July 17, 2016
“The Chinese word for Hope was Haibo, which literally translates as “vast like the sea.” Popular slang for leaving a government job and entering the private sector at the time was to xia hai, or to “jump into the sea.”
July 17, 2016
“Jack wanted to get his feet wet as an entrepreneur, but he wasn’t quite ready to take the plunge and abandon his public sector job as a teacher. Entrepreneurship is such a well-established part of modern Chinese business and culture today that it is easy to forget how much things have changed in the last few decades.”
July 17, 2016
“ack’s friend Guo Guangchang, a man worth an estimated $7 billion before his unexplained disappearance for several days in December 2015, is the founder of investment firm Fosun. Guo survived the Cultural Revolution only by eating moldy, dried vegetables, later winning entry to Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, where he sold bread door-to-door in the dorms to make ends meet. Prior to his surprise absence in 2015, Fosun had been described by the Financial Times as the “Berkshire Hathaway of China.” Guo is an active supporter of Alibaba’s forays into logistics and finance.”
July 17, 2016
“Wenzhou lies two hundred miles southeast of Hangzhou. Hemmed in by mountains on one side and the East China Sea on the other, Wenzhou had always looked to trade, including tea exports, for its livelihood. But after 1949, its proximity to nationalist Taiwan became a liability. With Shanghai a three-hundred-mile ferry ride away, the city suffered from its isolation.
Wenzhou had little arable land and many unemployed or underemployed agricultural workers. But once Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms in 1978, the private sector started to boom. Wenzhou’s entrepreneurs, often working with family members, started out in light manufacturing. ”
July 17, 2016
“On sale inside are an estimated 1.7 million products, from toys to plastic flowers, jewelry to suitcases, clothing to home appliances, anything and everything that is Made in China. Without knowing it, a huge amount of what we consume in the West has passed through Yiwu. Even Christmas is “Made in Yiwu”: More than 60 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations are ”
July 17, 2016
“manufactured in the city. Although traders travel there overwhelmingly for its cheap prices, part of Yiwu’s attraction has been its supply of counterfeit products, for example handbags sold under almost-familiar-sounding names such as “Gussi.” The Financial Times journalist James Kynge traveled to the city in 2005 to research the problem of fake goods, only to find out that even hotels there were fake: He passed by not the Hyatt but the “Hiyat.”
July 17, 2016
“Yiwu attracts traders from all four corners of the world. The town is a favorite of traders from the Middle East, making Yiwu home to the fastest-growing Muslim community in China. With an estimated 35,000 Muslims in the city at any time—Chinese, South Asian, and Arab—Yiwu features dozens of Muslim restaurants and an ornate $4 million mosque featuring marble imported from Iran.”
July 17, 2016
Going to America
“Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the story goes, Jack met with the unnamed boss of Tonglu’s erstwhile U.S. partner. Jack quickly figured out, as The Economist related, that the “company he was investigating did not exist, that his host was a crook, and that he himself was in serious danger.” Jack has never named the boss, later described in local media only as a “bulky Californian.” But after refusing to take a bribe, Jack recalled he was locked in a beach house in Malibu, where his captor flashed a gun. He was then taken to Las Vegas, where he was kept in a form of house arrest in a hotel room on the top floor of a casino. Jack hasn’t repeated the details of any of this in recent years. His personal assistant, Chen Wei, has written that it is an episode that Jack prefers to forget. ”
July 17, 2016
“In any event, it was in Seattle that Jack first logged on to the Internet. He had heard about the Internet the previous year from a fellow English teacher in Hangzhou, called Bill Aho. Bill’s son-in-law was working on an Internet-related business, which Bill described. Jack recalled that it was Bill who first told him about the Internet, but that he “couldn’t explain it clearly either, it sounded very strange. . . . I couldn’t really understand it either.”
July 17, 2016
“Jack recalled his first online session: “My friend Stuart . . . said, ‘Jack, this is Internet. You can find whatever you can find through the Internet.’ I say really? So I searched the word beer. Very simple word. I don’t know why I searched for beer. But I found American beer, Germany [sic] beer and no Chinese beer. . . . I was curious, so I searched ‘China,’ and no ‘China,’ no data.”
July 17, 2016
“Jack later recalled to the journalist Charlie Rose: “It was so shocking, we launched it nine forty in the morning, twelve thirty I got a phone call from my friend. ‘Jack, you’ve got five emails.’ I said, ‘What is email?’” Three emails came from the United States, one from Japan, and one from Germany.”
July 17, 2016
“For his client in Tonglu, Jack returned to China empty-handed, with no deal to finance the proposed highway. But inside his suitcase he carried back with him a computer running the Intel 486 processor: “It was the most advanced in China at that time.”
Back in Hangzhou he set about building his concept of an online yellow pages. He named the business China Pages. In this, his second venture, he would dive headfirst into the entrepreneurial sea, leaving his teaching days behind.”
Notes From: Duncan Clark. “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.” iBooks.
