Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

part to the yawning technological gap that had opened up with the United States.
At the beginning of 1994 China had only 27 million phone lines and 640,000
cell phones for a population of 1.2 billion. The early users of cell phones were
either government officials or the 
getihu
who could afford to shell out $2,000 to
buy one, with others making do with pagers.
The Chinese government resolved to change this, seeing an improvement in
telecommunications as a tangible improvement they could deliver in the lives of
the masses. Just as King Henry IV of France cemented his legitimacy by putting
a chicken on every dinner table on a Sunday, with 
xinxihua
the Chinese
Communist Party began to roll out phone lines, then cell phones, then broadband
connections to hundreds of millions of people.
In 1993, Vice Premier Zhu Rongji launched the Golden Bridge Project to
create an information and communications network spanning the whole country.
In 1994, the government ended the monopoly of telecom services held by the
Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). To inject some competition
into the market, a second carrier, called China Unicom, was established. Other
countries, starting with the United Kingdom, had used private capital to finance
the competitors taking on state-owned telecom incumbents. China, obsessed
with control of information, could not contemplate this—twenty years on it still
hasn’t—and opted instead to launch China Unicom as a new state-owned
enterprise, backed by three other ministries and a number of other state-owned
enterprises, effectively pitting one government department against a coalition of
other departments in a uniquely Chinese approach to telecom deregulation.
Spurred into action by the loss of its monopoly, the new minister of MPT,
Wu Jichuan, responded with massive new investment in telecom infrastructure.

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During a visit by U.S. secretary of commerce Ron Brown to Beijing shortly
after the first SLAC-IHEP Internet connection was established, China signed an
agreement with Sprint to set up a new Internet connection linking Beijing and
Shanghai with the United States. This was the beginning of the “ChinaNet”
Internet service provider link that would allow members of the public, including
Jack, to dial up to the Internet in China for the first time.