Page 83 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

CHAPTER FIVE

Imagine MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Craigslist rolled into one company. That’s China’s
Oak Pacific Interactive. Now imagine Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng making a run
for your business with MySpace China. That’s the card Joe Chen is playing at his social net-
working consortium with a public listing in the offing.

Oak Pacific
Interactive—
Web 2.0 on Steroids

oe Chen sends his driver to pick
Jme up from the Swissôtel where
I’m staying in Beijing. He tells me to
keep an eye out for a “Texas police
cruiser.” A beige-colored, plush-
looking Lincoln Mercury Grand Mar-
que pulls up, and I remind myself to
ask Chen what he meant as we drive
along a side road to avoid the clogged
highways in the capital city’s central
Chaoyang business district.
It’s a bright, sunny November day with a slight chill in the air: one of the
few good seasons to be in the too-hot-and-humid or too-cold-and-dry climate
of Beijing. Arriving at the entrance of a modern office building called China
Life Tower that could as easily be in Chicago, I take the elevator up 18 stories
to meet Chen. A colorful character with a maverick’s personality, Chen is a
grand dreamer and Internet pioneer who has mesmerized me with captivating
yarns that blend philosophy, folktales, and common sense.
His rise from flipping burgers at Wendy’s in Wilmington, Delaware, to
earning a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an

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