Towards the end of October 2020, Ant Group was ready to launch the world's biggest initial public offering. The enterprise, which had grown out of Jack Ma's Alibaba entity, had become one of the largest financial services groups in China, with a virtual monopoly over the digital payment market through its Alipay mobile finance app.
Before the IPO, Ma addressed an assembly of high-profile figures with a controversial speech that criticized the Chinese financial system.
He accused China's state-owned banks of operating with a "pawnshop mentality," which had caused them to fall behind nimbler competitors such as Ant. He also complained that authorities were trying to "use the way to manage a railway station to manage an airport" when regulating the new...
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