Synopsis/Summary/Review of Alibaba - The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the creation of the World's Biggest Online Marketplace

Chapter 1

Put Up Your Fists!

Jack Ma was born on September 10, 1964, into a family that lived on the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou. Ma legend has it that his family was common and ordinary, but ordinary families do not live on the shores of West Lake. Ma’s mother and father spent their lives as professional performers of ping tan, a traditional style of storytelling and ballad singing performed in Suzhou, in southern China.
Ma was not the kind of child who liked to talk much or have anything to do with achievement. Like many boys his age, he was regarded as a rebel: stubborn, naughty, incorrigible,the kind of boy who had to be disciplined repeatedly, but even that discipline did not change him. Much of this striking out against others may have had to do with his status as a social out￾cast. The Cultural Revolution in China began shortly after Ma was born, and he grew up in an environment of extreme social tension.

Mathematics vs. English

People say that if you want to change the world, you should first change yourself. Ma seems to have done the opposite: he changed the world but preserved himself much as he was. He started out small and unremarkable, which he remains, and while he initially struggled with math, he was a whiz in English—and this is still true today.
Different from other children from the beginning, he was not particularly charming or adorable, and he got terrible marks, generally failing math. The strange thing was that he had unbelievably fluent English: in the 1970s and 1980s, when math and engineering trumped humanities, this was not the way teachers thought things should be. In middle school, he was fortunate to have a likeable young woman as his geography teacher. Once she told a story that benefited Ma for years to come, to the point that he believes it actually changed his whole life.

The story was quite simple. One day, the teacher was walking along the shore of West Lake and some foreigners asked her to tell them about Chinese geography. Her English was good enough that she could respond intelligently. “You all have to study geography,” she told the students, “but even more important is for you to study English. For when foreigners ask you something and you can’t answer them, you will make all Chinese people lose face.”Ma went home to pick up some money, and on the very same day spent six mao, around two U.S. dollars at the time, to buy a radio. He used this to listen to the English broadcast every day.

Ma Goes to College

Jack Ma took the college entrance examination three times and failed the first two. The first time Ma took the college exam, he got a mark that signified total defeat. Head hanging down, he went to work as a hired laborer. One day, Ma was hired to help copy documents at an institution called the Zhejiang Dance Troupe Association. Here, he got hold of a book called Life, by the author Lu Yao. It so influenced Ma that it changed his thinking in short order and helped guide the future course of his life.

Now Ma decided that he would try again to get into college. He began preparing a second time for the exam. China’s college entrance exams were given once a year.  As an indication of how hard it was to get into college, the following statistics from the Ministry of Education are illustrative: 6.1 million people registered for the exam in 1978, 5.8 million people took it, and of these millions, a total of 402,000 people were admitted to institutions of higher education. So it is not surprising that many excellent candidates were rejected including Jack Ma.

For the next year, Ma worked days and studied at night, and spent every Sunday in the library at Zhejiang University. Three days before the third exam, one of Ma’s professors, Professor Yu, said to him in a somewhat discouraging way, “Ma Yun, your math is dreadful. If you pass this time, I will start writing my name upside down.” This had the salutary effect of making Jack Ma angry, but it added to his determination to actually pass math; it was something he remembered for many years.
He took the exam for the third time, and this time he passed. On the morning of the exam, he had chanted aloud the ten basic mathematical formulas, and during the exam he applied them, one by one. Coming out of the exam, he compared answers with his classmates and knew that he definitely had come up to the mark. This time, his math grade was 79—not high, but enough to squeak through.

College and a Dream

Both the English language and the idea of teaching fit him perfectly. Spoken English was his strong suit, and he took to college as a fish takes to water. With the simple opportunity to go to college, Ma began his quest for the outstanding in life. From the day he entered college, fate began to smile upon him. He found the classes easy and realized that he did not need to spend all his time studying. As a result, he began to involve himself in the student union and was soon elected its president. Later, he was elected president of the entire League of Student Unions of Hangzhou. To a student from the lower tier of colleges, this was something of a miracle.

When Ma graduated, he was the only one among five hundred graduates of the ben ke program to be placed as a teacher in a higher institution. The others were placed in middle or high schools. He was appointed to teach at the Hangzhou Electronics Technology College. There he spent the next five years, conscientiously teaching English to young people. He would not have lasted that long had he not made a promise to one of his mentors, an older man who came to visit him early in his career. This leader from a local institute knew that Ma, restless and ambitious, might be inclined to head out on his own, as many of his peers were doing. Jack Ma felt that commitments were binding. He took to heart the request by his elder and promised he would stay for five years, and he did.