China wants manufacturing, not the internet – With insights from The Wall Street Journal

Onto China, please have a read of the excellent article republished below from our partners at The Wall Street Journal. It explains a lot about Beijing's seemingly irrational behaviour of late, which slashed hundreds of billions off the market value of Chinese online companies. Including, of course, Tencent, whose success transformed the value of early stage investor Naspers – rescuing many South African retirement funds from the woeful local economy. Having lived under a quarter century of similar ideology in SA, it's easy for us to see how hard boiled communists like China's President Xi (and ideological bedfellows in Pretoria) are rooted to a worldview that factories making "real" things should be promoted by the state. In our Constitutional Democracy, citizens who take their freedom to question for granted find it hard to relate to realities of China. And that includes investors. In the Middle Kingdom, stepping out of line can attract swift and brutal retribution, no matter how high your profile. Piet Viljoen pointing us to this excellent piece in Forbes which asks what really happened to AliBaba's founder Jack Ma. More high quality insights on what's going down in China from the IRR's new head John Edres via our interview yesterday (above). Click here for the story on BizNews – with the text highlights and links to the full interview on either video and audio. – Alec Hogg

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