If you listen to its Wall Street promoters, there’s nothing not to like about Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant set to issue possibly the biggest initial public offering ever this week.

Well, here’s one unsettling thing: An investment in Alibaba is also an investment on apparatchiks who often govern like Chairman Mao even as they get away with promoting China’s economy as if it’s being run by Adam Smith.

OK, Alibaba certainly has some real selling points: a virtual lock on the China’s fast-growing Web retail economy; management led by home-grown tech guru Jack Ma.

And no one expects Beijing, Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma or any investment banker earning a cent from this deal to highlight China’s ugly history — from the bloody repression of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the massacre at Tiananmen Square to the continued crackdown on just about any dissent, political or religious.

But the company also knows that one way to keep Wall Street quiet is to spread around a little green — which it did in spades in preparation for the IPO.

The players in the deal include all the big US banks, who’ll promote the offering as if it’s the next Google or Apple. After all, they’re splitting tens of millions of dollars in fees on an IPO likely to top $25 billion.

To ensure complete Wall Street buy-in, Alibaba went a step further, opting to have its shares listed to trade not in China but here at the New York Stock Exchange, where Ma on Friday will ring the iconic opening bell as Alibaba shares finally trade.

Wall Street will also tout Friday’s event as a massive step forward in China’s economic reforms — which is partly true.

Yes, the company will have to conform to US law on what it must disclose to investors, and to at least some of our corporate-governance rules. And, yes, capitalism has helped more people rise out of poverty than any economic system ever invented, as China’ market reforms have again proven.

And logic suggests that increased economic freedom will someday mean more political freedom in China. Except that, if China’s history is any guide, maybe not.

And let’s be clear: China is far from the free market in action. The Communist Party runs most major business, either through direct control or by fiat.

Don’t take my word; just read the fine print in the Alibaba “prospectus” (the official document for the IPO), which discloses “risks related to doing business in the People’s Republic of China.”

For instance: “The PRC economy differs from the economies of most developed countries in many respects including the extent of government involvement, level of development, growth rate, control of foreign exchange and allocation of resources.”

Plus, Aliababa’s “financial condition and results of operations are affected to a significant extent by economic, political and legal developments in the PRC. . . PRC government also exercises significant control over China’s economic growth by allocating resources, controlling payment of foreign currency-denominated obligations, setting monetary policy, regulating financial services and institutions and providing preferential treatment to particular industries or companies.”

In other words, doing business with Jack Ma is actually doing business with the People’s Republic of China.

And that’s a pretty big risk.

Plus, the corporate structure involves entities and controls with a rather Enronesque smell.

IPO investors, for example, won’t really own Alibaba’s Chinese assets, just a stake in a Cayman Island firm with “rights” to most of Alibaba’s China holdings (which are held by Ma and senior management).

And those rights are subject to the whims of a whimsical Chinese government.

Wall Street will tell you that Beijing wants Alibaba to succeed. And with relatives of Communist Party members littered through Alibaba’s executive ranks, there is a real profit motive — but it may just be a motive to get rich as dumb Americans buy shares at the inflated post-IPO price.

In fact, China’s government has ruled similar corporate structures to be illegal — and that trumps anything the Securities and Exchange Commission can render, since so much of Aliababa’s business isn’t here or in the Caymans, but where the Chinese Communist Party rules.

Feel free to ignore all this, jump aboard the latest e-commerce sensation and bet that China’s government — the same one that drastically limits all kinds of freedoms, including online ones — will leave Alibaba alone.

Or, if you’d rather rest at night, let Jack Ma and Wall Street have their fun — while you buy a nice, simple, US-focused mutual fund.

Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.