Alibaba Jack Ma’s Promise of 1 Million U.S. Jobs Now in Jeopardy

During the 2018 annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), Jack Ma said that if China-U.S. economic and trade relations deteriorate, the promise he made last year during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump to create a million jobs in the United States will become null and void.

On the evening of the 9th, the Boao Forum for Asia held a theme dinner where Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma had a conversation with Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma had a conversation with Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

In response to the China-U.S. trade fight, Lagarde said,

Trade is conducted in accordance with the rules, players should follow their own set of rules, such as in the World Trade Organization (WTO).Whenever there is a problem, a mechanism should be used to settle the dispute; if the mechanism is not perfect, we can negotiate and improve the mechanism, but we must never go wrong.

Ma and Lagarde hold the same view, “If trade stops, the world will stop, no one can stop the process of globalization.” “If China and the United States maintain good economic and trade relations, there will be no problem at all in providing the United States with 1 million jobs, or even 10 million jobs,” Ma said. But if there is no trade between China, the 1 million jobs will be gone too.

Alizila coverage on meeting between Jack Ma and DonaldTrump where Ma discussed plans to create 1MM U.S. jobs.

In an interview on the same day at BFA, Jack Ma was also asked by foreign media to comment on Facebook’s recent disclosure of user information. Ma initially declined to comment. “I don’t comment on Facebook, but I want to say that 15 years ago (Facebook was founded in February 2004), Facebook could have never imagined that something like that would happen today,” he said.

“Today, Facebook is a social network with about 2 billion users,” added Jack Ma. “They didn’t realize all of these problems earlier, but they should be working to solve them now.”

I think the problem will be solved and we should not “kill” this company because of what happened. The most important aspects to the solution are: respect data, respect security, respect privacy.

Boao Forum for Asia’s annual conference hall
This article originally appeared in Sina Tech and was translated by Pandaily.