今年的TIME的Person of the Year评选结果已经诞生,是The Ebola Fighters.

Doctors who wouldn’t quit even as their colleagues fell ill and died; nurses comforting patients while standing in slurries of mud, vomit and feces.

今天与你分享的是落选者(Runner-up)之一的马云, 我们的年度人物. 文章以 Jack Ma, The Capitalist讲述了阿里巴巴帝国之路, 以及马云的雄心和智慧.

这张配图把马云画的像毛主席, 下巴还点了痣. 插图作者Tracie Ching解释说:“I knew I would represent him as a businessman but wanted to ensure his humility and vibrancy came across as well”. 你画成这样,干脆直接说他是五毛党不就得了?

When the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange rang out on Sept. 19, it marked the biggest IPO the world had ever seen — bigger than Facebook’s or General Motors’. This new Wall Street juggernaut, based 7,000 miles away in Hangzhou, China, is Alibaba. Its founder and chairman, 50-year-old Jack Ma, is now challenging some of the most powerful companies on the Internet, including Amazon, eBay and PayPal. And he is doing so by melding Western entrepreneurship with a canny—and sometimes controversial—sense of how to profit in the world’s most populous nation.

Melding Western entrepreneurship with a canny/controversial sense of how to profit in China. 西方的模式,东方的智慧.

As with so many Chinese enterprises, comprehending the enormity of Ma’s creation requires thinking on a different scale. Alibaba is used by more than a third of China—some 500 million people—making it easily one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world. Those customers come to Alibaba to shop in the electronic malls it operates, where some 8.5 million merchants, large and small, ply their goods.

例如马云在很多访谈中提到的, “The e-commerce in rich countries like U.S. is just the dessert; In China it’s the main course”.

Increasingly, Chinese pay for those goods—and conduct all kinds of other transactions—using Alipay, a PayPal-like service affiliated with Alibaba that is now one of China’s most important financial entities. In fiscal year 2014, Alibaba generated $8.5 billion in revenue, nearly half of it profit. And Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO made Ma one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

如果用一句话来介绍阿里巴巴的话或许应该是: paypal(Alipay) + Amazon (Tmall) + Ebay (taboo) + MORE.

But even those figures obscure the significance of Alibaba’s rise and the extent to which it has been propelled by Ma’s deft understanding of how to do business in his homeland. Since it began in 1999 by linking Chinese manufacturers with foreign and domestic buyers, Alibaba has played a crucial role in China’s digital opening to the West. Having previously worked in the Ministry of Trade, Ma was able to ensure support from the Communist Party government and take on bigger competitors in China’s private sector. His innovations were not just technical but also diplomatic and strategic.

Ma’s deft understanding of how to do business in his homeland propelled Alibaba’s rise. 看得懂形式听的懂话, 在中国的地盘就得按中国的规矩来. 本科的时候在商务英语中有一章是讲 “文化”, 老师以李开复的自传为引子讲企业文化的重要性。书中有一段李开复先生说道: “1999 年之前,我的回答总是 :我是一个多文化背景的科学家 ,因此我能够理解两种文化的不同。我对这一点深信不疑,但是,回到中国后,我才发现,自己对这 一点其实过于自信了。”

Like many Chinese, Ma comes from almost nothing: he is the son of traditional storytelling performers who taught himself English by tagging alongside tourists at a local hotel. Later he became a teacher and traveled to the U.S. Searching the World Wide Web for information on Chinese beer and coming up dry, he vowed to bring China online, at a time when only 1% of the population was on the web.

A few years later, Ma started Alibaba in his apartment with 17 friends. His first employee was his wife, who now looks after the couple’s two children. Zhang Yin has claimed that she fell for Ma despite his unexceptional looks because he had the capacity to do things other men couldn’t. Friends have also been drawn to that ambition. “Jack had the biggest dreams of anyone I’ve ever known,” says Porter Erisman, an American adman who left his job at Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing to work for Ma early on. “You’d come up with a goal, and he’d immediately ask you to triple it.”

成功或许无法复制, 但是成功人士品质和习惯是值得学习的.

A consummate spinner of corporate narrative, Ma is full of Shaolin-monk-style sound bites. “eBay is a shark in the ocean. We are a crocodile in the Yangtze,” he famously proclaimed. “If we fight in the ocean, we will lose. But if we fight in the river, we will win.” Ma claims to base his management technique on Chinese martial-arts teachings, encouraging employees to adopt nicknames from kung fu novels. (His own, Feng Qingyang, is a nod to an aggressive master swordsman.)

企业文化是公司领导者的管理哲学.他也首创了互联网大会的“华山论剑”, 甚是精彩.

Like the best martial artists, he is capable of turning weakness into strength. In the years before Alibaba went public, for instance, Ma leveraged his freedom from Wall Street pressure on quarterly earnings to keep his site free for a long time, building market share. Obliged to show shareholders progress on profit margins, eBay watched as Alibaba scooped up business.

