Why China’s billionaires keep disappearing

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba , made headlines when he was recently spotted at the Yungu School in Hangzhou, where the company is headquartered. He had rarely made a public appearance since he irked the Chinese Communist Party for criticizing the country’s financial regulatory system in 2020. “He described them as having a ‘pawnshop mentality,’ and that really ruffled a lot of feathers,” said Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative and author of “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism.” “Also, just the brash character of Jack Ma rubbed a lot of regulators and very…