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The Chinese revolution eats up its capitalists - at least those who arouse the slightest suspicion that they are not communist and capitalist at the same time.
This in no way means renouncing personal or social prosperity.
But it means losing everything as soon as you are no longer loyal to the party.
Successful Chinese entrepreneurs should prefer not to ask questions about the country's political and economic future.
Jack Ma, founder of internet giants Alibaba and Ant, did just that.
He raised the question of whether China's banking and financial system is still keeping pace with the rapid development of the private corporate world.
It has now disappeared, the Ant IPO has stopped, and Beijing's antitrust authorities are suddenly investigating.
Such an approach is known less from American investigations against US technology companies than from Russian investigations against oligarchs who are politically out of favor.
Jack Ma is not an isolated incident either.
The agricultural billionaire Sun Dawu was arrested at the beginning of November, and the reasons, as always in autocracies, sound rather nebulous: “Unrest caused”, “Production impeded”.
The contrast to a state-owned competitor is suspected to be the trigger;
that would not be unusual.
But dangerous.
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China's economic and global political success since the country opened up 40 years ago is based on the fact that China appeared to be different from the rest of the communist world.
It seemed not only to forego great power behavior and to reward investors, but also made its system so flexible that entrepreneurial freedom could point the way out of the dictatorial economy of shortage.
Investments in China were seen as a good long-term investment.
Now Beijing is destroying trust.
Xi Jinping has brought members of the Politburo and high-ranking generals to justice for corruption, but these were political power struggles.
Now, at the same time as the draconian crackdown on Hong Kong, against the Muslims and Tibetans, and with the demonstration of power against India, the signal follows: Our economy too has to strictly follow the party line.
But there is no globalized digital economy that is forbidden to think about the conditions for its success.
Entrepreneurs who are supposed to master all the finesse of the world market but have to remain silent about China's problems will fail.
For the party's sake, simulating blindness in one eye doesn't work.
Jack Ma is the key witness for this.