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Chapter Five: China Is Coming On
1
. One of Jack’s early cards lists him as “marketing director.”
2
. Starting in the late 1980s, Dr. Walter Toki at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center played an instrumental role, after he reached out to the
Chinese-born American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate T. D. Lee about
establishing an Internet connection with scientists in China.
3
. Via a satellite uplink from an AT&T ground station at Point Reyes,
California.
4
. In its first edition.
5
. Called the “Golden Dove Project.”
6
. John Nathan Hosteller, a Republican member of the House of
Representatives from Indiana, and Democratic senator Bill Bradley of New
Jersey.
7
. The
Qianjiang Evening News.
8
. A sample listing from the site illustrates its simple nature: “Hydrofluoric
acid with different concentrations packed in plastic drums of 25kgs”
accompanied by the contact information for the Ningbo Material General
Corporation.
9
. Including a
Hangzhou Daily
article that appeared on October 18, 1996.
Chapter Six: Bubble and Birth
1
. To
The Economist
.
2
. CIECC had been established two years earlier to pursue “EDI”
(Electronic Data Interchange) projects for MOFTEC.
3
. She would later become chair, CEO, and Communist Party secretary of
Chinese state-owned telecom manufacturer Putian. There she would
actively promote China’s own standard for 3G mobile telephony, called
TD-SCDMA, which failed to gain market acceptance.
4
. Jasmine Zhang from Yinghaiwei asserts that Jack chose the name
because it sounded like Ariba.com, another high-profile e-commerce
website at the time.
5
. Both domain names were registered under Jack Ma’s mother, Cui
Wencai. On August 17, 1999, Cui transferred the ownership to Alibaba Ltd.
6
. Alibaba.com was launched in April 1999, replacing the earlier
alibabaonline.com and alibabaonline.com sites that had gone online in
January. The company would later describe the site as a “trial” when
unveiling an upgraded site at a formal launch ceremony the following
October.
7
. At China Pages, Jack had been joined by his wife, Cathy, Toto Sun (Sun
Tongyu), Wu Yongming, James Sheng (Sheng Yifei), Ma Changwei, Lou
Wensheng, and Simon Xie (Xie Shihuang), who had met Jack when
working for Dife. Others from Hangzhou who had joined him in Beijing
included Lucy Peng (Peng Lei, who quit her job as a teacher in Hangzhou
when she married Toto Sun), Han Min, Jane Jiang (Jiang Fang), Trudy Dai
(Dai Shan), and Zhou Yuehong.
8
. For forty hours of access from ChinaNet.
9
. Nearly all of the advertisers were technology firms, such as Intel, IBM,
Compaq, Microsoft, Legend, and Founder.
10
. Or “New Wave” (
xin lang
in Chinese).
11
. Jack Hong, Benjamin Tsiang, and Hurst Lin. Sinanet had some users in
Taiwan but struggled to make headway in China, and was blocked at times
by the Chinese government.
12
. From Dow Jones, Intel, and Morningside, an affiliate of the Hong Kong
property developer Hang Lung run by Gerald Chen.
13
. Only Raymond Lei had studied overseas, at Purdue University in Indiana,
where he received a master’s degree in computer science.
14
.
Xiao Ao Jiang Hu
in Chinese.
15
. According to Chen Xiaoping, a professor at the University of Washington in
Seattle.
16
. Cai Chongxin, or in Taiwanese romanization, Tsai Chung-Hsin.
17
. His father, Dr. Paul Tsai, is the founder of the Tsar & Tsai Law Firm, whose
origins in 1965 make it one of the oldest partnership law firms in Taiwan.
18
. Alumni include the playwright Thornton Wilder (
Our Town
), the former
CEO of Walt Disney Michael Eisner, the singer Huey Lewis, former White
House press secretary Jay Carney, and most recently Song Andong, the first
Chinese player drafted by the NHL. Joe is now a trustee of the school.
19
. His ancestral home was Huzhou, near Hangzhou.
20
. In 1996, Joe married Clara Wu, a Stanford-and Harvard-educated
professional born to Taiwanese parents in Kansas.
21
. Galeazzo Scarampi, chief executive of Investor Asia Ltd.
22
. As one shareholder, Raymond Lei, had left the company the eighteenth slot
was available for him. Eighteen is a lucky number in China, but Joe decided
to leave it vacant, and he became employee No. 19. “Nineteen has always
been my lucky number. My lacrosse jersey number was nineteen. I was
born on January nineteenth.”
23
. A Cayman Islands company registered in June 1999 called Alibaba Group
Holding Limited.
24
. Joel Kellman at Fenwick & West helped set up some meetings.
25
. The name “8848” was chosen because it represented the height of Mount
Everest in meters.
26
. Touting the first foreign-held license to operate Internet services in China.
27
. He also wrote the seminal 2004 article, which later became a book, about
the “long tail” as it applies to retailing online.
28
. After receiving an MBA from Wharton, Yip had built up and sold a systems
integration company in the United States before moving to Hong Kong and
joining CIC.
29
. These had been registered by a Hong Kong–born, UCLA computer science
graduate named James Chu.
30
. Despite Xinhua’s backing, his site china.com was repeatedly blocked in
China by rival agencies.
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