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Quote:He has trounced eBay, set up a rival to PayPal and not only taken over Yahoo's operations in China but been given a billion dollars for the privilege. But he is perhaps best known as the leading preacher of the internet business gospel - and how it is changing China...

Overseas critics accuse Ma of being so focussed on business and so dewy-eyed about the internet that he is more willing to collude with the censors than any of his rivals. But for millions of young Chinese, Ma is as much of a hero as kung fu stars, rock singers or actors.

Ask someone under the age of 30 about their ambition and the chances are they will reply "to start my own business". Bestseller lists are dominated by management guides. One of the most popular TV programmes of the past year was Win In China, which has a similar format to The Apprentice. Ma, of course, was a star of the show...

Quote:Mr Ma's rock-star status reflects how he has enabled thousands of his countrymen to become their own bosses, build businesses and make money—a dream ingrained in Chinese culture but repressed by decades of Communist antipathy to private enterprise. Alibaba has become the world's largest online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, Asia's most popular online auction site and, as a result of its acquisition of Yahoo! China, the 12th most popular website in the world. That combination makes Alibaba one of the few credible challengers to the global online elite of Google, eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.

Alibaba is far from being just a Chinese knock-off of these American giants. Indeed, they have borrowed ideas from him. “Jack is not just a Chinese visionary, but a global one. Western companies are taking pages from the Alibaba book,” says Bob Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns. At Alibaba's heart sit two B2B websites (alibaba.com and china.alibaba.com), one a marketplace for firms from across the world to trade in English, the other a domestic Chinese service. Rival e-commerce outfits, such as America's Ariba and Commerce One, sought to cut multinationals' procurement costs. In contrast, Alibaba's intention was to build markets for China's vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises, which make everything from cufflinks to motorcycles, by allowing them to trade with each other and linking them to global supply chains. Today, traders in America buy from Alibaba and resell on eBay.