&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Piyush Goyal takes veiled dig at China, invokes Jack Ma while pitching India to Japanese investors")
Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal took a veiled dig at China while pitching India to Japanese investors in Tokyo saying that they don't have to worry about disappearing after becoming successfull businessman in India and reappearing as a professor in a university in Japan, referring to Jack Ma founder of China's online marketplace Alibaba as an example who joined Tokyo College, University of Tokyo as visiting professor from May 1, 2023. Goyal was on a four-day official visit to Japan from August 24 to 27, 2026, leading a 200-member Indian business delegation seeking to deepen trade and investment ties between the two countries.
"Entrepreneurship is celebrated in India. You don't have to worry that if you make money in India, if you are a successful businessman, you may disappear one day and end up coming out as a professor in a Japanese University. That risk doesn't happen in India," said Goyal.
Was Goyal referring to China?
While Goyal explicitly did not mention China, the reference was clearly towards China. Jack Ma, billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, had withdrawn from public life after criticising China's financial sector in 2020. Western media had framed him as the poster boy of China's tech industry. He publicly said state-owned banks had a “pawn shop” mentality. His public appearances decreased, though he appeared once publicly in January 2021 via a tightly stage-managed video address to rural teachers. He then gave up control of the Ant group in 2023, reducing his voting rights from 50 per cent to 6 per cent. He was then seen working as a visiting professor at Tokyo University in Japan. He was last seen publicly in February 2025 at a major government and tech sector meeting in China, where he shook hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Goyal was trying to suggest that India's neo-liberal free-market economic structure celebrates entrepreneurship and deregulation of the market. Eventhough crackdown on Jack Ma was anti-democratic, supporters of the crackdown suggest that Ant Group was operating and providing loans outside the traditional banking system, without massive cash reserves, and so a few defaulters would have had a ripple effect on the Chinese economy. They also suggest that the monopoly of Alipay was making it troublesome for competitors to survive.
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