Page 44 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

If he pulls it off, Li will be among the first Chinese entrepreneurs to take
a domestic Chinese Internet brand and plant it offshore. Could the next step
be other Asian countries? Or possibly a search engine for Chinese speakers in
America? Or sites in Europe, as already rumored?
At the very least, the story of Baidu and its soft-spoken China-born CEO
demonstrates that China is becoming more than a nation of me-too tech-
nologies. Yes, it’s true that Baidu has the local edge in China and has not had
to face the same criticisms as Google over privacy and free speech issues,
ideals that Americans hold dear. Moreover, it’s fair to say that Google has far
more resources focused on the much larger American search market than on
the still-tiny Chinese market. Yet even though Google has gone native in
China and is putting more oomph into beating Baidu, my bet is that Baidu
will continue to one-up Google in China with its homegrown smarts. More
significantly, Baidu may be a harbinger of future technological breakthroughs
in China.
The next chapter chronicles how a wizard of an entrepreneur, Jack Ma,
has cast a spell over China’s Internet scene by creating the country’s leading
e-commerce site, Alibaba, raising a record $1.5 billion in an initial public
offering, and absorbing Yahoo! China in a headline-grabbing $1.6 billion deal
from Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang. Ma also one-uppped Meg Whitman with an
eBay-crushing online auction site called Taobao. Talk about a Chinese tech
entrepreneur with global influence!

18 SILICON DRAGON