In the United States today, it’s pretty obvious that billionaires run the show. There are 13 of them in Donald Trump’s administration right now, the most in American history. That includes Linda McMahon, the scandal-plagued former wrestling executive who’s now trying to dismantle the Department of Education, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, who’s doing immense damage to services like Social Security that millions of people rely on. Outside the government, there’s Jeff Bezos, who has turned the Washington Post into his personal propaganda mouthpiece; Rupert Murdoch, who did the same with TV news and tabloids; Peter Thiel, who essentially created J.D. Vance as a national political figure; Harlan Crow, who treats Clarence Thomas to luxury vacations that look suspiciously like bribes; and a dozen others. And lest you think the Democrats oppose any of this, billionaire worship is a bipartisan pathology. Kamala Harris had her own Musk figures in the form of Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, who would doubtless have become key economic advisers if she actually managed to win, and DNC chair Ken Martin believes there are “a lot of good billionaires” who should have influence in the Democratic Party. We live at a moment when the financial elite have gained enormous power over everything that happens in the political and economic spheres—power comparable only to the robber barons of the 19th century, or perhaps actual feudal barons. But what if there was another way? 

Well, there is, and it’s in China. Whereas the American political system has allowed billionaires to bend the government to their will, China has done just the opposite. There, it’s the government that tells billionaires how they may and may not behave. Just consider the case of Jack Ma. With an estimated net worth of roughly $25 billion, Ma is the closest thing China has to a Musk or Bezos figure. Like Bezos, he founded an e-commerce company in the 1990s: Alibaba, the Chinese answer to Amazon. In the decades since, it’s expanded to encompass the various retail websites in the Alibaba Group, which dominate the Chinese market much like Amazon does in the States. The company also offers cloud computing services similar to Amazon’s AWS, making it a key player in China’s burgeoning tech sector. But where Jeff Bezos has been able to put his thumb on the scale of U.S. politics—by withholding the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement, for instance, or by suing to abolish the National Labor Relations Board—Jack Ma has been immediately slapped down when he’s tried meddling in Chinese politics in a similar way.  

Ma’s story has been reported fairly extensively in the English-language press, but some important context has been left out. As his biographer Duncan Clark put it in a recent interview with NPR, the Chinese tycoon made a controversial speech in October 2020, in which he “criticized the country’s financial system,” offering a “very forthright criticism of regulation and sort of talking about the power of technology and the need for government to step aside.” This “did not end well for him,” and Ma “largely disappeared from public view” for a few years. In fact, he was missing altogether for about three months, starting soon after Chinese state officials “summoned Ma to Beijing for ‘regulatory interviews’.” There was briefly speculation that he was under house arrest before CNBC’s David Faber confirmed that he was merely “lying low.” (Other reports suggest he spent time “hiding out” in Tokyo, on the island of Mallorca, and on his “88-metre superyacht.”) The exact details of what happened to Ma in late 2020 are still unclear, but the consensus among analysts of China’s politics is that pressure from the state—and perhaps the threat of an arrest, even if it was never carried out—came into play.

Needless to say, this all sounds very authoritarian and scary. That’s certainly the way anti-China “hawks” in the conservative press have spun it. In the National Review, Andrew Stuttaford wrote in 2022 that the “clampdown on Jack Ma” was a sign that President Xi Jinping is pursuing “fascism with Chinese characteristics” and argued that “deepening the CCP’s grip on China is morally repulsive.” In Forbes, writer George Calhoun compared Ma to the Russian political prisoner Alexei Navalny. Other publications, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, used less charged language but told the same general story: a successful businessman voiced his opinion about some government regulations, and the government punished him for it in a worrying abuse of power. 

If that was, indeed, all that happened, it would be worrying. But there’s more to it than that. Notably, many of the English accounts of Ma’s disappearance neglect to mention the content of his “forthright criticism,” noting only that he made one. But when you read the translated text of the speech he made to the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai, it becomes clear why Chinese administrators would have seen Ma’s political agenda as a threat to the economic well-being of both China and the entire world. 

