Jack Ma's wife Cathy Ying Zhang quietly bought £19.5 million London mansion amid Ma's rapprochement with Chinese regime
The family of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma bought a £19.5 million London mansion amid a rapprochement with Chinese authorities after years of scrutiny and political exile.
Ma’s wife, Cathy Ying Zhang, acquired the six-bedroom Edwardian house, formerly the Italian embassy, in London’s elite Belgravia district in October 2024, property records show.
The purchase came after Ma’s return to public life after disappearing from view in the aftermath of a speech criticising China’s financial system. It could be seen as a “precautionary diversification” in case Ma again provokes Beijing’s ire, said Sari Arho Havrén, a China specialist at the Royal United Services Institute.
“Wealthy families are hedging against regime risk—one never knows when policies may turn hostile again,” she said. “Affluent families are diversifying quietly. Rule of law societies still hold considerable appeal.”
Ma, 61, is the founder of Alibaba Group, whose online commerce platforms have earned him a fortune of around $30 billion. The Belgravia house, the Ma family’s first known property holding in the UK, may have been funded by the sale of Alibaba shares in 2023, Havrén said.
Ma’s wife Zhang, who has taken Singaporean citizenship, is reportedly the sole director of an offshore company that Ma used to buy a château and vineyards in France.
Last year it was reported that Zhang spent up to $38 million on three commercial properties in Singapore. The buying spree is part of a trend that has seen prominent Chinese businesspeople move money abroad for fear of asset freezes or capital controls.
Many have left China altogether. As many as 13,800 “high-net-worth individuals” emigrated in 2024—a 28 percent rise from 2022, according to investment migration consultants Henley & Partners.
The sale of the Belgravia mansion, managed by Knight Frank and Beauchamp Estates and handled by law firm Withers LLP, was rushed through ahead of a rise in the UK’s stamp duty surcharge for overseas buyers, according to a November 2024 report that did not name the buyer.
Beauchamp and Knight Frank declined to comment. Zhang and Ma Withers did not respond to questions put to them via Withers.
In 2015, it was reported that Ma family purchased ‘Asia’s most expensive home’ in Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak which was formerly owned by the Belgian government. In the same year, it was reported that Ma had bought a 28,000 acre property in upstate New York for $23 million.
Ma vanished from public view in late 2020 after he criticised China’s financial regulators. Beijing reportedly punished him with a fine of nearly $3 billion and halted a stock market listing by Ant Group, an offshoot of Alibaba.
He resurfaced in China in 2023 after an apparent reconciliation with the administration of President Xi Jinping, occasionally attending public events. In February 2025, he was seen shaking Xi’s hand at event with Chinese industry leaders. However, Ma’s public remarks went unreported by official state media, prompting analysts to suggest that he had not been “completely rehabilitated”.
In April, The Guardian reported that Chinese authorities enlisted Ma as part of a campaign to pressure a dissident businessman to return to China from France to help prosecute an official who had angered the regime.
“They said I’m the only one who can persuade you to return,” Ma reportedly told the unnamed businessman in a telephone call. The Chinese government called the allegations “pure fabrication”.
Headline picture: Beauchamp Estates
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Comments
Real estate(the land, not the mansion) is a really good long term storage of wealth as it is fixed, finite, and doesn't depreciate in value except through market trend and it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
However, this causes land speculation which drives the price of land up, and people do not want to develop properties because it would means investing in buildings which costs money to build and maintain and entails risk and ongoing effort.
The correct solution to this is a land value tax, which if implemented correctly, should drive down the price of land down to zero and force Jack Ma's family to either commit to actually investing in UK's economy or park their wealth elsewhere.
By robocat 2025-11-2219:36 > The correct solution to this is a land value tax, which if implemented correctly, should drive down the price of land down to zero
Isn't most land already 'taxed' by a mortgage? Or for a cash purchase it is 'taxed' by the opportunity cost of the investment? Plus rates (taxation) for commercial land in my city are also expensive compared to cost.
Yet these costs don't drive the price of land to zero.
>Real estate(the land, not the mansion) is a really good long term storage of wealth as it is fixed, finite, and doesn't depreciate in value except through market trend and it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
None of this is true.
