一位“中国通”眼中的马云 China’s virtual reality

In 1999, Duncan Clark gained bragging rights that any long-time China hand would relish today: the former Morgan Stanley investment banker turned business consultant was given the chance to visit the lakeside apartment of Jack Ma.

1999年，邓肯•克拉克(Duncan Clark)得到了任何一位资深“中国通”在今天都会渴望得到的炫耀资本：这位由摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)前投行家转行的商业顾问有机会参观马云(Jack Ma)坐落在湖畔的公寓。

The flat was the nucleus of a new company that Ma had named Alibaba a few months before, saying he wanted to sell things online in China. To some this seemed a laughable prospect in a country that then had minuscule internet penetration. But if Alibaba was to fail, it would not be for want of trying: you could “count the number of cofounders by the toothbrushes jammed into mugs on a shelf”, Clark writes of the company’s early years. And ultimately, the days and nights spent coding, calling and hustling would be rewarded in 2014 with a $25bn initial public offering, the biggest of all time.

马云在数月前刚创办的新公司阿里巴巴(Alibaba)将从这座公寓起步——马云说他想在中国开展在网上销售商品的业务。在一些人看来，这简直可笑，因为当时在中国还没有多少人使用互联网。但是，如果阿里巴巴失败了，也绝不会是因为没有去尝试——克拉克在叙述该公司早年历史时这样写道：数一数架子上塞满马克杯的牙刷的数量，你就知道这家公司有多少个联合创始人。日以继夜编写代码、打电话和奔波忙碌终于在2014年看到了回报，阿里巴巴在首次公开发行中融资250亿美元，创下“史上最大规模IPO”的纪录。

Clark has long been one of the most visible westerners in China’s technology scene. In Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built, he draws on a considerable trove of personal reminiscences in addition to dozens of interviews to write what could be the definitive history not just of Alibaba but other titans of the Chinese internet such as Tencent, Sohu, Sina and Baidu — all household names in China but little known in the west.

在中国科技界，克拉克向来是最引人关注的西方人之一。在《阿里巴巴：马云的基业》(Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built)一书中，他凭借大量的个人回忆和数十次采访，写下了堪称权威的关于中国互联网巨头——不只是阿里巴巴，还有腾讯(Tencent)、搜狐(Sohu)、新浪(Sina)和百度(Baidu)——发展历史的著作。在中国，这些都是家喻户晓的名字，在西方却鲜为人知。

The author tends to accentuate the positive about Alibaba, referring to his subject throughout as “Jack” and serving up a succession of anecdotes that illustrate his business genius. Many chapters begin with a stirring quote from Ma such as: “The Internet [is like] beer . . . the good stuff is at the bottom. Without the bubbles, the beer is flat and nobody would want to drink it.”

该作者着重讲述阿里巴巴的正面情况，从头到尾把他的主人公称做“杰克”，并为读者奉上一系列体现马云经商天分的趣闻轶事。很多章节都是以马云振奋人心的名言开始，比如：“互联网像一杯啤酒……好东西都在底下。没有沫，啤酒就走味了，没人想喝。”

But the narrative is at its best when it seeks to place Alibaba in its local context. In Taobao, the eBay-like online marketplace launched by Ma in 2003, Clark sees a virtual reflection of the bustling Yiwu wholesale market just down the road in Alibaba’s home city of Hangzhou — and, beyond that, of Ma’s native Zhejiang province as a whole, which the author describes as “China’s crucible of entrepreneurship”. Blazing with pop-up boxes and floating banner ads, Taobao is about as far away from the clean lines and uncluttered negative spaces of Google as could be imagined.

不过这本书最精彩的地方是在它尝试把阿里巴巴置于其当地背景之下来叙述的时候。马云在2003年创办了与eBay类似的网上市场淘宝网(Taobao)，在淘宝网的身上，克拉克看到了熙熙攘攘的义乌小商品批发市场——距离阿里巴巴总部所在地杭州市不远——以及马云的家乡、被克拉克形容为“中国企业家熔炉”的浙江省——的虚拟版本。不断有窗口弹出、布满浮动的横幅广告的淘宝网与谷歌简单的线条和整洁的负空间简直是天壤之别。

While the bustling entrepreneurial energy of China’s bricks-and-mortar economy has been reproduced in Taobao and latterly its sister website Tmall, so have the problems — counterfeit goods and some accusations of counterfeit numbers following Alibaba wherever it goes.

尽管淘宝网及后来创办的姊妹网站天猫(Tmall)重现了中国实体经济中充沛的创业活力，但是这些网站也传染了实体经济中的问题——假货以及与阿里巴巴如影相随的关于捏造数字的指责。

Clark gives this side of the story too, offering the most thorough treatment yet of some of the more difficult episodes in Alibaba’s history. In 2011 an argument erupted over the transfer of the Alipay online payments business to a company controlled by Ma, which raised fears among minority shareholders Yahoo and SoftBank that the value of their stakes in Alibaba would be eroded. The investors accused Ma of asset-stripping, while Ma argued that there were solid regulatory reasons for his apparent violation of corporate governance norms. Clark speaks to all the parties concerned, setting out the claims and counterclaims in accessible fashion — and Ma does not come off looking particularly good.

克拉克也介绍了这方面的情况，对阿里巴巴发展历程中的一些艰难经历进行了最全面的叙述。2011年，阿里巴巴将在线支付业务支付宝(Alipay)的所有权转移到马云控股的一家公司名下，引发了争议，少数股东雅虎(Yahoo)和软银(SoftBank)担心它们所持阿里巴巴股份的价值会受到侵蚀。投资者指责马云进行资产剥离，而马云认为他表面上违背公司治理规范的行为从监管方面来说有着充足理由。克拉克与所有相关方进行了交谈，以让人容易理解的方式列出了正、反主张——马云表现得并不是特别好。

The last chapter, “Icon or Icarus?”, looks at the future of Alibaba, which has not had a particularly smooth ride from investors since it went public in 2014. After a vertiginous rise in the months following its IPO, Alibaba’s shares sank by 50 per cent before the summer of 2015 was out. In late August, they fell below the $68 IPO price for the first time, and have hovered a little above negative territory ever since.

在最后一章“偶像还是伊卡洛斯?”中，作者展望了阿里巴巴的未来。自从2014年上市以来，阿里巴巴并没有一直得到投资者另眼相看。在IPO后几个月里阿里巴巴的股价大幅上涨，随后在2015年夏天结束前，其股价暴跌50%。去年8月底，阿里巴巴的股价首次跌破68美元的发行价，自那以来其股价一直徘徊在略高于发行价的水平上。

The book is a must-read for anyone hoping to navigate China’s new economy. Despite being behind the “Great firewall”, China’s internet — thanks largely to Ma — will become a part of everyone’s life sooner rather than later.

对于每个希望在中国新经济领域闯荡的人来说，这本书是必读之作。尽管中国互联网被隔离在“防火墙”之内，但是它肯定会成为每个人生活中的一部分，只会早不会晚——而这在很大程度上多亏了马云。