Ah yes, citing Wikipedia… who’s sources explicitly state that Beijing never contacts them and that Jack Ma’a policy has been to be skeptical of the government’s role. Classic.

It’s only Beijing that we never hear from, he says. He adds that he wishes that were different.

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Describing the ideal relationship between companies and the government, Jack Ma has said something along the lines of: “Go ahead and flirt with it, but don’t marry it.”

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The paper still reports extremely critically on issues that the Chinese state media avoids.

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Executive Vice President Joseph Tsai, for example, has complained that the Western media reports on China in a biased and one-sided way because they disagree with communism. He has said that the South China Morning Post should report on things “as they are.”

Turns out, when you shift your focus from being a purely Hong Kong-oriented paper to an international one, your editorial scope changes.

When in Hong Kong writing about mainland China, you can afford to be more critical because your readership has a pretty fair view of mainland China (given that, y’know, they’re literally right beside it}. When writing for the international audience, there are far more things that need to be cleared up.

As I showed above, SCMP is clearly deviating pretty far from Beijing’s policy (in large part because Alibaba and Jack Ma have always maintained a somewhat skeptical stance relative to the government) and often comes out openly against Beijing’s positions. All you’ve shown me is people saying “oh no but Alibaba is Chinese and China is bad and thus SCMP is bad.” Just the tiniest but racist, don’t you think?