Love on the rocks

摘要

Tack ma, Alibaba's chairman, likes to be J seen as a self-made man. Other Chinese firms may cultivate their relationships with important Communist officials, but the boss of China's biggest e-commerce firm has long insisted that he merely dates the government, and it will never lead to marriage. This week he stressed again that he is no red capitalist: "In Alibaba, I fiercely object to making all sorts of complicated, curious guanxi [connections]." Mr Ma is also keen for Alibaba to be regarded as a global innovator: "We are an internet company [that] happens to be in China." His ambition is for Alibaba to serve two billion consumers and tens of millions of small companies worldwide. To further this aim, this week his firm unveiled a partnership with Lending Club, a peer-to-peer platform based in San Francisco, to extend credit to American firms buying Chinese goods on its site.