Ma became more enmeshed with Silicon Valley in 2005. That’s when Yahoo, run by founder Jerry Yang at the time, decided to buy a large stake in Alibaba for $1 billion. Yang, who first met Ma at the Trade Ministry, told Time that he remembered him as “highly curious about the Internet industry and obviously very entrepreneurially minded.” Yahoo wanted a piece of Alibaba because of its market position in China, but also because of Ma.

阿里巴巴和雅虎.

The marriage fell apart, though, as Ma tangled with Yahoo’s new management. As Alibaba’s market share took off, it became clear that he’d given away too much of his company for far too little. “If he had waited even a year, Jack would have gotten a lot more,” says Gary Rieschel, a venture capitalist who ran the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s investments in Asia outside of Japan, including Alibaba, from 2000 to 2009. He eventually gathered together a group including local princeling investors close to the party elite to buy out half of Yahoo’s stake.

阿里巴巴，雅虎，软银. 当初孙正义也说过是因为马云才做出让步/伸出援手. 孙正义当初投资杨致远的情景和投资马云的情景非常相似, 他相信他的感觉不会看错人。

Those relationships are a reminder that Ma couldn’t have produced his achievements without Beijing’s approval. His ties to the party apparatus are a key advantage over foreign rivals, which don’t compete on the same playing field in China’s closed Internet ecosystem. Alibaba operates not only in retail but also in heavily state-dominated and -protected areas like finance. (When Alibaba started offering money-market accounts, $90 billion poured in.)

马云总说: “I’m like a blind man riding on the back of a blind tiger”. 社会主义的动物园为你保驾护航.

That’s good not only for Ma and Alibaba but also for the Communist Party. China has come under increasing criticism for its closed financial sector, which holds the private savings of citizens in state-owned banks at minuscule interest levels, then taps that money for state-run projects—many of which have floundered as China’s growth has slowed. Allowing someone like Ma to offer even a slightly better interest rate without real reform helps placate ordinary citizens in a nation where the ruling elite is mindful of the potential for social unrest.

什么叫 “先让一部分人富起来”? 看得懂形式，听的懂话。

Yet Ma’s skill in co-opting government support has exacted a price, particularly as he seeks both capital and customers on a global stage. He came under media fire, for example, for a 2013 interview with the South China Morning Post in which he appeared to suggest that the government’s actions in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were justified. Ma’s media representative says the reporting was incorrect and the journalist “misunderstood” his statement. Ma has also said he thought a controversial decision a decade ago by Yahoo to turn over personal information about a Chinese journalist to the Chinese government was justified because “local laws must be obeyed.”

exact a price指的是 has a very bad effect on a person or on a situation.

因雅虎泄漏email信息给政府，中国记者师涛2005年被控以泄漏国家机密罪被判10年有期徒刑. 雅虎的杨致远给他家人道歉，大概说了段: “我们想做生意，不得不低头”.

Those forays into seemingly authoritarian views—and a circumscribed approach to shareholder rights—set him apart from some of his counterparts in Silicon Valley. “The thing you have to remember about Jack Ma is that he is a proxy for a certain set of party interests. If the ruling cadres in Beijing didn’t want Alibaba to exist, it wouldn’t,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang, a co-founder of J Capital Research, an independent financial-research firm specializing in China.

Jack Ma is the a proxy for a certain set of party interests. 硅谷的企业家和我们的企业家的区别就是: 硅谷的大佬们会影响美国的政治, 例如大选, 法律决策中, 政府要依靠这些亿万富翁们. 在中国恰恰是相反的, 看看这段时间的赵本山就懂了.

Apart from the issue of Alibaba’s independence from Beijing, a more fundamental question looms: Can Ma replicate his Chinese success elsewhere? While it’s unlikely that many Americans or Europeans will do their Christmas shopping on one of Alibaba’s websites anytime soon, Ma is almost certain to use some of his cash hoard to start acquiring Western media and entertainment properties.

上市之后的阿里巴巴又是新的开始了.阿里巴巴的文化与区域文化如何抗衡/中和? 正如很多报道中都用Goliath这个词来形容阿里巴巴: 高大威猛不可一世的巨人大哥, 在和少年单挑的时候被砍了头.

Alibaba will also try to grab the dominant market position in other emerging economies like Brazil, India and Russia. Back in China, Alibaba is planning to launch a Chinese version of Netflix and has announced expansions into consumer credit, insurance and mobile apps.

That puts Hangzhou’s homegrown giant in competition with basically all the U.S. Internet heavyweights. Ma says he want to build not an empire but rather an ecosystem, which is less likely to be toppled. Either way, he isn’t looking to bide his time or hide his brilliance, as an old Deng Xiaoping proverb recommends.

“hide the brilliance and bide the time” 可以翻译成 “韬光养晦”

邓爷爷说过: “我们再韬光养晦地干些年，才能真正形成一个较大的政治力量，中国在国际上发言的分量就会不同.”

马云说不.

@英语学习笔记 | TIME

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