Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma's promise to create 1 million new US jobs is the latest casualty of the trade war. 
 
 The Alibaba (BABA) chief grabbed attention at the start of last year when he made the highly ambitious pledge following a meeting with Donald Trump, who was president elect at the time. 
 
 But in an interview published late Wednesday by China's official news agency, Xinhua, Ma said the waves of new tariffs imposed by Washington and Beijing in recent months have undermined the plan. 
 
 "This promise was on the basis of friendly China-US cooperation and reasonable bilateral trade relations, but the current situation has already destroyed that basis," Ma said. "This promise can't be completed." 
 
 A spokeswoman for Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce company, confirmed Ma's comments to CNN. 
 
 Analysts had already expressed serious doubts about the pledge, which Alibaba announced after Trump and Ma met at Trump Tower in New York in January 2017. 
 
 "Jack and I are going to do some great things," Trump said at the time. 
 
 Ma's vague promise wasn't based on Alibaba investing in the United States to build factories or fulfillment centers. Instead, he talked about stimulating trade by helping American small businesses sell their products to consumers in China and elsewhere in Asia. 
 
 Alibaba held a big conference in Detroit last year to encourage American small businesses and farmers to sell their products to Chinese consumers through its platforms. The company didn't immediately respond to a request Thursday for information on how many US jobs those efforts have created so far. 
 
 In the Xinhua interview, Ma said Alibaba "will not stop promoting the healthy development of China-US trade." 
 
 A strong advocate of globalization, he has expressed growing fears about the trade war, telling investors earlier this week that it could drag on for as long as 20 years. 
 
 "It's going to last long, it's going to be a mess," Ma said Tuesday in Hangzhou, the city where Alibaba is based. 
 
 The 54-year-old tycoon, who set up Alibaba in his apartment nearly two decades ago, announced this month that he will step down as executive chairman of the company next year. Daniel Zhang, the current CEO, will succeed him. 
 
 Ma, a former English teacher, said he wants to return to education. 
 
 -- Yong Xiong and Sherisse Pham contributed to this report. ||||| The United States has gained tremendously from globalisation, but has squandered the benefits by not spreading the rewards throughout society, Alibaba Group executive chairman Jack Ma said on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 
 
 He also urged the world to give Donald Trump time before passing judgment on how he might shape the future course of Sino-US trade relations. 
 
 Don’t blame globalisation for world’s ills, Xi Jinping tells Davos 
 
 Ma’s comments at the forum in Switzerland come after Trump threatened on the presidential campaign trail to slap punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the US after accusing Beijing of adopting unfair trade practices and manipulating its currency. 
 
 Trump’s election victory and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union have also sparked an international debate over whether there is a political backlash against free trade and the benefits of globalisation. 
 
 “American international companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalisation,” Ma, the founder of Alibaba, the world’s largest online retailer, told the forum in Davos. “The past 30 years, companies like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft made tonnes of money.” 
 
 Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post. 
 
 The problem, he added, lay in how the US has spent the wealth. 
 
 Chinese president presses pro-trade message in Switzerland before landmark Davos address 
 
 “In the past 30 years, America has had 13 wars at a cost of US$14.2 trillion,” he said. 
 
 “What if they had spent part of that money on building up their infrastructure, helping white-collar and blue-collar workers? You’re supposed to spend money on your own people. 
 
 “It’s not that other countries steal American jobs,” said Ma, echoing criticisms made by Trump of China’s economic and trade policies. “It is your strategy – that you did not distribute the money in a proper way.” 
 
 Ma met with Trump in New York earlier this month and said he told the incoming US president he was still optimistic about globalisation, even though there were areas that should be improved. 
 
 He told also Trump that both the US and China could benefit from a more inclusive form of globalisation where the gains were more widely shared. 
 
 “I believe globalisation is good, but it needs to be improved. It should be inclusive globalisation.” 
 
 Ma added the world should give Trump more time to sort out how the US will deal with China in its trade relations. 
 
 “He’s open minded and he’s listening,” Ma told the forum. 
 
 Alibaba offers Trump 1 million US jobs, builds bridge for Sino-US ties 
 
 The Chinese internet tycoon said the consequences of a trade war between the world’s biggest and second-largest economies would be too grave for both countries to bear and they should do everything to avoid it. 
 
 “It’s so easy to launch a war. It’s so difficult, almost impossible sometimes, to terminate that war,” he said. “The Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, are those finished?” 
 
 Ma gave an indirect reply when asked who initiated his meeting with Trump in New York. 
 
 He said there were “some people” who asked if he wanted to meet Trump and he initially declined because he did not know what to discuss with the president-elect. 
 
 But after others asked him a few days later, he replied in an email that he was ready for the meeting and believed Trump would be happy to meet him, too. 
 
 China’s Xi calls for a world without nuclear weapons 
 
 “At least I think president-elect Donald Trump would be happy to hear what I want to talk about so I went,” he said. 
 
 Ma said the meeting with Trump had gone better than he expected. 
 
 “We spoke about how we can help small American businesses sell their products in China and Asia through our network, which can create a lot of jobs for them,” he added.
– Take your pick as to which of these statements from Alibaba founder Jack Ma is gloomier: He's going back on his pledge to create 1 million US jobs, and the US-China trade war that he blames for that plan's undoing is one that he believes could last two decades. "It's going to last long, it's going to be a mess," the Chinese tech billionaire said Tuesday. He addressed the jobs plan, made after he met with then president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017, on Wednesday: "This promise was on the basis of friendly China-US cooperation and reasonable bilateral trade relations, but the current situation has already destroyed that basis. This promise can't be completed." CNN provides background, explaining Ma's "vague promise" didn't involve building Alibaba facilities in the US, but rather by helping fire up small US businesses by enabling them to better tap into the Chinese market. The Wall Street Journal also uses the word "vague" to describe how critics viewed Ma's pledge, observing that, nearly two years later, Alibaba hasn't released any figures related to the number of jobs created thus far. Count the Washington Post among those critics. It points out that based on Commerce Department figures, 1 million new American jobs would require that US exports to China rise by an additional $206 billion a year. That's a more than 100% jump over 2017's $188 billion in exports, a figure that encompasses things that wouldn't benefit from Alibaba's platform, like airplanes.