Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

First Connection
Finally, in the fall of 1995, Zhejiang Telecom started to provide Internet access
services in Hangzhou. By the end of the year there were only 204 Internet users
in the whole province. But Jack was among them and was finally able to load a
website in front of his first client, the Lakeview Hotel, on the 486 computer he’d
brought back from Seattle in his suitcase. “It took three and a half hours to
download the front page. . . . I was so excited.”
Starting with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, China experienced an
entrepreneurial explosion that began to replace Marx with the market, becoming
a socialist country “with Chinese characteristics.” But this did not mean the
Communist Party was going to ease up on a central pillar of its rule, the control
of information. China has a long tradition of controlling information, but
especially so under the rule of the Communist Party. It is surprising, therefore,
that the country ever connected to the Internet at all. The fact that it did
illustrates the Chinese government’s often contradictory desires to maintain
control while simultaneously unlocking greater economic opportunities.
Without the Internet, Jack’s vision of connecting entrepreneurs with global
markets would have never been realized.
On September 14, 1987, while Jack was still a university student, the very
first email from China was sent by Professor Qian Tianbai at Peking University
to Karlsruhe University in what was then West Germany. The email, in English
and German, read, “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the
world.” The email was sent at 300 bits per second (bps), an impossibly slow
connection by today’s typical consumer broadband speeds measured by the tens
or hundreds of millions of bps. It would be another seven years before China
was connected to the Internet proper.
While the Chinese government was thinking about what to do about the
Internet—wrestling with issues of ideology, control, and infrastructure—the U.S.
government was pondering the wisdom of bringing a communist country online.
In the end, it was not politicians but scientists,
2
on both sides of the Pacific, who
took the lead. After years of efforts, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, connected
3
 with the Institute of High Energy
Physics (IHEP), 5,800 miles away in Beijing.
While this was just a connection between two institutions, other scientists
wanted to set up their own links. Connecting SLAC-IHEP to the Internet was a
much easier solution than stringing up new links from other locations in the

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United States to IHEP. As Dr. Les Cottrell at SLAC recalled, “We explored this
only to find out that the DOD [Department of Defense], the DOE [Department of
Energy], the State Department all were very concerned about this.” But
eventually the U.S. government agreed, “They said okay, you can do this as long
as you tell everybody who is on the Internet that China’s coming on.”
Les wasn’t quite sure how to “tell everybody” on the Internet but eventually
it was agreed that he would send an email to a particular distribution list. On
May 17, 1994, the first real Internet connection to China was established.
Although IHEP was host to China’s first Web pages, the Internet soon
became more than a privilege reserved for particle physicists.
At the same time as this first connection was being established, China was
on the verge of a massive expansion in its communications infrastructure, a
policy it called “informatization” (
xinxihua
). China’s communist rulers had
watched the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 with alarm, attributing it in