It wasn’t any old regulation we’re talking about here. Ma came out vocally against the Basel Accords, a set of international banking regulations that are designed to prevent catastrophic financial crashes like the one that threw 90 million people around the world into extreme poverty in 2008 and 2009. (The most recent round of the Accords, in fact, were enacted between 2010 and 2012 in response to that very crisis.) The Accords’ most important element is strengthened capital requirements for banks—that is, requirements that banks keep more actual money on hand to prevent runs and collapses like the ones in 2008. Jack Ma didn’t like this one bit, and said that “the world is talking more and more just about risk control, not development. […] [T]he Basel Accords have put great limitations on Europe’s ability to innovate as a whole, for example, in digital finance.” Beyond the accords themselves, he called into question the whole concept of “risk control” and caution in global finance, calling it an outmoded “pawnshop mentality.” Instead, he argued that “we must […] rely on the development of a credit-based system” and extend credit to more and more people, saying that “I think every beggar is (can be) creditworthy,” and emphasized “blockchain” and “digital currencies” as part of his ideal future economy.  

In an American context, this would be like saying the Dodd-Frank Act was a huge mistake and that extending subprime mortgages and payday loans to people who obviously can’t afford them is actually good. “Every beggar can be creditworthy,” in particular, is an absolutely wild line. And Ma’s economic opinions here weren’t just abstract; he was actively investing in new forms of “digital finance” himself. Around the time he made the Shanghai speech, Ma was preparing to make an initial public offering for the Ant Group, yet another of his companies. Among other “fintech” products, the group controlled Huabei, a “virtual credit card-like service” that debuted in 2015 and “accounted for nearly a fifth of China’s short-term household debt” by June 2020, along with Alipay, a PayPal-like cashless transaction app which is “used by more than 730 million people every month” and “has become a major portal for personal credit, loans, investments and insurance in addition to a payment tool.” This is how financial journalist Kevin Xu describes the impact of this kind of company in China: 

The boom and bust of P2P [Peer-to-peer] lending in China in the last five years have been horrific and well-documented. It has wreaked havoc—executives went to jail, ordinary people’s savings disappeared, SMBs [Small and Medium-Sized Businesses] blacklisted by the “social credit system,” lives ruined, suicides committed—all across the country, and especially in Ma’s hometown of Hangzhou, one of the epicenters of P2P.

Notably, Xu is sympathetic to Ma overall. In the same article, he even says that he once considered taking a speechwriting job on his staff. But even he can’t spin the rise of app-based digital lending companies as a good thing for China. 

Despite all this, the Ant Group was expected to have the biggest initial stock sale in world history, and according to the Wall Street Journal, there were “concerns at the central bank that Ant could become too big to rescue in a financial meltdown.” Even without such a meltdown, it would have made Jack Ma one of the most powerful people on Earth, placing a staggering degree of leverage over China’s economy into his hands. And here he was in Shanghai, talking about wanting to slash financial regulations and expand the use of cryptocurrencies and risky forms of credit (which he personally would profit from). So of course China cracked down on him. It wasn’t a question of suppressing his personal opinions, it was part of a concerted antitrust campaign—one that would soon hit the Alibaba Group with a historic $2.8 billion anti-monopoly fine, force it to break into six different “units” with their own CEOs, and force the Ant Group to break Alipay’s loans function off into a separate business. As Tech Buzz China journalist Rui Ma (no relation) writes, “The real question is how [Alipay] was allowed to get so powerful in the first place.”

Today, Jack Ma is back in the public eye. But he was notably subdued when he met with Xi Jinping for an economic summit this February, compared to his old braggadocious self. He has good reason to be. In the wake of the antitrust crackdown on his businesses, he lost more than half of his net worth. More importantly, he’s been reminded that he and his money are not untouchable. And he’s not the only one: according to Business Insider, China has 432 ex-billionaires whose wealth and power have waned since 2021, thanks to a combination of market downturns and Communist Party intervention. That’s roughly a third of the billionaires the country had at its peak. 

