alibaba soars; meanwhile where are the dissenters?

Alibaba soars; meanwhile where are the dissenters?

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


Singles buying day in China. The premise being if you have no love interest in your life you go on line and buy your self something. Since there are so many people in China retail on line volume was voluminous yesterday on single's day.

Alibaba controls 75% of on-line shopping in China and the stock exploded again. Alibaba [ baba] came public at $68, first buy/sell order during IPO at $90, now at $116 [AM premarket]. That's down a bit from yesterdays high price on the stock but the stock is soaring.

China has had an unusual amount of social change in the last fifty years. Google Cultural revolution [here]. Now China embraces Capitalism with open arms [ sort of]. Meanwhile the ruling communist party strains their brains to create new slogans to describe how to merge Communist ideals of social order with capitalism's flights of fancy designed to create a hundred ways to sell stuff to everyone. Every day becomes a new reason to buy stuff which is good for business and creates jobs, surging GDP and stockholder value. Everyone in China will get a new apartment, new job and a latest generation cell phone. All will be well in China and hence the world.

Meanwhile what happens to those lonely singles after their room in their grandmother's basement is full of stuff they don't use and they lose their job or begin to fall behind in the race to the top " American style" to have more money, more things, and more of their lives spent chasing the new emphasis on the material side of reality. Slogans forgotten, Confucius ideas on one's place in the World laughed at as old fashioned.

Here's what I wrote on the occupy wall street movement in America. Occupy wall street and it's ideals and discontents is a movement now sleeping in America but probably not dead. A few rioters in St Louis being the latest generation of critics of the American way of life.

What happens when the disaffected in China get tired of chasing the elusive American dream of owning lots of neat stuff? How will Ablibaba keep selling and growing if the ruling Chinese communist party decides to change the slogans back to the old Confucius ideals of individual sacrifice and communist corporate communal values of less is more.

Here's what I wrote before on the occupy wall street movement in America. America has it's divide between rich and poor, happy and disaffected, lonely and contented, and hopeful and nihilistic.

What changes are coming to the American dream and how will it effect China and of perverse interest to this discontented lonely author, the long term stockholders of Alibaba?

occupy wall street -3 /who is we?

fiction
edward w pritchard

Protest on Wall Street. Meanwhile the stock market roars back today as the old regime continues business as usual.

In a park near Wall Street strange affinities are created among the protesters as the shifting interests of various groups jockey for position and a voice. All the while the zeitgeist modifies and shifts; beyond even the stock markets ability to predict or discount. Who is the new we? What spark will unite change?

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