Why Was Jack Ma Planting Rice? The CCP May Have the Answer

In the past couple of days, a set of photographs has spread rapidly across the Chinese internet. In the center is Jack Ma. He is wearing nothing more than a plain white t-shirt, a pair of oversized shorts, and a big smile. And standing beside him are some of the most powerful executives in China's technology industry. We saw Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu, we saw former Taobao chief Jiang Fan, and we saw Ant Group chairman Eric Jin, along with more than a dozen senior executives from Alibaba and Ant Group, while their combined wealth is measured in the billions of dollars. But they weren't attending a board meeting or unveiling a new AI model. Instead, they rolled up their pants, stepped barefoot into a muddy rice field outside Hangzhou, and were planting rice seedlings. The pictures immediately went viral. Many Chinese praised Jack Ma. They said that he had finally retired and found peace in retirement. Some other people even wrote poems about returning to nature, saying that after seeing through fame and fortune, Jack had chosen a much simpler life. Well, I don't buy that explanation. In today's China, where political symbolism matters, do you really believe Jack Ma and members of his executive team simply woke up one morning and decided to spend the day playing farmer? If Jack did it with his family or by himself, that might be leisure moments. But with a whole team of senior executives? No, it's got to be something else. The person who posted the photographs seemed to hint that there was indeed something else. The pictures were first shared by Alibaba partner, or one of its partners, Liu Zhengfei. And the title of his post read, only by holding rice seedling in our hands can we ensure grain for the future. Now, that wording immediately reminded me of one of Xi Jinping's well-known remarks about food security and agriculture. And then Liu added another sentence that's very telling. So he said, the logic of the field is simple. When it's time to plant, you plant. When it's time to endure, you endure. Now think about that. Alibaba helped redefine e-commerce. It transformed cloud computing in China. Today it is competing in AI. Yet one of its senior executives chose to summarize the company's situation with a single word, endure. What exactly is Alibaba trying to endure? Clearly, this wasn't simply a group of executives enjoying a company outing. Liu Zhengfei was talking about something else. Part of the answer is obvious. Alibaba has been under enormous commercial pressure. Its stock, first of all, is not doing very well. Competition in AI has intensified. And the company also faced growing geopolitical pressure overseas. Even one small detail in the photographs attracted attention. Alibaba's chief scientist, his name is Zhou Jingren, whose departure had recently become the subject of widespread online rumors, also appeared in the rice field. His appearance immediately reassured many employees and investors that Alibaba's AI leadership remained intact. So yes, part of this event was almost certainly about strengthening morale, about showing unity, about telling employees that the leadership team remains together during a difficult period. But I don't think that's the whole story because there's another question almost no one is asking. Why not hold a strategy meeting or a team building event somewhere else to do it? Why choose a muddy rice field to plant crops with our own hands? Well, to answer that question, we need to leave the rice field and turn our attention to something that received, in my opinion, not enough attention outside China. Three articles published by the CCP. So now let's talk about why the 1950s still matter. On June 19th, Xinhua published a lengthy article titled, The Three Great Transformations, An Unprecedented Social Revolution. Now at first glance, it looked like an ordinary history lesson about the famous political campaign in the 1950s, but it wasn't. One day later, People's Daily published another article praising the same political campaign. Then on 21st, it published a third. Three major party media articles, three consecutive days, all celebrating exactly the same chapter of the CCP's history. And that immediately caught people's attention because propaganda in China is rarely random. When the party suddenly visits a particular chapter of history, it usually isn't talking about the past, it's talking about the future. So what exactly were these three great transformations? For many young audiences, the phrase means very little. But for people who experienced the Cultural Revolution, even in the 1950s, and especially for China's entrepreneurs, those four words, or those three words, three great transformations, carry a painful memory because they marked the beginning of the end of private ownership in China. When the CCP came to power in 1949, it didn't abolish private business overnight. At first, it still depended on private entrepreneurs. So instead of immediate confiscation, the party moved step by step. What it did first was to weaken private business. So in 1952, three years after establishing the regime, it launched the Five Anti-Campaign. Officially, the campaign targeted bribery, tax evasion, fraud, theft of state property, and theft of economic intelligence. It's almost like its then version of anti-corruption. So many businesses could not survive. And that was only the beginning. Once private businesses had been weakened, the party moved to control them. Private companies then could no longer freely decide what to produce, whom to sell to, or how to operate. The state controlled production, distribution, and sales. So by that stage, ownership had already become little more than a legal formality. And the final step came under a remarkably reassuring name. It's called Public-Private Partnership. It sounds harmless, right? It sounds like cooperation, but in reality, it became the very mechanism for the CCP, for the state to gradually absorb private businesses. And agriculture followed the same pattern. So within just a few years, nearly every major means of production had passed into state control. And the CCP has always described its action of plundering private wealth as one of its greatest achievements. And Xi Jinping has repeatedly called it a historical leap from socialist revolution to socialist construction, and the institutional foundation of what Beijing now calls Chinese modernization, which brings us back to today. Why would the party suddenly devote three consecutive days of editorial work to celebrating this particular campaign? Why this chapter of history? And why now? The answer to the question fears many Chinese business owners and entrepreneurs now, because when they see the party celebrating the campaign that eliminated private ownership once before, they're no longer thinking about history. They're thinking about the future. And suddenly, Jack Ma standing barefoot in a rice field doesn't seem nearly as strange as it did at the beginning of the story. So now let's go back to Jack Ma. Now imagine you're sitting in Jack's position. You have spent your entire career building one of China's largest private companies. You have already watched Beijing suspend your Ant Group's record-breaking IPO. You have witnessed years of regulatory crackdowns on internet platforms. You have heard private entrepreneurs repeatedly warn against the disorderly expansion of capital. And then suddenly, the party begins celebrating the three great transformations, the very campaign that brought private ownership under state control. What would you hear? Did you hear a history lesson or a political signal? I suspect many business owners like Jack heard the latter. So why did Jack Ma take his executives to plant rice? It wasn't simply a team-building exercise. It was a public display of political humility and a pledge of loyalty in anticipating upcoming storms, a signal that Alibaba understands the direction of the political wing. Now, you know, rice farming occupies a special place in the Communist Party's political narrative. Agriculture stood at the very center of the socialist transformation campaign that state media or party newspapers had just been celebrating. So when some of China's most famous entrepreneurs rolled up their pants and stepped barefoot into a muddy rice field, it was difficult not to notice the symbolism. Those images projected humility, not financial ambition, not technological ambition, not global expansion. The message seemed to be, we understand the party's priorities. We know where our place is. So you have to understand in today's China, entrepreneurs increasingly understand that survival depends not only on reading market signals. More importantly, it depends on reading political signals. When party media begins celebrating the three great transformations again, many business owners are not asking, how do I build the next Alibaba? They're asking, how do I protect what I still have? Alibaba is fighting one of the most competitive battles in its history. Competition in AI has intensified. Bidense and DeepSeek are expanding, and investors have questioned whether Alibaba is falling behind in the AI race. Like I said, its stock isn't doing very well. So Endura has become both a political strategy and a business strategy. I see behind Jack Ma's big smile. I don't simply see a retired billionaire enjoying country life. I see the reality facing many of China's private business owners. Politically, they're trying to convince the party that they can be trusted and they will cooperate. Commercially, they're trying to survive one of the fiercest technology races in the world. One battle is being fought in Beijing, and the other is being fought in the marketplace. And I think increasingly, the one fought in Beijing is more critical and relentless.