You may find China’s approach to its financial elite harsh. It is harsh, in some ways, especially if you’re used to the United States’ more hands-off approach. There have even been cases where Chinese bankers have been sentenced to death for things like bribery, which does cross a line into the draconian. But then again, most of the “ex-billionaires” who’ve fallen under Xi Jinping’s regulatory hammer are still around, and still extremely rich—just less so than before. And you have to ask yourself: which is worse, being too harsh on billionaires and their activities, or not harsh enough? 

Consider a counterfactual: what if the U.S. government had done to Elon Musk what the Chinese government did to Jack Ma? Say, in 2022, when Musk’s plans to buy Twitter and remake it in his own image started to move forward? There was some discussion back then about American regulators suing to prevent the $44 billion sale, but nothing came of it. But suppose U.S. antitrust watchdogs had blocked the deal, and a little later, made it clear to Musk that there would be serious consequences if he kept meddling in American politics. Imagine someone had arrested him when he openly bribed Pennsylvanians with entry in a $1 million raffle in exchange for registering to vote in 2024, for instance—or when he did the same thing in a Wisconsin judicial race this year. 

If Musk had been given the Jack Ma treatment, a major social-media platform would not have transformed into a cesspool of racism and misogyny, and there might not be a President Trump laying waste to everyone’s basic constitutional rights (and the world economy) today. That would be a better outcome than the one we’re living with right now. Or imagine if U.S. officials broke up Amazon into several competing companies, the way China did with Alibaba, and sent Jeff Bezos on a Ma-esque mandatory vacation for a few years. There is no particular reason we can’t do those things; only the political will is lacking. But instead, we’ve taken the opposite path to China. We’ve allowed our American oligarchs to pretty much do whatever they want, whenever and however they want. As a result, they now dominate our government and our economy from top to bottom. 

Everywhere you look, there are ways in which China’s approach to so-called “entrepreneurs” and the corporations they create beats the U.S. approach. For another example, consider education. In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party introduced an ambitious policy known as “double reduction” in which, as the New Yorker reports, “companies that taught a K-12 core curriculum were restricted from prioritizing profit, going public, or raising foreign capital.” It was an extinction-level event for private education and tutoring firms, which had previously played a major role in the Chinese educational system and encouraged fierce competition among students to sell their services. (One company’s ads reportedly read “Come, and we’ll tutor your child; don’t come, and we’ll tutor your child’s rival.”) Almost overnight, one such company “let go of sixty thousand of its staff,” while others pivoted to entirely new business models, teaching skills for hobbies and recreation like “calligraphy instead of calculus” or even moving into fashion design. As one would-be mogul ruefully posted to WeChat, “the era of private tutoring has ended” in China. Meanwhile, the other half of the “double reduction” consists of sweeping reforms to public education, most notably cutting down homework requirements that were deemed burdensome. 

This approach has a lot to recommend it. Although the idea might be controversial, excessive homework really is burdensome and causes unnecessary stress, and it creates class inequalities because some homes are better to learn in than others—those where wealthier families can afford more books, better internet, and quiet, uncrowded workspaces, for instance. The Chinese government is right about that. And they’re definitely right about wiping out private education companies. Although there’s been a concerted ideological push in favor of for-profit education in the U.S., allowing it to supplant the public kind is actively harmful. Chiefly, this is because every dollar that goes into profit for an education company’s bosses and shareholders is a dollar not spent on making the education itself better, and by its nature, a private company’s first incentive will always be to maximize profits by making education worse. (For more on this, see this article.) For-profit schooling also deepens inequality, converting knowledge from a universal right to a privilege only some can buy.

