Alibaba had a busy day. First, the e-commerce giant’s founder Jack Ma had a chat with US president-elect Donald Trump about his ideas on how to create 1 million US jobs – bringing farmers and small businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years. “We had a great meeting,” Trump told reporters on January 9 as he accompanied Ma back down to the lobby of his Trump Tower headquarters after the meeting. Then Alibaba and Intime Retail Group’s founder announce a joint bid to take the Chinese department store operator private for HK$19.79 billion (US$2.55 billion). Alibaba Group chief executive Daniel Zhang said: “Those who cling on to the old ways of retailing will be disrupted.”
It seems American princelings can make the most of their political connections just like their counterparts in China, writes Johan Nylander, after Donald Trump appoints his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as his senior advisor in the White House. Kushner, who is heir to his family’s privately held multibillion-dollar real estate firm Kushner Companies, has been working for several months on a Manhattan property deal with Chinese investment giant Anbang Insurance.
As Myanmar looks to attract foreign money to boost the economy, a sketchy and opaque legal system makes investors think twice Matthieu Baudey and Carole Oudot take a look at how the country is working toward a better business climate one year after the National League for Democracy’s landslide win in Myanmar’s historical elections.
China has decided to rewrite history, ordering all textbooks from primary school to university to be republished to extend the length of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression – widely known as the Second Sino-Japanese War in Western history books – from eight years to 14, writes Lin Wanxia. The War of Resistance will now start from September 1931 – the Mukden Incident – instead of July 1937 – the date of the Luguo Bridge Incident.