Alibaba founder Jack Ma seen in China after long absence

NEW DELHI: Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who has rarely been seen in public in the past three years, has resurfaced at a school in China’s Hangzhou, media reports said.

The 58-year-old has kept a low profile since criticising China’s financial regulators in 2020. Ma was the most high-profile Chinese billionaire to have disappeared amid a crackdown on tech entrepreneurs, a report said.

He recently returned to China after more than a year overseas, said an agency report. The Alibaba-owned newspaper said he had made a short stopover in Hong Kong, where he met friends and also briefly visited Art Basel, an international art fair.

It added that Ma has been travelling to different countries to learn about agricultural technology, but made no reference as to why he had disappeared from public view in recent years. Ma, a former English teacher, met staff and toured classrooms at the Yungu School in Hangzhou, the city in which Alibaba is headquartered.

He talked about the potential challenges of artificial intelligence to education, according to the school’s social media page, it was reported.

“ChatGPT and similar technologies are just the beginning of the AI era. We should use artificial intelligence to solve problems instead of being controlled by it,” he said. Once the richest man in China, Ma gave up control of financial technology giant Ant Group in January this year.

It was seen by some commentators as further evidence that he had fallen foul of the Chinese Communist Party for becoming outspoken and too powerful, it was reported.