In one of the highest-profile incidents so far, JD.com founder Richard Liu was arrested in the US in 2018 and accused of raping a 21-year-old female Chinese undergraduate, though prosecutors there subsequently decided not to press charges against the billionaire. More recently, former Korean boy band member Kris Wu has been detained after a university student accused him of pressuring young women into sex.

“Even if this doesn’t lead to serious consequences for Alibaba, I think people are learning from this kind of protesting experience,” said Pocket Sun, co-founder of SoGal Ventures, which invests in female entrepreneurs. “If this is not the real turning point, then the next one might be, or the one after the next might be because people get less tolerant over time.”

But the country’s largest corporations have thus far been largely shielded from the upheaval of the #MeToo movement in the West, in part because of a lack of recourse for reporting incidents and longstanding sexist norms. Businesses also have tended to deal with gender discrimination away from the public spotlight. From hazing rituals during which women simulate sex acts to forced drinking and job ads that use women as bait to lure male workers, sexism remains endemic particularly in the tech industry.

Alibaba will now work with police on their investigation, based on an account the female employee posted online after she first reported the incident internally. The employee’s story only emerged after she began handing out flyers in the company cafeteria last week, hoping to be heard, a person familiar with the matter said. According to the woman, her boss came into her hotel room and raped her when she was inebriated after a night of drinking with clients in the city of Jinan.

The accused has confessed he performed intimate acts with the female employee and law enforcement officials will determine whether he broke the law, according to the memo. Separately, Jinan Hualian Supermarket - whose employee was allegedly present at the dinner - released a statement on its official WeChat account, saying the company will fully cooperate with police on a suspected assault case.

“I expect the biggest impact to be recruitment and talent management,” said Michael Norris, an analyst with Shanghai-based consultancy AgencyChina. “Alibaba’s growth required a strong talent pipeline across various business units. This incident may dissuade promising female graduates and highly-qualified female managers from joining Alibaba.”

Alibaba will conduct a company-wide training program on employee rights protection, including anti-sexual harassment, Zhang said. It will also establish a reporting channel and speed up the formation of a code of action to address such issues. Chief people officer Judy Tong will be given a demerit in her records. The human resources department “did not pay enough attention and care” and “lacked empathy,” Zhang said.

‘Change is only possible if everyone takes individual action, but it must start at the top. It starts with me. Please wait and watch.’

Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang

This wasn’t Alibaba’s first brush with public scandal. In 2020, the wife of Jiang Fan - then the youngest partner at the e-commerce giant - took to the Twitter-like Weibo to warn another woman, a prominent social media influencer, not to “mess” with her husband. It escalated quickly into the firm’s worst public relations debacle at the time, igniting a frenzy of online speculation about whether Jiang and the internet star were having an affair, and if that swayed Alibaba’s business decisions or investments. The executive was ultimately demoted.

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The incident drew scrutiny from Beijing, particularly over the way individual posts and trending topics about the scandal vanished from Weibo, according to an article published by the online arm of People’s Daily. That shone a spotlight on Alibaba’s extensive media empire and the influence it wields in the public arena, Bloomberg News has reported. It lent impetus to an already wide-ranging campaign to rein in the power that Jack Ma and other technology moguls wield over commerce, data and fintech in Asia’s largest economy.

“We must use this opportunity to reflect and rebuild our thinking and actions fully,” Zhang wrote. “Change is only possible if everyone takes individual action, but it must start at the top. It starts with me. Please wait and watch.”

Bloomberg

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