Page 47 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

experienced base did not exist five years ago. China-born entrepreneurs are
starting to have global influence.”
Ma, who is 43 years old, is an unlikely Web pioneer. In contrast to most
Internet entrepreneurs in China today, he’s a “tech dummy,” which is an
advantage if you’re designing user-friendly Web sites. “A product should be
click and get it. If I can’t get it, then it’s rubbish,” says Ma.
Another difference: He’s “100 percent made in China,” Ma says. Ma
grew up, went to school, taught English, and started his first and subsequent
Internet businesses in Hangzhou, a large city on the Yangtze Delta some 180
kilometers southwest of Shanghai. I later visited Hangzhou for a behind-the-
scenes tour of Alibaba and a peek into what makes Ma tick.
Ma was born in 1964, right before the Cultural Revolution. When he was
a young child, his grandfather was tormented for being bourgeois, and his
classmates ridiculed him for his “bad family.” He got sucked into the revolu-
tionary fervor and desperately wanted to become a Red Guard and spread
Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s ideology but was not accepted. As a teenager, he
became disillusioned with communist propaganda stating that China was the
best country in the world. Later, when he was a young teacher, his anguish
over the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and shootings was so severe that
he could not get out of bed for two weeks. This dramatic series of experiences
made Ma a fierce competitor and an independent thinker. Without them,
Alibaba would not exist, and Chinese society would not have advanced so far
so quickly.
Today, Alibaba.com is a key driver in China’s unparalleled economic
growth that is helping millions of China’s small businesses connect to one
another and to the international community through two trading sites.
Alibaba China is the largest online marketplace for domestic Chinese business
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transactions and has 16 million users. The English-language site, Alibaba
International, has 3 million users, mostly global buyers and importers
searching for and trading with China’s numerous suppliers. Click on the
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Alibaba.com site in the United States, and you get access to an online flea
market of more than 35 product categories, in English, ranging from com-
puters to blankets. This site also has links to businesses organized into five
geographic markets, including the United States, India, and the United
Kingdom. Well-marked sections feature easy-to-find buttons that link users to
buyers, sellers, suppliers, trade shows, and seminars.

Alibaba—The Wizardry of Jack Ma 21