Page 53 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

giving their own child to us. It is a big change for them, but they know we
can do a much better job.”
Local operation of Yahoo! China does raise sensitive issues, however.
Because the portal now is run within Chinese borders, it is censored by
Chinese government authorities, as all sites are. Yahoo! recently has been crit-
icized for turning over the names of two Chinese bloggers earlier in this
decade who were jailed.
But Ma is not concerned about censorship. “We are a business. We’re in
the Net to improve and change people’s lives. We are not into politics,” he
says. Would he turn over names of Internet users to officials? “I would
cooperate if there were criminal charges like terrorism or drugs,” he says.
A makeover of the Yahoo! China site was under way in May 2007 when
I met its president, Zeng Ming, in Beijing for a rare interview. Zeng, a former
professor of management strategy from Cheung Kong Graduate School of
Business in Beijing, joined Yahoo! China in August 2006 as vice president of
strategy and was named president four months later. He is the third president
of Yahoo! China since Alibaba took over. His predecessor, Xie Wen, was in
the job only 40 days before he resigned over disagreements about the radical
changes needed to fix the portal.
At Zeng’s office in a high-rise tower optimistically called the Winterless
Centre, he let me in on the new master plan for upgrading Yahoo! China. It
involves meshing Yahoo!’s search technology, user-generated content, and a new
Web 2.0 portal that includes social networking media into a moneymaking
platform set. The new, improved
Yahoo! China was set to debut in
late 2007. Also in the works is a
longer-range plan to integrate “The Net is about culture. You can’t have
Yahoo! search into Alibaba and expats working on it.”
Taobao. That would put Alibaba at
Zeng Ming,
the forefront of a trend toward inte-
president, Yahoo! China
grating search with e-commerce so
that buyers and sellers can search
and find exactly what they want on
the first try, a feature eBay also has.
“When we took over Yahoo! China, we knew the transaction would not
be easy. Major innovation takes time,” says Zeng. The first 12 months were

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