Review: Alibaba founder Jack Ma opens doors in China
— -- Born in 1964, Ma Yun — better known in the Northern Hemisphere as Jack Ma — showed little promise as a child in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Physically scrawny, an indifferent student and reared during the disorienting Cultural Revolution, Ma failed college entrance examinations twice. Finally, at age 20, he won entrance into Hangzhou Normal College, a poorly rated institution.
During college, Ma exhibited one outstanding talent — his ability to learn English to the point of fluency. As a result, after graduation, Ma taught English for five years at an electronics technology college in his hometown. Then, showing a hint of the entrepreneurial talent to come, he started a translation agency. That led to a business trip to the United States in 1995, authorized by the Chinese government. What Ma did while in the United States is the elemental beginning of a meteoric rise to wealth and fame.
Telling the saga of how Ma invented what can more or less accurately be labeled "China's eBay" are Liu Shiying, a Chinese journalist/media consultant, in collaboration with Martha Avery, who has a Wharton School master's degree in business administration, and who speaks Japanese and Chinese. In English, the enterprise founded by Ma is rendered alibaba.com, and perhaps is best described as a business-to-business website, where just about any product can be sold or purchased.
It is difficult to discern from the book whether Ma cooperated with the co-authors a little bit, a great deal or somewhere in between. At times, Shiying and Avery practice hagiography. At other times, they seem mildly critical of Ma. The phrasing of the book, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, adds to the lack of clarity about the authors' relationships to Ma, because the English constructions range from stilted to bizarre.
Still, for readers willing to battle through the book's shortcomings, Ma's rise is worth digesting. How he progressed quickly from ignorance of the Internet to mastery of the new technology — to overcoming official Chinese resistance — will help American readers realize how surreal establishing capitalism in a quasi-Communist nation can feel.
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