China Emerging_ 1978-2008 - Xiao-bo , Wu [65]
In the summer of 2006, the film Still Life by the young film director, Jia Zhang-ke, won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival. Its Chinese name means “The Nice Men at the Three Gorges.” The footage was filmed in Fengjie County near Chongqing, which has witnessed over two thousand years of history. Within five months of filming, Jia discovered that his camera could not keep up with the changing scene. An old tower in the distance which he saw when he started filming had disappeared by the time he returned from a trip to Beijing. Everything within the circumference of his lens had changed—buildings, landscape, and daily life.
Workers retrieving steel beams from a demolished building.
Production line at the Volkswagen plant, Shanghai.
A worker in a shipyard in Dalian, Liaoning (May 2007).
The bestseller The World is Flat has been popular in China and has become a common topic of conversation. In this book, the author declares that events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Internet, and open-source activities have flattened the global, political, economic, and cultural scene, thereby enabling people who previously had no access to power and wealth to directly participate now in making money and creating public policy. All they need is patience, some creativity, and broadband access.
The Americans and the Chinese might differ in their reading of this evaluation of the world. Americans might consider that they are in the process of flattening the world. On the other hand, many Chinese firmly believe that they are in the process of moving from the edges toward the center of a world that has already largely been “crushed flat.”
Car exhibition (Xi’an, 2008).
Internet Economics
O
n November 6, 2007, a company called Alibaba was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its helmsman, Ma Yun, or Jack Ma, is known for his mischievous smile and his penchant for shocking public sensibilities. Ma heads an Internet services company that
provides a foreign trade platform to six million small- and mediumsized enterprises. The Hong Kong listing was highly successful. Twelve years earlier, Ma had been a foreign language teacher in a small college in Hangzhou when, as the saying goes in China, he began to “draw a tiger by looking at a cat” and designed a Chinese language webpage.
Alibaba is an unimaginable fairytale to many people. From the shares allotted to foreign investors, Alibaba received subscriptions of US$180 billion since the offering was approximately 186 times oversubscribed. This broke all records at the Hong Kong exchange. The wild scene made TheEconomist wonder, “Is Alibaba the start of a China.com bubble?”
Let us step back in time to a scene in the winter of 1995. A sign displayed on the street in Beijing’s Zhongguancun read: “How far is China from the Information Highway? Go 1,500 meters to the north.” At the time, many people thought this was a road sign that had infuriated the confused policemen. Later the road sign was considered as a kind of milestone in the development of the Internet in China. Alibaba’s listing in Hong Kong became another milestone: The road in between had taken merely twelve years.
Jack Ma motivating his staff.
Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce company, Alibaba, appears on the cover of the Forbesmagazine (July 24, 2000). At the time, his small company was still operating out of an apartment in Hangzhou.
That road was paved with the efforts of a number of superlative entrepreneurs. In 1997, three youngsters appeared together in China to declare that the founding year of China’s Internet had arrived. They were Ding Lei, Wang Zhi-dong, and Zhang Chao-yang.
Ding Lei, or William Ding, founded a company called NetEase in Guangzhou, Guangdong. His slogan was, “network everyone’s powers,” and at the beginning, his plan was very simple. If people wanted to use the Internet