The SCMP reporter who got Alibaba chairman Jack Ma on record comparing his leadership decisions with Deng Xiaoping’s during the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown has resigned after being accused of editorial tampering.

In a statement released on its website, SCMP claims its reporter, Liu Yi, surreptitiously “accessed the system and replaced the editor-approved article with an altered version in which Mr Ma’s reference made in relation to June 4th was removed.”

CORRECTION, 2:18 pm: Due to a misreading, I wrote, “This looks bad for the South China Morning Post in more ways than one. The publication burned a source who said something he would rather not have — the reporter was completely within her rights to do that, by the way — and then burned its own reporter for being too good at her job.” Upon further review, it appears Liu Yi was the one who deleted the June 4th reference (thus the editorial tampering). Apologies to SCMP’s editors. The rest of the post stands as published, with strikethroughs over the parts that deserve open mockery.

Of course, if you believe the official line — the one spouted by Alibaba and Jack Ma, and which SCMP’s editors seem to endorse with their editing — you’d think Liu Yi basically made up the quote. According to WSJ:

In reaction to the quote, Jack Ma said in a statement on Thursday: “I was trying to describe the circumstances under which I made tough decisions when I was CEO of the company. Regrettably my remarks as reported [by the SCMP] did not reflect what I told the reporter, and caused a terrible misunderstanding.”

In case you didn’t understand what Ma was saying…

In a second statement released early Saturday on an official Alibaba Group microblog, the company said: “We don’t intend to question the SCMP’s motivation for the interview, but, according to the sound recordings of the interview, we found that the root [of the problem] is that the SCMP quoted improperly.”

We don’t intend to question the SCMP’s motivation for the interview, except that’s exactly what we’re doing right now. If SCMP quoted so improperly, one wonders why Alibaba hasn’t released the interview recording, or at least transcribed it the way they heard it. You know, proper way and all.

Liu chose to resign on Friday instead of sitting through SCMP’s in-house inquiries. At the SCMP, it appears, journalism is not intended to hold the rich and powerful to account, because, of course, the rich and powerful have the phone number of the editor’s office.

“Notwithstanding, the South China Morning Post continues to stand by the original article,” SCMP’s statement reads.

Here, again, the original Jack Ma quote:

“I made cruel decisions when thousands of Alibaba’s customers were involved in fraud, and when we adjusted Alipay’s structure. As the CEO of a company, you have to do that. It’s like Deng Xiaoping, the then top leader, had to make cruel decisions during the June 4 crackdown for the country’s stability.”

(Image via)

Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma (Yun) was interviewed by South China Morning Post last week, and in an article published Saturday, dropped this nugget of a quote:

“I made cruel decisions when thousands of Alibaba’s customers were involved in fraud, and when we adjusted Alipay’s structure. As the CEO of a company, you have to do that. It’s like Deng Xiaoping, the then top leader, had to make cruel decisions during the June 4 crackdown for the country’s stability.”

The sound bite has been highlighted by Bloomberg, which reports that Ma has faced social media backlash, and that there’s an online petition asking for Ma to rescind his comment.

On June 4, 1989, Deng’s decision to send in PLA soldiers to suppress the demonstrations on and around Tiananmen Square remains the most controversial in modern Chinese history, raising questions that remain unanswered — indeed, unasked — and leaving scars on the national psyche that manifest itself in ways subtle and obvious.

In February 2011, Ma’s company faced its first true adversity when more than 2,000 high-volume sellers were found to have defrauded customers, leading to an 8 percent stock price decrease in Hong Kong. Alibaba CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee fell on the sword by resigning.

If the equivalence isn’t obvious, it’s because we fail to appreciate what living in a post-6/4 China entails. Nothing is more important than commerce — economic development, the inexorable road to GDP growth — and the means by which to conduct it. Does a CEO’s decisions really have the impact of a paramount leader’s? If you force yourself to think the way they want you to, in which apparatuses to maintain individual, societal, and national wealth are of paramount importance, the answer might as well be yes. Jack Ma was being downright patriotic.

UPDATE, 1:32 pm: Global Voices has a lot more details: “Many netizens were disappointed and wondering why Ma chose to destroy his image…. Many also believed that Ma has made a deal with the devil, coming to some agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) so that they exercise direct control over his businesses to keep them expanding.”