Soon after Jack Ma gave his keynote at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford University, the U.S. media was flooded with news that “Jack Ma is interested in buying Yahoo.” At a time when Yahoo!, one of the world’s first Internet pioneers, is struggling, a Chinese suitor sounds particularly alarming.
I was at the conference. Ma started his speech by assuring the audience that his appearance in the States has nothing to do with “getting to Yahoo.” But no one seemed to believe him. Most questions directed to him were in the vein of: “Do you plan to buy Yahoo?” “Have you approached Yahoo for a deal?” “How are you going to buy Yahoo and when?”
Jack Ma’s answer to these questions was, not surprisingly, politically correct: “I am very interested.”
People who speculate that Jack Ma’s aim is to acquire Yahoo! may have missed the point. His real intention may very well be to expand his Alibaba Group to the U. S. market. “I want to learn one thing here,” he said, “how we can help U.S. SMEs (small and medium enterprises). What value we can create between us, Amazon and eBay.”
That has always been Jack Ma’s ambition. People who have followed his story may know his famous line: “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River.” Now, the crocodile is testing the water in the ocean. Will the crocodile turn into a shark?
A few months back, I wrote an article “What Is the Chinese Dream” here. In that article, I recounted an incident in which someone asked me: “tell me in one sentence or two, what is the Chinese dream?” I stuttered, and then said, “This is a simple question, but there are no simple answers.”
Since then, I have been thinking about this question, “what is the Chinese Dream?” I feel a little foolish that, having written a book titled The Chinese Dream, I still cannot articulate what the Chinese dream is.
When I speak to an American audience, I often say “the Chinese Dream is like the American Dream” (and this has even offended some of my Chinese compatriots). Yes, the Chinese middle class wants what Americans have – owning a big house, driving a luxurious car, and living a comfortable life.
I was quoted on The Daily, a new media for iPad, about Starbucks and PriceWaterHouseCoopers massive expansions in China: “All the jobs in China: 2 companies looking to hire from Asian giant’s huge middle class”:
Yesterday, accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers trumpeted plans to expand massively in Asia by hiring 15,000 people in China and Hong Kong over the next five years.
In fact, the firm said it will bring thousands of jobs to Chinese college graduates in the next few months, according to Dow Jones.
Starbucks, meanwhile, announced its own blistering expansion, vowing to more than triple the number of its mermaid- themed coffee shops in China by 2015. It’s aiming to get up to 1,500 locations in four years.
And here is where I was quoted:
Still, that doesn’t mean everything is gravy in China. According to Helen Wang, consultant and author of “The Chinese Dream,” even with companies bringing new jobs, China’s middle ranks are as worried about the future as we are.
“They have extreme anxiety because they don’t know how long this window of opportunity will be open,” she told The Daily. “They worry when the optimism will be gone, and if they don’t make enough money, the government won’t take care of them like before. So they grab what they can grab.”
Read the full article “All the Jobs in China” here.
I was on KTSF Channel 26, a San Francisco Chinese TV station, on Sept. 5, to talk about my book The Chinese Dream and the impact of the Chinese middle class on the U.S. economy.
