Chinese billionaire Jack Ma jets out of Australia after ‘personal trip’

Elusive Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma’s trip to Australia came as Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the Chinese private sector took a major new scalp.

Jack Ma in Sydney in 1985. The billionaire says his trip to Australia changed his life.

Elusive Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma has left Australia after a “personal trip”, the Alibaba founder’s first visit in six years to a country he has credited with changing his life.

Until he became the highest-profile victim of a Chinese tech crackdown launched by President Xi Jinping in 2020, Mr Ma was China’s most celebrated business figure and would regularly travel to meet world leaders.

Now rare sightings of the secretive billionaire light up the Chinese internet. The most recent viral photo showed Mr Ma, 58, drinking a bottle of Coca-cola in a Melbourne hotel foyer.

The Australian has confirmed the photo was legitimate and that Mr Ma has since left Australia.

Jack Ma during his ‘personal trip’ to Melbourne.

“It was just a personal trip,” said a person familiar with the internet entrepreneur’s itinerary.

Before the breakdown of Australia and China’s bilateral relationship, Mr Ma spoke of the formative role Australia had played in his remarkable business story, which saw him amass a fortune worth more than $35bn.

In 1980, a teenaged Ma met an Australian family from Newcastle, the Morleys, who were visiting his home town of Hangzhou. The family’s patriarch, Ken Morley, an electrical engineer, became a mentor figure to the young Ma, helping him improve his English and flying him to Australia in 1985 on his first overseas trip.

“When I arrived in Australia, I was so shocked and amazed by the wonderful things, the people, the culture, the landscapes, the products,” Mr Ma said in 2016.

“I was … educated in China that China was the best and richest country in the world … when I arrived in Australia I saw the world was so different,” he said, adding the trip “totally changed my future”.

Seeing members of the Morley family was the main reason for last weekend’s trip, The Australian was told by a person familiar with Mr Ma’s schedule.

It was the first time they had met in Australia since Mr Ma visited in 2017 to announce a $29m scholarship at University of Newcastle named in honour of the Morley family.

Melbourne has also been the headquarters of e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Australia and New Zealand operations, and is still the base for an outpost of his philanthropic foundation.

Mr Ma stood down from the board of Alibaba in late 2020. By the end of that year, Mr Xi ordered the cancellation of the stock market listing of Ant Group, a spin-off fintech business Mr Ma had founded.

Mr Xi reportedly became furious at Mr Ma over public criticism he had made about Chinese financial regulators. In January, Mr Ma agreed to shrink his voting rights in Ant from more than 50 per cent to 6.2 per cent, formally ending his control of the company. He has been mostly living in Tokyo.

The Xi era has been a dangerous time for Chinese entrepreneurs. Beijing-based investment bank China Renaissance recently made an extraordinary filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, admitting it was unable to make contact with its CEO, Bao Fan. The company’s shares has lost 30 per cent of their value on the news.

The investment banker’s disappearance came less than six months after China Renaissance’s president, Cong Lin, was taken away by Chinese authorities.

Desmund Shum, who wrote a book on his personal experience working in China’s elite business circles, said this was a “very, very scary moment” for the Chinese tech investment industry.

“Is (Beijing) going after individuals or going after the tech investment industry? I think that’s the most important question to ask,” said Mr Shum, whose ex-wife remains in prison in China after being investigated for her business activities.