downfall Of China's Private Entrepreneurs | SOHO | Pan Shiyi | Jack Ma | Blackstone Group

Chinese property tycoon Pan Shiyi, chairman of SOHO CHINA, is both famous and controversial in China. He was recently spotlighted by the media in China again because his son, Pan Rui, was reported to have made sensitive comments on a Weibo comment section.

In fact, Pan Shiyi, who has money and power in China, has close ties to the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but his son, Pan Rui, has repeatedly posted sensitive messages on Weibo criticizing the CCP system.

After the financial crisis in 2008, Chinese companies began to expand overseas with policy encouragement. In 2011, Pan Shiyi bought the office building of the Port Authority Bus Terminal next to Manhattan Plaza in New York for $700 million USD, and in 2012, he spent $600 million USD to acquire a 49% stake in Manhattan Park Avenue Plaza.

In fact, since last year, Chinese entrepreneurs have been in the midst of an eventful year. A commentary by Free Asia said that the Chinese Communist Party fears that once private enterprises grow in power, they will seek a political role and even challenge the Communist regime, therefore the authority is using the "new communism trend" to dilute and control private economic power. Knowing the Communist Party is saying one thing but doing another and letting public power run wild, the owners of private enterprises are in despair.

Another example is Alibaba founder Jack Ma. He has been in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party since October 24 of last year, when he criticized China's financial regulatory system at the Offshore Financial Summit in Shanghai, and it didn't take long for him to see firsthand the backlash from the Chinese Communist Party, even though he is worth more than $60 billion USD.

On the eve of the IPO of Ants Group, a financial technology company owned by Alibaba, in November last year, Ma and other senior executives were interviewed by the four major financial regulators, namely the People's Bank of China (CBC), China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), and the IPO of Ants Group was subsequently halted two days before the listing.
From these examples, we can see that since the reform and opening up and privatization in China, the ultimate goal of communism by the Chinese Communist Party has not changed, but its strategy has changed. They allowed private enterprises to own businesses, and after they had grown strong, the authority reaped them by so-called “legal actions”. Realizing that they are in a trap, the owners of China's private enterprises, large and small, are trying to escape China by all means. According to the 2019 Global Wealth Migration Report, the number of Chinese tycoons who emigrate overseas rose from 10,000 in 2017 to 15,000 in 2018.

The CCP's ambition to annex private assets is growing, and the pace of re-communization is accelerating. A series of recent actions by Beijing also reflect that the CCP is expanding its ambition to the whole world. Are we, in a free society, ready for this?
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