Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has fired a manager accused of rape, moving to contain the fallout after an employee’s account of her ordeal went viral on social media and exposed "problems” with the culture at China’s e-commerce leader.
Li Yonghe, appointed just last month to lead a newly created division overseeing much of Alibaba’s nonretail businesses from food delivery to travel, has resigned alongside his human resources chief for mishandling the incident. The sexual assault allegations, first reported by the employee on Aug. 2, have unearthed systemic challenges with the company’s mechanisms, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News.
The incident, which involved an external client and several executives during a night of heavy drinking in the country’s northeast, has blown the lid off pervasive mistreatment of female workers across companies in China, where the #MeToo movement has thus far failed to take off as widely as in Silicon Valley or elsewhere. Zhang, in a lengthy pre-dawn memo, described an outpouring of emotions on Alibaba’s intranet and vowed to step up protections for women across the company while addressing its failure to act.