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The Great Internet of China, 20 Years On Looking back on how choice and trust have shaped the country’s Internet economy By MIN CHEN
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ast August, the Chinese government announced that the number of Internet users in the country had reached a mind-boggling 802 million, which is more than the combined populations of the United States, Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil (CNNIC). Of these users, more than 29 million gained Internet access for the first time in the second half of 2018 (CNNIC). The tale of China’s Internet economy is akin to seemingly every other story about the country since the turn of the Millennium, where speed and scale appear to be of the essence. While it may be tempting to attribute this dizzying growth to China’s rivalry with the West, academics, analysts, investors, and the like agree that such a conclusion is overly simplistic when making sense of its digital transformation. One such authority is SOSV General Partner William Bao Bean; with over two decades of experience in the space, he is frequently cited as one of the leading non-local authorities on the Chinese Internet economy. He points to the country’s developmental path and cultural perceptions about trust and choice for creating an environment that’s conducive to astronomical rates of digitization. Bean began his career as an equity research analyst, where he was ranked as the number one stock picker in tech, media, and telecom by Reuters Starmine in 2006. He also worked on Alibaba, Kingsoft, and eLong’s international initial public offerings (IPOs) before moving to the investment-side with SoftBank Group, and later, Singtel Innov8. He now manages two of SOSV’s accel-
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JUMPSTART MAGAZINE
July 2019
The American Internet leaders have run their playbook; it’s a good playbook, and it worked in every single market in the world.
erators: MOX–a mobile-only accelerator focusing on emerging markets–and China’s first and longest-running accelerator, Chinaccelerator. Having witnessed China’s Internet economy grow from nascency to its globally dominant position, Bean acknowledges that “the only constant is change” when it comes to characterizing the landscape.
Choice and trust
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he inception of the Chinese Internet during the late 1990s was defined by ‘copies’ of U.S. companies of the early Internet era. Founded in 1996, web portal company Sohu was much like Yahoo. Tencent came on the scene in 1998 and introduced their take on AIM Instant Messenger, QQ, in 1999. Alibaba was founded the same year, going on to launch Taobao, ‘China’s Amazon,’ in 2003. Baidu, the country’s equivalent of Google, was founded in 2000. Phase two, beginning around the early-2000s, was a crucial growth stage for the Internet economy. Employees from the first generation of tech companies
