Alibaba on Monday scrambled to contain a sexual assault scandal that has thrown China’s largest ecommerce company into the middle of the country’s #MeToo movement, hurting its reputation just as Beijing puts pressure on its tech giants.
In an internal letter dated “before dawn”, Alibaba’s chief executive Daniel Zhang pledged to change the company’s culture and announced the firing of a manager who allegedly sexually assaulted one of his workers. He added that two other executives who failed to act after the incident had resigned.
Zhang called the alleged assault a “humiliation for all Aliren”, or “Ali people” as employees of the company call themselves. “We must rebuild, and we must change,” he said.