![Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma believes in altruism.](/content/dam/images/g/w/h/j/u/0/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gwhflm.png/1496233486291.jpg)
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When David Gonski leads the board of ANZ Banking Group into the Alibaba head office in China next week the first thing he will see is a wall of framed photos of Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma with world leaders.
The photos include Ma with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and one of Ma with United States President Donald Trump taken in the foyer of Trump Tower when Trump was president-elect.
It has not escaped the attention of just about every influential person in China that Ma was the first Chinese "leader" to meet Trump. They met in January – three months before President Xi Jinping met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Ma, who is one of the smartest and most successful entrepreneurs to emerge from China's graveyard of socialism, is attuned to the intricacies of geopolitics. His strategy for the global expansion of Alibaba is built on a philosophy that marries staunch capitalist beliefs with Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism.
Ma manages to unashamedly push Alibaba's commercial interests while promising to empower the world's poor through microfinance and e-commerce. He wants to lift at least 300 million Chinese out of poverty.
The centrepiece of his vision for globalisation is a new electronic world trade platform (eWTP). He says this will complement the World Trade Organisation, but Alibaba vice-president Brian Wong told Chanticleer and a group of visiting journalists last week that the WTO is dead.
Unfortunately, Gonski and his fellow ANZ directors will not get to meet Ma because he will be elsewhere talking to investors. Alibaba has risen 41 per cent this year and has a market capitalisation of $US309 billion.
But if the ANZ directors get a briefing from Wong they will discover that he is very good at channelling Ma. Wong works in the office of the chairman and, as the 52nd employee, he was on the ground when Alibaba was run out of a smelly apartment in Hangzhou.
When he spoke to Chanticleer, Wong was able to shed light on Ma's philosophy of business. He describes an individual who is breaking the conventional image of the leader of a multinational. Ma does not strut the globe attacking government regulations and delivering speeches weighed down with blatant self-interest. He is creating a new persona for global leaders by drawing on his own humble beginnings as a teenager offering translation services to tourists in Hangzhou.
The ANZ board will no doubt have intense interest in the way Alibaba is disrupting the Chinese financial system. But the message they will get is actually more like the one you would hear from the World Bank than a hard-nosed technology company.
Wong says Alibaba's financial products, including Alipay, now serve those who cannot be served by banks. "This applies to developing countries, which is probably three-fifths of the world's population that isn't being served in this way," he says. "What that does is allow people who are not able to be part of the economic system now to participate.
"It broadens the flow of money in terms of how it circulates within an economic system. But I also think it addresses a much larger issue, which is globalisation and the backlash because people feel it does not apply to them.
"Jack's whole approach to eWTP is a belief that trade should be something that includes everybody, not just the elite. So technology is the key to bringing those people in. That includes trade, finding the right business partners, but also includes infrastructure such as finance and logistics."
Wong says this has significant implications for the global trading system as well as human development. "So far we have not found a development model that is effective and really reaches all the people in the world.
"China is a great model because we have all of the same problems that developing countries have but on a much larger scale. If it works in China the chances are it will have a high success rate of working in other developing countries."
Wong says a form of the Alibaba business model is already working in the United States, where big data is being used to provide financial services to people who could not get finance.
Wong says Ma's motivation is different to most people because he grew up in a difficult environment. Ma's mission to help small businesses and those who are ignored are part of his commitment to helping the underdog.
Ma's visit to Australia as a teenager was a turning point in his life because he suddenly discovered there was a world of wealth and prosperity that was not being communicated in China, according to Wong. "He came back and said there's a lot of things out there we are not being taught."
Wong says Ma's regular meetings with world leaders are part of a broader strategy to build a global consensus in favour of globalisation. "Jack has become the defacto face of new China. A lot of people look to him and say this is what China is becoming. They feel very comfortable or good about it because Jack is very open and has a very inclusive mindset.
"Because we have Alibaba as a platform it becomes very relevant because they all want to do trade with China. So there is also a practical benefit of meeting someone like Jack Ma."
Wong says Ma's meeting with Trump was important because the US holds such an influential position in the world. "We recognise how influential the US is from a thought leadership standpoint. The US really does influence the way the whole world sees other countries and itself.
"Regardless of whether we like what is being espoused by its leadership, the fact is they have that much influence. So we felt it was important to at least let the US know who is Alibaba and what we are trying to do as it relates to the US and the rest of the world.
"We are fighting a very difficult narrative in the United States. In America they look at China as a competitor that is selling low-cost products to the market, they are taking jobs, and also they don't understand China because it's so foreign.
"When we are in a market like the US we are not only trying to battle perceptions of us as a company, but also of China as a whole and what the culture is."
Wong says Ma wants to educate American business so they understand that Alibaba is a platform for small businesses to sell to China and not a competitor.
"Jack believes that a world that does more trade with each other is a more peaceful, harmonious world," Wong says.
Wong teaches at the Alibaba global leadership academy, which was set up last year for about 30 international students. One of the pieces of the curriculum is understanding Chinese traditional culture and philosophy, including Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.
He says Confucianism defines the social order so everyone can live in an orderly way. Daoism is about harmony within a society or the yin and yang, while Buddhism is about tolerance and accepting others, even if they are from a different religion.
"Collectivism is the key mindset in China," he says. "That means people sacrifice individual things or benefits for the larger group.
"The Western mindset is about individualism, at least in America I would say. Jack has this value called altruism and he thinks the data technology era is about using technology to help empower other people, not yourself."
Wong says Ma's role as an adviser to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is an attempt to influence a new round of trade liberalisation.
There is only one jarring note to all of this. China has banned from its borders leading global technology companies that play a key role in e-commerce, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook.
An Alibaba spokesperson referred Chanticleer to the Chinese government to answer any questions about barriers to the free movement of US tech firms.