In the U.S., you could be forgiven for not understanding the dangers of privatizing education, because there’s been a decades-long war on public schools (along with all public goods), following the model Noam Chomsky identified: “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” The latest stage in this war has been Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. The move has been championed by both McMahon, who’s actually carrying it out, and by her predecessor Betsy DeVos—another billionaire, and one who is heavily invested in private education companies. In the United States, people like DeVos and McMahon have been allowed to undermine the public education system at every turn, even pushing “vouchers” that would fund private schools with taxpayer money. In sharp contrast, China has nipped any such effort in the bud—and assuming its government stays the course, its children will be benefiting for generations. (For that matter, they already outperform U.S. students in every academic category.)

Or consider the issue of cryptocurrency, which Jack Ma wanted to promote. In 2021, China banned the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies altogether, and they were right to do it. To put it bluntly, there is no legitimate reason why “crypto” should be allowed. As we’ve explored in this magazine before, it’s a highly volatile and unregulated speculative asset at best, and an outright scam at worst. It’s also enormously destructive to the environment and facilitates all kinds of crime, including drug and gun trafficking. Despite all this, the U.S. and its billionaires are all-in on the nasty stuff. Elon Musk is notoriously a big fan of “Dogecoin,” and Donald Trump himself recently promoted a highly dubious “$TRUMP” coin that caused over 800,000 of his biggest fans to lose around $2 billion. Trump even has a half-baked scheme for a “crypto strategic reserve,” so in the near future our entire economy might be underpinned by imaginary coins on computers rather than, you know, anything that actually exists. Certainly it’ll be hard to muster any political opposition, since as Tom Williams has written, the crypto industry has spent vast sums of money to influence the outcome of elections and pack Congress with friendly legislators who will push deregulation. But China has, once again, stopped this problem before it can start. As a result of their 2021 ban, they have yet to produce a crypto billionaire like Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who did quite a lot of political meddling through roughly $100 million in campaign donations in the brief time he was wealthy and famous. Instead, they produce things like nuclear plants and railways. 

That last point is a crucial one. In the English-speaking press, there has been a lot of ink spilled over Chinese economic “authoritarianism” and the plight of the poor abused billionaires. There has also been a lot of ink spilled over China’s seemingly never-ending stream of technological marvels: the giant solar farm shaped like a panda, the world’s fastest bullet train, the magnetic rail gun, the helicopter-like “flying taxi” prototypes, and so on. But for ideological reasons, few commentators make a connection between the two: that China is capable of these technological feats, at least in part, because it is economically “authoritarian” and keeps its billionaires on a short leash. In the free-market U.S., this is heresy. You literally wouldn’t be allowed to print it in Bezos’ Washington Post. But in the case of high-speed rail, at least, we have direct evidence that it’s true. As Paris Marx explained in their 2022 book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Elon Musk personally stepped in to stall California’s high-speed rail plans in 2013, when he announced plans of his own to develop a “Hyperloop”—essentially a giant pneumatic tube like the one in your local bank drive-thru, but for zipping cars back and forth at high speeds. The Hyperloop was always a silly idea, and its few practical demonstrations looked awful. But it accomplished its actual goal, which was to delay any high-speed rail from being built for over a decade and keep people locked into the idea of car ownership as the dominant mode of transport. 

If China had an economic and political system like the U.S., someone like Wang Chuanfu—the billionaire CEO of electric car company BYD, one of Tesla’s global competitors—might have been able to thwart mass transit projects in a similar way. Certainly he has a financial incentive to, just like Musk. But China’s Communist Party doesn’t have to listen to what Wang or any other CEO thinks, and so China has built roughly 30,000 miles of operational high-speed railways as of 2024, plus the aforementioned world’s fastest bullet train. The difference between the two models should be obvious. 

In a recent article for Foreign Policy, deputy editor James Palmer asked the critical question: “Did China Get Billionaires Right?” He summed up the state of the world’s two biggest economies like this: 

In much of the world, the defining characteristic of billionaires is impunity: the ability to ignore laws, social norms, or borders through the sheer force of wealth. U.S. billionaires do all they can to evade their responsibilities to the state—or to actively subvert the government for their own ends. Capital, and the laws protecting capital, shields and fortifies them. It’s usually only when their wealth itself turns out to be fraudulent, as with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, that they face jail time.

