Alibaba under fire from Beijing in wake of sex assault scandal
ALIBABA, China’s biggest online retailer, has fired a manager accused of sexual assault and promised policies to prevent sexual harassment, but still came under attack by state media for failing to act until the accuser went public.
On Saturday, a female employee posted an 11-page account on Alibaba’s intranet saying her manager and a client had sexually assaulted her, and that superiors and human resources had not taken the matter seriously since she reported it.
Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, said in an intranet memo that the manager, at the grocery delivery unit Neighbourhood Retail, had said he was involved in “intimate acts” when the employee was inebriated, and “has been fired and will never be rehired”. He said police were investigating the matter.
The manager could not be contacted for comment.
Police in the city of Jinan, where the alleged incident took place, said yesterday that the client was under investigation. State media and online commentators were overwhelmingly critical of Alibaba’s perceived delay in handling the incident.
“Alibaba could not offer an answer that satisfies public opinion for this ham-handed inaction,” said an editorial in the Global Times, published by the state-run People’s Daily.
Internally, on a group chat dedicated to the issue, staff have demanded measures to prevent sexual harassment.
The incident has also sparked internal discussion over Alibaba’s culture according to one employee. The employee said the retailer was facing heavy pressure from public opinion and there was a need for it to “scrape poison off the bone” – a Chinese expression meaning to remove a portion to save the whole.
Mr Zhang announced company-wide training for the prevention of sexual harassment and said Alibaba was staunchly opposed to “the ugly culture of forced drinking”. The female employee said in her account of the incident that her manager had ordered her to drink.
“This incident is a humiliation for all Alibaba employees. We must rebuild, and we must change,” Mr Zhang said.