Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and once the richest man in China, has reappeared in public after maintaining a low profile for the past three years. The 58-year-old billionaire recently visited a school in Hangzhou, according to a report by the South China Morning Post, an Alibaba-owned newspaper.
Ma has been largely absent from the public eye since he criticized China's financial regulators in 2020, leading to speculation about his whereabouts.
The report revealed that Ma returned to China after spending more than a year overseas, making a brief stopover in Hong Kong, where he met with friends and attended Art Basel, an international art fair. The South China Morning Post did not provide details on why Ma had disappeared from public view in recent years, but it mentioned that he has been traveling to various countries to learn about agricultural technology.
During his visit to the Yungu School in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered, Ma, a former English teacher, met with staff and toured classrooms. The school's social media page reported that he discussed the potential challenges that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to education.
Ma was quoted as saying, "ChatGPT and similar technologies are just the beginning of the AI era. We should use artificial intelligence to solve problems instead of being controlled by it."
In January, Ma relinquished control of the financial technology giant Ant Group, which some commentators saw as further evidence that he had fallen out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party due to his outspokenness and increasing power.
In October 2020, Ma criticized traditional banks for having a "pawn-shop mentality" at a financial conference. A month later, Chinese authorities abruptly canceled Ant's planned £26bn stock market flotation, which would have been the world's largest, citing "major issues" with regulating the company.
Following the cancellation of Ant's initial public offering, there were rumored sightings of Ma in several countries, including Spain, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Australia. The Financial Times reported in November that Ma had been living in Tokyo, Japan, for six months.
When Ma first stopped making public appearances, there were speculations that he had been placed under house arrest or had been detained in some other manner.
