Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

From Student to Teacher
If you are one in a million in China, you’re one of 1,300 people.
—Bill Gates

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Barrow Boy
Jack Ma was born on September 10, 1964, the Year of the Dragon, in Hangzhou,
a city one hundred miles to the southwest of Shanghai. His parents named him
“Yun,” meaning “cloud.” His surname, “Ma,” is the same as the Chinese word
for horse.
Jack’s mother, Cui Wencai, worked on a factory production line. His father,
Ma Laifa, worked as a photographer at the Hangzhou Photography Agency. But
both share a passion for 
pingtan,
a form of Chinese folk art performance that
involves the singing of ballads and comedic routines punctuated by the sound of
wooden clappers. Exposure to the art form may help explain Jack’s abilities as a
communicator. 
Pingtan
no doubt provided Jack’s parents a welcome escape
from the hardscrabble life of postrevolutionary China, a window to a richer and
more colorful past.
A future icon of Chinese entrepreneurship, Jack came into the world at a
time when private enterprise had almost been completely extinguished. Ninety
percent of industrial production had been taken into the hands of the state. China
was alone in the world, struggling to recover from the Great Leap Forward.
Faced with the starvation of millions across the country, Mao Zedong had been
forced to make a “self-criticism” and was relegated to the margins of power.
Deng Xiaoping was among those tasked with reversing the most damaging
aspects of collectivization, a foreshadowing of the pivotal role he would play in
unleashing the country’s economic miracle, which, two decades later, would
provide the opening for Jack’s entrepreneurial career.
But when Jack was two, Mao was back in power and China was subjected
to the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Mao launched an attack on the “Four
Olds”—old customs, culture, habits, and ideas—and Red Guards marched to
destroy cultural sites and antiquities, including in Hangzhou, where they
attacked and badly damaged the tomb of Yue Fei, a famous Song dynasty
general. But even the Red Guards were not immune to the charms of the city,
taking breaks from their violence with boat trips on West Lake. Mao himself
developed a strong attachment to Hangzhou, visiting it on more than forty
occasions and staying up to seven months at a time. He enjoyed performances of
pingtan
. Despite Mao’s fondness for the art form in private, old customs like
pingtan
became a target of the Red Guards and its practitioners were denounced.
Jack’s family was at risk of persecution, particularly as his grandfather had been
a local official
1
under the Nationalist (KMT) government. During the Cultural

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Revolution Jack was taunted by his classmates, although fortunately the family
was not broken up like many were at the time.
In February 1972, President Nixon traveled to Hangzhou as part of his
historic visit to China to meet Mao. Nixon was accompanied on the trip by
almost one hundred reporters, including Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Ted
Koppel, and Barbara Walters, their live broadcasts generating support for the
normalization of relations with China, leading eventually to cities like Hangzhou
reemerging as a destination for foreign tourists.
As a boy, Jack fell in love with the English language and literature,