BIZCHINA / Zhang Chaoyang
Opening the door to China
Updated: 2000-08-20 10:26
By Charles Zhang, Founder and CEO of Sohu.com
About four years ago, after many years at MIT, I went back to China with
two suitcases. Then, there were about 3,000 Internet users in Beijing,
China, and I spent half a day to get Internet access, providing the
identification necessary and completing a very lengthy registration. At
that time, China was still in the Internet Dark Age. Now, China has about
10 million Internet users and everybody is talking about the Internet.
In the past few years, we have come a long way. I wanted to start an
Internet company and was trying to raise some capital. But nobody in
China understood what venture capital was, so I had to come back to the
U.S. to find money. Fortunately, some of my former colleagues at MIT,
including Professor Ed Roberts and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of
the media lab, provided the seed capital. We started the company,
Internet Technologies China, which launched Sohu.com. Later ITC was
renamed Sohu.com.
In the past few years, we have been able to persuade Beijing Telecom to
allow us to put our first server into China's Internet infrastructure.
The whole society had already accepted the Internet content provider
concept and the advertising model. We introduced the first advertisement
on the Internet in China, the first search directories and the concept of
venture capital. We have been the main concept leader and educator
regarding the Internet in China.
Four years ago, I was the only person going back to China to start an
Internet company. Now, probably 10,000 overseas students have returned to
China to start dot-coms. If you go to the universities and ask Chinese
overseas students what they want to do after graduation, probably 80
percent of them will say they want to start a dot-com company.
The 10 million people using the Internet in China today will probably
grow to 20 or 30 million within a year. There are between 50 and 100
million pages downloaded in China everyday. Sohu.com alone gets 10
million hits per day. And when we add up all the portal sites, you reach
something like 100 million pages downloaded. By comparison, Yahoo has 300
million per day. So Internet use in China is quite significant compared
to a few years ago.
The Internet may be the quickest portal into a billion-person emerging
economy.
The Internet has become very hot and very popular, not only with the
students and with the dot-com companies, but with the traditional media.
Every newspaper has a dot-com IT section talking about the Internet. In
other words -- China has come a long way.
What does this mean for China? What is the impact of the Internet on
China? I believe that the Internet is really about choices. Before we had
the Internet, Chinese people had limited access to information. After the
Internet, there has been a quantum leap in terms of the amount of
information that people can access. Through the Internet, you can read
over 70 newspapers throughout China. You can find out which city is the
most polluted when planning where you want to live. If you travel, you
can find out which airline has the safest record. With information, you
have the ability to decide things. March 15th in China is called the Day
of the Rights of Consumers. Now, if you buy something that you are not
happy with, you can easily find alternative providers, and the Internet
facilitates this.
The Internet, of course, also provides more information about different
political agendas. But really, it is about people becoming more informed
about everything -- what to buy, where to live, who to do business with
and so on. In the daily life of the Chinese people, the Internet is all
about the right of choice on a very large scale. The result is the whole
society, both the government and individuals, becoming more informed and
able to discuss things. And the whole society just becomes more
intelligent. So the national I.Q. has jumped significantly, and this is
just the beginning.
In China today, there is not only the proliferation of the Internet sites
and users but also a very important trend of decentralization. A market
economy is forming. And in learning to work in a market economy, we must
compress everything that has happened in the West in the last 50 years
into a few short years.
So, with both decentralization and Internet development compressed in
such a short period of time, there is a steep learning curve for the
government, officials and businesses. It is only by proactive,
constructive working together that we can make things happen. One example
is how we persuaded Beijing Telecom to put up an Internet server. They
wanted to organize it the old "central planning way." They would have
organized all the content on the server in Beijing and would have ordered
everyone to put up this or that information. We persuaded them that this
was not the way to build it. You have to rely on the society for the
content and allow people to create it their own way. You have to rely on
many, many companies backed by venture capital to build the site and to
build many sites. After a lot of discussion, they said, "Okay, Charles,
maybe you know. We will give it a try. You can put your server there."
That is the first server we put on Beijing Telecom, later followed by
many, many servers by different companies. And Beijing Telecom's
infrastructure became the largest server farm in China, hosting all the
major portals. Now, private businesses are building sites instead of
Beijing Telecom allowing only one central commission to build content for
people to read.
This is definitely a constructive process. We worked with the government
and persuaded them. We realized that we have to really work together with
the government to accelerate this learning process. By working together
and by proactively cooperating, it will be possible to create a legal
infrastructure and to understand different issues. China is in a major
transition and that transition is not that easy. It is not just building
things like skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, but also changing the
mentality of the media. We are trying to embrace all these new things in
a few years. And the only way to succeed is by constructively working
together.
For the original, pls
clickhttp://www.govtech.net/magazine/visions/aug00vision/China/index.php
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