2020-10-27 14:59:39
As Jack Ma of Alibaba helped turn China into the world’s biggest e-commerce market over the past two decades, he was also vowing to pull off a more audacious transformation.
过去20年，阿里巴巴的马云帮助中国成为全球最大的电子商务市场，他还发誓要实现一次更加大无畏的转型。
“If the banks don’t change, we’ll change the banks,” he said in 2008, decrying how hard it was for small businesses in China to borrow from government-run lenders.
“如果银行不改变，我们就改变银行，”他在2008年表示，并谴责中国小企业向政府放贷机构借款异常困难的现象。
“The financial industry needs disrupters,” he told People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, a few years later. His goal, he said, was to make banks and other state-owned enterprises “feel unwell.”
“金融行业需要搅局者，”几年后，他对中共机关报《人民日报》表示。他说，他的目标是让银行和其他国有企业“不爽”。
The scope of Mr. Ma’s success is becoming clearer. The vehicle for his financial-technology ambitions, an Alibaba spinoff called Ant Group, is preparing for the largest initial public offering on record. Ant is set to raise $34 billion by selling its shares to the public in Hong Kong and Shanghai, according to stock exchange documentsreleased on Monday. After the listing, Ant would be worth around $310 billion, much more than many global banks.
马云将在多大程度上取得成功，如今正在清晰起来。他实现金融科技抱负的工具是阿里巴巴分拆出来的蚂蚁集团，该公司正准备进行有史以来规模最大的首次公开募股。根据周一公布的证券交易所文件，蚂蚁集团将通过在香港和上海的公开发行募集340亿美元。上市后，蚂蚁集团的市值将达到3100亿美元左右，远远超过许多全球银行。
The company is going public not as a scrappy upstart, but as a leviathan deeply dependent on the good will of the government Mr. Ma once relished prodding.
该公司的上市不再是作为斗志高昂的新贵，而是一个极为依赖政府的友好态度的庞然大物，而政府曾经是马云乐于鞭策的对象。
More than 730 million people use Ant’s Alipay app every month to pay for lunch, invest their savings and shop on credit. Yet Alipay’s size and importance have made it an inevitable target for China’s regulators, which have already brought its business to heel in certain areas.
每个月有超过7.3亿人使用蚂蚁的支付宝应用来支付午餐费、用积蓄投资和信用购物。然而，支付宝的规模和重要性已使其不可避免地成为中国监管机构的目标，这些机构已经在某些领域对它的业务进行了整顿。
These days, Ant talks mostly about creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. Several government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and stand to profit handsomely from the public offering.
如今，蚂蚁集团所谈的主要是同大银行建立合作关系，而不是颠覆或取代它们。几家国有基金和机构都是蚂蚁集团的股东，它们有望从此次公开发行中获得丰厚利润。
The question now is how much higher Ant can fly without provoking the Chinese authorities into clipping its wings further.
现在的问题是，在不激怒中国当局，导致它进一步剪掉其翅膀的情况下，“蚂蚁”还能飞多高?
Excitable investors see Ant as a buzzy internet innovator. The risk is that it becomes more like a heavily regulated “financial digital utility,” said Fraser Howie, the co-author of “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”
兴奋的投资者将蚂蚁集团视为振奋人心的互联网创新者。《红色资本主义——中国非凡崛起之下的脆弱金融基础》(Red Capitalism: The Fragile financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise)的合著者侯伟(Fraser Howie)表示，风险在于，它变得更像是一个受到严格监管的“金融数字公用事业”。
“Utility stocks, as far as I remember, were not the ones to be seen as the most exciting,” Mr. Howie said.
“在我的印象里，公用事业股并不是最令人兴奋的股票，”侯伟说。
Ant declined to comment, citing the quiet period demanded by regulators before its share sale.
蚂蚁集团拒绝置评，理由是在售股前有监管机构要求的静默期。
The company has played give-and-take with Beijing for years. As smartphone payments became ubiquitous in China, Ant found itself managing huge piles of money in Alipay users’ virtual wallets. The central bank made it park those funds in special accounts where they would earn minimal interest.
该公司多年来一直在与北京讨价还价。随着智能手机支付在中国变得无处不在，蚂蚁集团发现自己管理着支付宝用户虚拟钱包中的巨额资金。央行要求将这些资金存入特别账户，这样可以获得最低限度的利息。
After people piled into an easy-to-use investment fund inside Alipay, the government forced the fund to shed risk and lower returns. Regulators curbed a plan to use Alipay data as the basis for a credit-scoring system akin to Americans’ FICO scores.
当人们纷纷涌入支付宝内部一个简单易用的投资基金后，政府迫使该基金规避风险，降低收益。监管机构限制了一项以支付宝数据为基础，建立类似美国FICO的信用评分系统的计划。
China’s Supreme Court this summer capped interest rates for consumer loans, though it was unclear how the ceiling would apply to Ant. The central bank is preparing a new virtual currency that could compete against Alipay and another digital wallet, the messaging app WeChat, as an everyday payment tool.
