Page 153 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Meeting Mr . PingCo

Wang picks me up in his light blue late-model BMW. My early-morning
meeting was at his investor GSR’s office, overlooking the new headquarters
for Google China across the street. We are only a few blocks from Wang’s
alma mater, Tsinghua University. Giving me a toothy grin, Wang offers to
drive by the school. At the university gates he pulls the car over and pauses to
let me snap several pictures of him posing with his snazzy car and its license
plate with many 9’s, Wang’s lucky number. Bright, young, earnest-looking
graduate on his way up in the world—it’s not a bad image. But from Wang’s
reserved demeanor, you’d never know it.
As China opens to the world, Charles Wang is only one among a large
talent pool of young and motivated engineers showing Silicon Valley their
stuff. Expect a lot more tech whizzes to turn up, emerging from China’s
switched-on entrepreneurial zones and inventing new technology—and in the
thick of the hot mobile Internet area, like PingCo. Having grown up poor
during the Cultural Revolution, many Chinese entrepreneurs—Wang
included—are used to working hard and are not afraid to fail. Indoctrinated
in the communist philosophy of a harmonious society, they are working for a
better tomorrow and emerging as a quiet but powerful force today in Chinese
society and tomorrow perhaps all over the world.
Wang, who is 33 years old, was born in a small town outside Hangzhou
in the flourishing private enterprise province of Zhejiang in eastern China.
His schoolteacher parents encouraged him to seek new horizons. Wang left
home for Beijing and graduated from Tsinghua in 1996 with a bachelor’s
degree in electrical engineering. He then joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) as a
corporate trainee in Beijing. His rare-in-China multinational experience
served him well. Thanks to a strong bond with his mentor, HP’s Chinese
manager Ricky Lee, Wang’s career took off. Within two years, he was
promoted to sales manager at HP.
In 1999, when Lee left HP for a state-owned information technology
enterprise called Founder Group, Wang joined him to help initiate reforms at
the money-losing company. At age 26, he was put in charge of a joint venture
between Founder and Yahoo! to handle ad sales for the U.S. Internet portal’s
Mandarin-language site. In 2001, the venture was spun off as a Hong Kong

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