In China, however, every billionaire’s fortune is built upon a thin foundation: the goodwill of the CCP. At every turn, the ultra-rich, especially since Xi took power, are reminded that their wealth exists at the sufferance of the party—and that it could all be taken away. Careful not to draw attention to themselves or seem to challenge the party’s right to “lead everything,” billionaires’ position in China is inherently precarious.

That’s a good summary of how things stand. But Palmer’s interpretation is a center-left, economically liberal one. He concedes that “In an era of unchecked billionaire power in the West, it might be tempting to think China has found a better way.” But describing it as a “temptation” is a negative framing—you’re supposed to resist temptation—and he points out that the Chinese government has many notable flaws, including corruption by wealthy individuals within the Communist Party itself. So his answer to “Did China Get Billionaires Right?” is still, essentially, “no.” 

I don’t think that’s particularly compelling. To be clear, I’m not one of those Western communists who thinks China is some kind of red utopia without flaw. In fact, there’s plenty to criticize about the way Xi Jinping and his allies run things. Palmer is perfectly correct about corruption in the CPC; that’s well-documented. China also has the awful distinction of executing the most people of any country on Earth, including for non-violent drug crimes. Its human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority— although cynically seized upon by anti-China politicians like Marco Rubio who couldn’t care less about human rights—are still real and horrifying. Working conditions in many Chinese sweatshops and factories are abominable, just like the European factories and sweatshops of the 19th century that Karl Marx railed against. Perhaps not by coincidence, the Chinese government has even cracked down on Marxist students and banned websites dedicated to Maoism—a curious action for a supposedly communist state. Feminist activists, too, have been imprisoned for things like reporting on the #MeToo movement or handing out stickers. Other restrictions on public speech and artistic expression are equally impossible to defend, like the ban on supernatural horror films and all forms of pornography (including eating a banana in a way authorities deem too “erotic”). For that matter, allowing billionaires to exist at all, even heavily regulated, shows that China hasn’t quite got the hang of communism yet. But, like with Cuba’s literacy programs, it would be a mistake to say that nothing China does is praiseworthy because some things it does are inexcusable. You have to judge on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with your own political goals and principles. And when it comes to billionaires, coming down hard on their heads is clearly superior to letting them off the leash to do whatever they please. 

The American people aren’t stupid. They know that the unchecked power of billionaires, large corporations, and the financial elite is the single biggest problem affecting their lives. That’s why 60 percent of Americans say they dislike Elon Musk, and why even conservative websites like the Daily Mail saw their comment sections overflow with mockery when UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson got shot last year. It’s why the one real spark of life in the Democratic Party right now is Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which has been drawing crowds in the thousands to unlikely places like Nebraska. But although I believe Bernie’s heart is in the right place, he’s not so much fighting oligarchy as talking about fighting oligarchy, and because he mainly invites Democrats like Representative Greg Casar to rally with him, the practical effect of his campaign is to route popular anger at oligarchy back into Ken Martin’s billionaire-friendly Democratic Party. (Although his recent call for people to run as independents was more promising.) It’s time for a more forceful message. In China, they’re actually fighting the political influence of billionaires like Jack Ma, tooth and nail, and we ought to be doing the same. When Joe Biden ran his pathetic 2024 campaign, he made a point of saying “Look, I’m a capitalist. If you can [make] a billion bucks, wonderful.” We ought to say, instead: Look, I’m not a capitalist. You have abused your wealth and power, and we are going to take it away from you. Right now, people like Musk, Bezos, McMahon, and the rest of the rogue’s gallery are rampaging across America, seeking whom they may devour. To defeat them, we might just need a little dose of Xi Jinping Thought.