Trump seems to like at least one thing about China: Alibaba's Jack Ma

Donald Trump has reserved some of his harshest commentary for China, but he still made nice when one of the country's billionaires came for a visit.

The CEO of e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma met with the president-elect Monday in New York. Ma claimed his company would help create one million jobs in the U.S. over the next five years by allowing small businesses to sell their products in China.

In the Trump Tower lobby, Trump called Ma a "great, great entrepreneur" and said the meeting had been "great."

"Jack and I are going to do some great things," he said.

"We talked about supporting one million small businesses to sell on our platform to China and Asia, especially Southeast Asia, where we are pretty big," Ma said, according his corporate news site, Alizila.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Founded in 1999, Alibaba's businesses include several e-commerce platforms as well as the digital payments service Alipay, the Alibaba Cloud and Youku Tudou, a YouTube equivalent.

Infamous for its eye-watering sales figures -- during its November 2016 Singles Day event the company transacted $17.8 billion in sales -- Alibaba's online e-commerce platforms are significant competitors to American companies.

In particular, it stands against Amazon, which has been trying to make headway in China with the launch of its Prime service.

Meanwhile, Alibaba has run into hurdles in the U.S. with its Taobao platform being labelled a "Notorious Market" by the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative thanks to apparent high levels of counterfeit goods, Bloomberg reported.

Despite his kind words for Ma, the president-elect has proven unpredictable when it comes to the world's second largest economy.

Besides continued criticism of China's monetary policy, Trump also caused controversy in December after taking a call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. Taiwan is seen by China as a breakaway state, and the U.S. has so far declined to officially recognise it as an independent nation.

In recent days, an op-ed in the state-run Xinhua news agency lambasted Trump's "obsession with 'Twitter diplomacy.'"

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

Correction: Alibaba was founded in 1999, not 2009 as originally stated.