When the Whale Falls, Ten Thousand Things Are Born

The Boomerang the Chinese Communist Party Wrote for Its Own Future

There is no reason to mourn Alibaba.

One of the stranger habits of retrospective writing about China’s lost decades of economic opening is the tendency to turn yesterday’s beneficiaries into today’s martyrs. Once Beijing turned against its technology giants, Jack Ma was gradually reconstructed abroad as a symbol of the private entrepreneur crushed by the Communist Party, as though the previous two decades had been a heroic contest between an independent capitalist class and a hostile Leninist state.

The real history was considerably less romantic.

Alibaba became enormously powerful inside the order that Beijing had created, and it learned how to use that power against others. When China’s antitrust authorities finally moved against the company, they found that Alibaba had abused its dominant market position through the notorious “choose one from two” practice, preventing merchants from participating on competing platforms and enforcing those restrictions through platform rules, data and algorithms. The resulting fine was RMB 18.228 billion. (SAMR)

Nor should Jack Ma be retroactively dressed as a liberal dissident simply because the political climate eventually turned against him. In a 2013 interview with the South China Morning Post, Ma compared difficult decisions he had made at Alibaba with Deng Xiaoping’s decisions during the June Fourth crackdown, saying that a leader sometimes had to make cruel decisions for stability; the newspaper subsequently stood by its original report when controversy erupted over the passage. (South China Morning Post)

Alibaba was not an innocent creature accidentally wandering through an authoritarian forest. It prospered inside that forest, grew enormous there, and at times behaved exactly as enormous creatures tend to behave when nothing larger has yet decided to bite them.

So when the Communist Party finally turned on Alibaba and the triumphant phrase appeared—

“When a whale falls, ten thousand things are born.”

—I had no particular objection to the first half of the sentence. Alibaba was indeed a whale, and there are worse things that can happen to an economy than watching an entrenched giant lose the ability to decide which smaller businesses are permitted to compete with whom. Beijing itself later boasted that the crackdown had given smaller businesses more room to develop and restored competitive vitality to the platform economy. (SAMR)

The interesting part was not whether the whale deserved to fall.

It was the extraordinary confidence with which the people standing beside an even larger whale assumed that the sentence could never apply to them.

The Communist Party looked at Alibaba and saw an organism that had become too large, too concentrated and too capable of determining the lives of everything around it. It concluded that the surrounding ecosystem would become healthier if some of that concentrated power disappeared, because smaller actors would recover space in which to compete, adapt and grow.

There is an almost exquisite historical comedy in the fact that a Leninist party could articulate this principle without apparently noticing its possible political application.

Alibaba could determine whether a merchant sold goods on one platform or another, but the Party built a system capable of deciding which platforms existed in the first place; Alibaba could manipulate access to a market, while the Party could regulate capital, information, association, education and political organization across an enormous territory; Alibaba could become a monopoly inside an industry, while the Communist Party explicitly preserved its own monopoly over political power.

Once the metaphor is allowed to travel beyond e-commerce, therefore, the identity of the largest whale becomes rather awkward.

This is where “一鲸落，万物生” becomes more interesting than the people who used it probably intended, because the history of political language is filled with sentences that escaped their original owners. A government can invent a slogan to describe its enemies, congratulate itself on the elegance of the phrase, repeat it until everybody remembers it, and only much later discover that history has quietly changed the subject of the sentence.

This publication has long argued that the present Chinese political structure will not endure indefinitely and that its eventual crisis may involve another territorial and political fragmentation rather than a simple transfer of power at the center. That remains an argument about the future rather than an accomplished historical event, but the irony contained in the old metaphor does not depend on knowing the date or exact form of such a transformation.

If that political order eventually breaks apart, the things released by the fall would be considerably more consequential than another generation of shopping applications. Regions could rediscover political possibilities suppressed by centralization, cities could experiment with institutions suited to their own circumstances, communities could recover identities flattened by a single national narrative, entrepreneurs could operate without continually calculating the invisible boundary between commercial success and political danger, and Asia itself could confront a mainland no longer organized around the assumption that one center possesses a permanent right to command everything within the borders inherited by the People’s Republic.

Whether every creature born from such a transformation would be beautiful is beside the point. An ecosystem does not promise that everything emerging from a fallen giant will be good; it promises only that the disappearance of overwhelming concentration creates possibilities that could not exist while the giant occupied nearly all available space.

That was, after all, the insight contained in the slogan when it was aimed at Alibaba.

There is therefore no need to rewrite the phrase, denounce it, or replace it with some cleverer slogan. The Communist Party’s formulation is already perfectly adequate; it merely requires the courtesy of being applied consistently.

Alibaba was a whale, and its fall was no tragedy.

The Party simply forgot to look upward before celebrating the principle.

一鲸落，万物生。

Perhaps it was not a curse directed at Alibaba after all, but a prophecy whose authors had mistaken the identity of the whale.