今年夏天，中国最高法院为消费贷款的利率设定了上限，不过尚不清楚该上限将如何适用于蚂蚁集团。中国央行正在准备一种新的虚拟货币，可以作为日常支付工具，与支付宝和另一款电子钱包——即时通讯应用微信竞争。
Ant has learned ways of keeping the authorities on its side. Mr. Ma once boasted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, about never taking money from the Chinese government. Today, funds associated with China’s social security system, its sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned life insurance company and the national postal carrier hold stakes in Ant. The I.P.O. is likely to increase the value of their holdings considerably.
蚂蚁集团已经学会了让当局站在自己这边的方法。马云曾在瑞士达沃斯的世界经济论坛(World Economic Forum)上夸耀，自己从未从中国政府那里拿过钱。如今，与中国社会保障体系、国家主权财富基金、一家国有人寿保险公司和国家邮政运营商有关的基金都持有蚂蚁集团的股份。这次公开募股可能会大大增加他们所持股份的价值。
“That’s how the state gets its payoff,” Mr. Howie said. With Ant, he said, “the line between state-owned enterprise and private enterprise is highly, highly blurred.”
“国家就是这样得到回报的，”侯伟说。他说，对于蚂蚁集团来说，“国有企业和民营企业之间的界限非常非常模糊。”
China, in less than two generations, went from having a state-planned financial system to being at the global vanguard of internet finance, with trillions of dollars in transactions being made on mobile devices each year. Alipay had a lot to do with it.
在不到两代人的时间里，中国从一个国家计划的金融体系变成了全球互联网金融的先锋，每年通过移动设备进行的交易额达到数万亿美元。这与支付宝有很大关系。
Alibaba created the service in the early 2000s to hold payments for online purchases in escrow. Its broader usefulness quickly became clear in a country that mostly missed out on the credit card era. Features were added and users piled in. It became impossible for regulators and banks not to see the app as a threat.
阿里巴巴在21世纪初创建了这项服务，以托管方式保存在线购物的付款。在这个几乎错过了信用卡时代的国家，它很快显现出更广泛的用途。功能不断增加，用户不断涌入。监管机构和银行不可能不将该应用视为一种威胁。
A big test came when Ant began making an offer to Alipay users: Park your money in a section of the app called Yu’ebao, which means “leftover treasure,” and we will pay you more than the low rates fixed by the government at banks.
一个巨大的考验来了，蚂蚁集团开始向支付宝用户提供这样一项服务：把你的钱放在一个叫做“余额宝”的地方，我们会给你更多的钱，高于政府在银行提供的固定低利率。
People could invest as much or as little as they wanted, making them feel like they were putting their pocket change to use. Yu’ebao was a hit, becoming one of the world’s largest money market funds.
人们可以想投资多少就投资多少，让他们觉得口袋里的零钱也派上了用场。余额宝大受欢迎，成为全球最大的货币市场基金之一。
The banks were terrified. One commentator for a state broadcaster called the fund a “vampire” and a “parasite.”
银行都被吓坏了。一位国家电视台的评论员称该基金是“吸血鬼”和“寄生虫”。
Still, “all the main regulators remained unanimous in saying that this was a positive thing for the Chinese financial system,” said Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
不过，“所有主要监管机构仍然一致认为，这对中国金融体系是一件积极的事，”位于华盛顿的彼得森国际经济研究所(Peterson Institute for International Economics)研究员马永哲(Martin Chorzempa)说。
“If you can’t actually reform the banks,” Mr. Chorzempa said, “you can inject more competition.”
“如果不能真正改革银行，”马永哲说，“那还可以注入更多竞争。”
But then came worries about shadowy, unregulated corners of finance and the dangers they posed to the wider economy. Today, Chinese regulators are tightening supervision of financial holding companies, Ant included. Beijing has kept close watch on the financial instruments that small lenders create out of their consumer loans and sell to investors. Such securities help Ant fund some of its lending. But they also amplify the blowup if too many of those loans aren’t repaid.
但随之而来的，是对金融业内阴暗、不受监管的角落及它们对更广泛的经济构成风险的担忧。如今，中国监管机构正在加强对包括蚂蚁集团在内的金融控股公司的监管。北京在密切关注小额贷款机构利用消费贷款创造并出售给投资者的金融工具。这些债券帮助蚂蚁集团为其部分贷款获取了资金。但如果太多此类贷款没有得到偿还，它们也会放大危机的规模。
“Those kinds of derivative products are something the government is really concerned about,” said Tian X. Hou, founder of the research firm TH Data Capital. Given Ant’s size, she said, “the government should be concerned.”