Step by step:
>as it is fixed
Something not being able to be moved is a negative, not a positive
>finite
New land is created all the time. The netherlands has created an entire new province.
> and doesn't depreciate in value
Only true legally. I can assure you land does depreciate, as can any farmer that has used it to farm the same crop for years and now finds its yields reduced as a result.
>except through market trend
So, just like any other asset?
> it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
Untrue, simply check any number of rural areas that have had the life drained out of them over the past 50 years.
Land is useful, but let's not pretend like it's something it isn't.
By caminante 2025-11-2216:04 Real estate includes land and structures.
There's too much overlooked survivor bias with "I wish I owned real estate..." retrospectives. What people are really saying is that they wish they had speculated, but that's no different than "I wish I owned [NVDA]..."
Take homes values. On a real$ basis, "home prices show a strong tendency to return to their 1890 level[s]" [0].
1. People just move if things get expensive. Urban land area is only 2.6% of total US.
2. Tech improvements unlock cheaper and more durable homes.
What Jack Ma's doing is a completely different level of personal estate management and a flight to safety.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case%E2%80%93Shiller_index#Eco...
By wakawaka28 2025-11-2216:49 Speculation is a legitimate market activity. People make predictions about what will be valuable in the future and marshall those resources toward the most valuable future use. If speculators are wrong, they lose money. There's no free lunch here like you make it sound.
>The correct solution to this is a land value tax, which if implemented correctly, should drive down the price of land down to zero
We have prices to help decide what is the most valuable use of a resource. Trying to implement a bunch of policy to cancel out price signals will lead to all kinds of dysfunctional situations.
Fixed percentage property tax based on market data and legitimate appraisals is the right kind of tax on land (or as correct as it gets; the ideal is that people pay for what public services they use and no more).
>force Jack Ma's family to either commit to actually investing in UK's economy or park their wealth elsewhere.
They are investing in the UK economy by owning land there. A mansion requires maintenance and property tax payments. The UK is not entitled to tell people how they must spend the fruits of their labor. If you'd rather the mansion not go to a foreign rich person, you could ban foreign purchases of mansions. But this would no doubt hurt the people who build and maintain them. Furthermore, Jack Ma probably has limits placed on him by his country. He may only be free to buy a mansion. He will no doubt use it... Leaving a country takes time.
If you want to be mad about land prices, be mad at the infinite deficits and credit bubbles being inflated in the West.
By trollbridge 2025-11-2211:50 Henry George enters the chat
The treatment of Ma compared to his equivalent in the US (probably Bezos or Musk?) might be one of the neatest illustrations of genuine ideological difference between the two countries.
Massive drop in entrepreneurship after the strong-arming of Ma:
https://x.com/EleanorOlcott/status/1834109085450731530?s=20
"In 2018, 51,302 new startups were founded. Last year, that number was down to 1,202."
That's the cost of authoritarian centralization. But it would also be dishonest not to concede the other side of the ledger. A government that eliminates all challenges to its authority also doesn’t depend on coalitions or election cycles, so doesn’t need to bargain with public-sector unions, entrenched lobbies, or party factions to stay in power. That concentration of authority can give Beijing a longer planning horizon than governments that live inside a permanent 18-month election cycle.
That’s the structural trade-off: fewer constraints and more long-term maneuvering room, at the price of suppressing bottom-up initiative, i.e. entrepreneurship.
This is not a value judgment: it’s just the logic of political institutions. Centralized regimes can move quickly, avoid gridlock, and pursue 20- or 30-year industrial policy. But the same mechanisms that let them think long-term also deter the kind of decentralized experimentation that produces new firms and new ideas.
By nine_zeros 2025-11-2214:36 [dead]
By fmajid 2025-11-2213:11 Surprising they took so long. Most wealthy Chinese exfiltrate their children and as much of their capital as they can get away with from the clutches of the CCP. That's why there are so many Chinese twentysomethings driving Ferraris in Vancouver, and changing them every 6 months. Also why China has put tight controls on buying real estate abroad and banned bitcoin
