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Summary: An adventure-- you are there in China. Fantastic!
Review: As an Asian watcher who lived abroad in China and Taiwan, I really enjoyed and sped through this book. The motivation of the characters (tireless and superhuman at times) to see the inevitable changes technology is bringing and then work to make China a part of it is both an exciting and touching story. If you enjoy stories of dreamers, doers, and the entrepreneur spirit, this is a good read for you.
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Summary: Lucid, Eye opening, and Very Funny--
Review: I felt like I was on an adventure in China with some of the most incredible characters I have read about in a long time. The book reminds me of the best books about the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but it is set in a world that I don't know much about. I felt like I went on a journey to China and back. I have not been able to stop thinking about the main characters, including Edward Tian, James Ding, Bo Feng, Eric Li, and a few other guys who are technological geniuses and, best of all, hysterically funny.
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Summary: Great read, inspiring story
Review: I'm just back from China. This book is the first of the many China books that I have read that captures how it really feels there. THe story about the visit to an old village where fiber optics are being installed brilliantly shows the clash between the new and the old. THe mains characters, businessmen and venture capitalists, are fantastic. I didn't want the book to end so that I can see where this story takes them next.
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Summary: This book is a purely a domcom story
Review: One of the best business books I have ever read. It is an inspiring story, written with insight and passion. I'm ready to pack up and head to China.
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Summary: Awesome- inspring story
Review: The author is a Wired / Fortune magazine reporter with 25 yrs experience and he spins an engaging story about developing the internet infrastructure in China with native Chinese financial and technical talent. The author has written his book in a multi-layer fashion, not unlike a Tom Clancy novel. This book includes an 11-page index, but lacks any further footnotes or bibliography on this nascent market. There is no map or timeline summarizing key events, as the author weaves several interrelated stories spread throughout his book. Also there is no government / company hierarchy chart, like the popular charts of Silicon Valley company spin-offs, so it is confusing to keep the players straight.Starting in 1992, his story centers on the development of 3 main characters about 3 years after Tiananmen. Tiananmen galvanizes these young men's patriotism while studying in the US, leading them to discover their purpose in life. What surprised me was the government's vision towards rapidly installing broadband internet and voice over IP capability. Proactively before admission to the WTO, a government contract was let to a start-up managed by young entrepreneurial Chinese who had their own vision that the internet would catalyze "Democracy with Chinese characteristics." Of course, the CCP wanted the internet because they needed a catalyst for enhanced communication for Chinese companies to compete globally. Bo Feng (b 1969), a native of Shanghai with teachers for parents, was sent to California at 18 as his stop of last resort in 1987, as his family despaired from his lack of ambition. At 21 years old, he drops out of the College of Marin, a local community college, bitten by the creative freedom with making films and storytelling like a budding Spielberg. He works in Chinese restaurants to fund his films (p36). He gets married to a round eye, and his father-in-law introduces him to the investment community, and soon gets hired in 1994@25 by Sandy Robertson, one of the Silicon Valley tycoons (p52). He works with Robertson to provide mezzanine financing for AsiaInfo $18M and SRS $7M in 1995. As Robertson retires, Feng sees a need for seed capital, so with Eric Li founds the Chengwei Venture fund...with $60M in 1999, lead by Yale, Sutter Hill, Stanford (p179). Eric Li, a UCB BSEE and Stanford MBA, had prior VC experience at Orchid Asia Holdings. This is just before the internet dot com bubble bursts in Y2K. Suning (Edward) Tian, a native of Beijing, now the CEO of China Netcom Corp..., a privatized Chinese government start-up in 1999 with the mission of laying the national fiber network backbone. In Jan 2001 about a year after breaking ground, he is visited by China Premier Zhu Rongji for an hour presentation and he pleads for a broadened licence (p268). Born in 1963, from bourgeois scientific parents, he was raised by his maternal grandparents during the Cultural Revolution (CR) (p25) and his estranged father after. He places very high in the college placement exams and enters LiaoningU, Dalian, to study biology after his parents, with grad work at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing (p29). At 25, he leaves China to study at Texas Tech, graduates with a doctorate in ecology, but he finds his true calling in a college basement computer lab with a Macintosh (p31). Appalled by Tainanmen, he and fellow ISTI/Beijing, UCLA EE/CS techie sidekick Jian (James) Ding (p46) found BDI and create a Chinese pro-Democracy news website. He translates the Western news sources and becomes the first popular alternative web news source outside of the People's Daily. They rename BDI to AsiaInfo to become a Dallas portal/ Beijing provincial SW and network provider that later went public on the NASDAQ (ASIA) in 1999. AsiaInfo evolves into a general web portal, like a Chinese grown Yahoo, but operates in the States near UT Dallas. On the mainland, a BDI subsidiary does network systems work. One of their first projects was automating the Shenzhen stock exchange for $2.2M in 1995 (p69) using Sun computers. For SW, they modified free Unix Open Systems shareware. They also established the first internet backbone over voice lines between Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong and the West in 1994 for $4M (p70). Then they expanded it into ChinaNet, the national backbone over voice lines in 1995. Then Shanghai On-line wanted a website, portal, and local infrastructure developed for $3M in 1995. Running out of expansion funds, they meet Feng, who underwrites an $18M expansion as his second deal for Robertson, Stephens (p81) in 97. AsiaInfo is on its way towards becoming the dominant player in China's internet. Wang Zhidong, the co-founder of Stone Rich Sight (SRS) in Beijing, created RichWin in 1996, a Chinese translator shell around MSWindows. He is a son (b1967) of Guangdong peasants, started working on radios in HS, and won a full scholarship to Beijing Univ, EE lab. He discovers the Computer Lab and switches to CS. Soon he is freelancing in Beijing's Zhongguancun. He makes an Adobe-like DTP and OS SW for a BeijingU spin-off. He teams up with Yan Yanchou, who started making Chinese IBM PC clones in 1983 at the National Research Inst (p60). Yan makes the 1st word processor using Chinese characters; using his video controller with a custom ROM (1985). They found SRS funded by the Stone Group (HK) in 1987, created RichWin with Feng's 1st deal of $7 million of VC in 95 (p64), becoming the defacto Chinese GUI OS by 97. They create SRSnet.com, for RichWin support, and later acquire Hong & Lin's Sina.net and morphs into a Yahoo-like portal (p88) in 1999 and has an IPO (SINA) in 2K (p208) in the midst of the dot com crash. After MS releases a Chinese Windows OS, it regains its world domination in 2001 (p264). With no source of revenue, Daniel Mao, a VC, fires Wang. Smarting from the loss, Wang starts up Dianji Technology with a new mission.
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Summary: This book is a purely a domcom story
Review: The characters in this book are not what the book described since the author is the personal friend of the characters. This is purely free publicity for them. Search the web and you will find other comments about the auther. The latest story is the VCs have splited since they can't really get along, and the politics in the VC firm was unbearable with just a few people. Most of the portfolio companies are in bad shape. The VC's website has not been updated since 2001, wonder why. If you really want to know about IT in China, then you should learn from other sources. Most of the IT companies in China are not making money. This book only gives you a picture of the early dotcom years and we all know what happened. Don't judge the book by the cover or the content. It is only a perspective from one person.
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