Alibaba may be big, but it still bows to Beijing

US tech companies fought for dreamers, but their Chinese counterparts haven’t protested in support of migrants being evicted in Beijing.

LET’S call it China’s dreamers moment.

The city of Beijing began evicting large numbers of rural migrants this past week as part of a safety campaign after a deadly fire in a slum tenement that housed many migrants.

In the US, the so-called dreamers are young immigrants who were brought to the US illegally as children. In China, the dreamers are domestic migrants who moved from farms to megacities in pursuit of better opportunities. Many of these migrants live as second-class citizens, with tenuous residency rights and limited access to city social services.

These migrants have fuelled China’s booming tech industry. They drive ride-sharing cars and deliver parcels and food ordered online. Their better-educated peers are programmers and professionals at Internet companies in Beijing. A few major company founders were migrants.

When President Donald Trump decided to end the US programme that protects the dreamers from deportation, American tech companies signed open letters and supported lawsuits to stop the repeal. They argue that the dreamers are contributing members of the community and add to the US economy’s competitive edge.

China circuit

No such protests emerged from China’s tech firms in response to the evictions in Beijing, one of the country’s biggest internet hubs. In fact, online news and social-media platforms, most of them based in Beijing, scrubbed their sites of critical postings, including a public appeal from lawyers, academics and labour activists to stop the campaign.

Tech companies haven’t sat on their hands. E-commerce company JD.com sent a text message last weekend offering stipends and the use of company dormitories and vehicles to any Beijing employees forced to move.

But the Chinese tech companies’ public silence over the mass evictions shows an underlying truth about their position in China. Despite the economic growth, jobs and innovation they create, the tech companies remain reliant on the authoritarian government, and that limits their influence.

“Everybody understands that the government is in charge in China,” Liu Yang, a 25-year-old college graduate from the central city of Zhengzhou who went to Beijing this year to look for a programmer job, told me. “Companies don’t want to cause trouble.”

Liu was evicted from the apartment he shared with two roommates near Beijing’s tech centre, Haidian, last week with only one day’s notice.

For the tech companies, the government is both overseer and customer. It provides business licences and regulates expansion into new sectors, such as internet finance. Tech companies form partnerships with the government to develop censorship tools to block online content and facial recognition technologies to monitor citizens. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and social-media and games behemoth Tencent Holdings are offering up their data-crunching abilities to local governments to build “smart cities.”

Says a government-relations executive who has worked in the tech industry for many years, companies can’t afford to offend the new party secretary of Beijing, a protégé of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Thousands of migrants are estimated to have been evicted, many on short notice, as authorities inspect buildings in the aftermath of the fire in southern Beijing on Nov 18 that killed 19 people, 17 of them migrant workers.

JD.com and Alibaba declined to say whether they have raised the evictions with the Beijing government. Alibaba says it is coordinating with its logistics partners to help affected workers and their families with temporary housing and other support and says its logistics affiliate hasn’t experienced any “significant disruption” to its service.

Anecdotally, services have been affected. Several shop owners at Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace told me that some delivery companies are refusing to ship to Beijing because local couriers are in short supply and some warehouses are being closed. Taobao customers in the city complain of slower service and higher delivery fees.

The tech giants know they rely on migrant labour. In a social-media post on Monday, Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma ( pic) thanked what he said were the three million couriers who delivered a billion parcels after the Nov 11 online shopping extravaganza that is China’s equivalent of Cyber Monday. Behind the “miracle” of China’s delivery-service industry, he wrote, are the couriers “who work on windy and rainy days.”

JD.com founder and chief executive Richard Liu always refers to the company’s more than 65,000 delivery workers as “brothers” because, he told me two years ago, he wants to show them respect.

Liu, who was born in a poor village in eastern China, went to university in Beijing with money donated from neighbors. He told me that JD couriers with a few years of experience can make over US$1,200 a month in Beijing, plus full benefits. That is considered good pay for blue-collar workers.

Migrants my colleagues and I spoke to this week aren’t expecting help. Some see in the government’s power a leveling effect on big companies.

“They’re just ordinary citizens like us,” says Nathan Wang, who works on user engagement at a Beijing-based internet startup. He is worried that his unheated studio apartment might be next to be torn down.