“这些衍生产品市政府非常担心的，”研究公司天灏资本的创始人侯晓天说。考虑到蚂蚁集团的规模，她说，“政府应该担心。”
The broader worry for China is about growing levels of household debt. Beijing wants to cultivate a consumer economy, but excessive borrowing could eventually weigh on people’s spending power. The names of two of Alipay’s popular credit functions, Huabei and Jiebei, are jaunty invitations to spend and borrow.
对中国来说，更大的担忧是家庭债务水平的不断上升。北京希望培育消费经济，但过度借贷最终可能影响人们的消费能力。花呗和借呗是支付宝两大热门信用功能，其名字就是以活泼的口吻邀请人们消费和借贷。
Huang Ling, 22, started using Huabei when she was in high school. At the time, she didn’t qualify for a credit card. With Huabei’s help, she bought a drone, a scooter, a laptop and more.
22岁的黄玲在高中时就开始用花呗。当时她还没资格申请信用卡。在花呗的帮助下，她购买了无人机、电动摩托车、笔记本电脑等商品。
The credit line made her feel rich. It also made her realize that if she actually wanted to be rich, she had to get busy.
信贷额度让她感觉自己很富有。但也让她明白，如果真想变得富有，就必须忙起来。
“Living beyond my means forced me to work harder,” Ms. Huang said.
“入不敷出的生活迫使我更努力地工作，”黄玲说。
First, she opened a clothing shop in her hometown, Nanchang, in southeastern China. Then she started an advertising company in the inland metropolis of Chongqing. When the business needed cash, she borrowed from Jiebei.
首先，她在位于中国东南部的家乡南昌开了一家服装店。后来，她在内陆都市重庆开了一家广告公司。当公司需要现金时，她就在借呗借钱。
Online shopping became a way to soothe daily anxieties, and Ms. Huang sometimes racked up thousands of dollars in Huabei bills, which only made her even more anxious. When the pandemic slammed her business, she started falling behind on her payments. That cast her into a deep depression.
网上购物已经成为她缓解日常焦虑的一种方式，有时黄玲的花呗账单会累积到数千美元，这只会让她更加焦虑。当大流行重创她的生意，她开始拖欠还款。这导致她极度抑郁。
Finally, early this month, with her parents’ help, she paid off her debts and closed her Huabei and Jiebei accounts. She felt “elated,” she said.
终于，在父母的帮助下，她本月初还清了债务，并关闭了花呗和借呗账户。她说自己感觉“无比开心”。
China’s recent troubles with freewheeling online loan platforms have put the government under pressure to protect ordinary borrowers.
自由放任的网络贷款平台近来在中国制造的麻烦，让政府面临保护普通借款者的压力。
Ant is helped by the fact that its business lines up with many of the Chinese leadership’s priorities: encouraging entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, and expanding the middle class. This year, the company helped the eastern city of Hangzhou, where it is based, set up an early version of the government’s app-based system for dictating coronavirus quarantines.
蚂蚁集团的优势在于，它的业务符合中国领导层的许多优先事项：鼓励创业、金融普惠以及扩大中产阶级。今年，该公司帮助其总部所在的东部城市杭州建立了一个基于手机应用的政府系统早期版本，用于判断新冠病毒的隔离情况。
Such coziness is bound to raise hackles overseas. In Washington, Chinese tech companies that are seen as close to the government are radioactive.
这样的便利合作必然会在海外引起怀疑。在华盛顿，被视为与政府关系密切的中国科技公司是危险的。
In January 2017, Eric Jing, then Ant’s chief executive, said the company aimed to be serving two billion users worldwide within a decade. Shortly after, Ant announced that it was acquiring the money transfer company MoneyGram to increase its U.S. footprint. By the following January, the deal was dead, thwarted by data security concerns.
2017年1月，时任蚂蚁集团首席执行官的井贤栋称，该公司的目标是在十年内为全球20亿用户提供服务。不久，蚂蚁集团宣布收购汇款公司速汇金(MoneyGram)，以扩大其在美国的业务足迹。到次年1月，由于数据安全方面的担忧，这笔交易失败了。
More recently, top officials in the Trump administration have discussed whether to place Ant Group on the so-called entity list, which prohibits foreign companies from purchasing American products. Officials from the State Department have suggested that an interagency committee, which also includes officials from the departments of defense, commerce and energy, review Ant for the potential entity listing, according to three people familiar with the matter.
最近，特朗普政府的高级官员讨论了是否将蚂蚁集团列入所谓的实体名单，该名单禁止外国公司购买美国产品。据三位知情人士透露，国务院官员已经建议由一个跨部门委员会对蚂蚁集团被列入实体名单的可能性进行审查，该委员会包括国防部、商务部和能源部的官员。
Ant does not talk much anymore about expanding in the United States.
如今蚂蚁集团已经甚少提及在美国的扩张。
Ana Swanson对本文有报道贡献。
Raymond Zhong是《纽约时报》科技记者。在2017年加入时报前，他在新德里为《华尔街日报》报道印度快速增长的经济。欢迎在Twitter上关注他 @zhonggg。
翻译：纽约时报中文网
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