A tale of two Chinese tech bros: from Alibaba to Huawei
Every day, teenager Ma Yun would go to the tourist hotel district of Hangzhou to see if he could find any foreigners who spoke English. It was the 1980s, and China was opening up to the world. Ma Yun offered to work as a guide in exchange for practicing the language. Despite his drive, his studies were not going well; he failed the university entrance exam several times. He was rejected for multiple jobs. The market was booming in China, and competition was fierce. During the 1990s, he worked as an English teacher. These were the early years of the internet in China. He saw an opportunity and, with several friends, founded an online business in his apartment. Years later, the young Chinese man would become known as Jack Ma, and his company, Alibaba, would attract worldwide attention because it was the first Chinese platform at the level of the big tech from Silicon Valley.
In the 1960s, another Chinese tech entrepreneur, Ren Zhengfei, lived his youth in a much more turbulent context. His father had been harassed and purged during the Cultural Revolution. The world around him was one of violence, fanaticism, and chaos. He was born in the impoverished province of Guizhou. As a child, he suffered the famine of the Great Leap Forward and entered university to become an engineer, but the Cultural Revolution interrupted his studies. His father's "poor record" prevented him from joining the Party and prospering professionally. In the final years of Maoism, he enlisted in the Chinese army to work as an engineer. When China began to open up, he moved to Shenzhen, the country's most innovative city. There, he realized that China needed its own technology in several sectors. One of them was telecommunications, especially in rural areas. It was then that he decided to found Huawei in 1987.
The 2000s and early 2010s were Jack Ma's star years. His style cool Silicon Valley style appealed to the West. It was the years of the big tech Digital transformations and the rise of software. The tech world was still riding the wave of social media and globalized innovation. Alibaba also had ping-pong tables and yoga studios in its offices. Jack Ma was a Party member, but his discourse had a liberal, techno-utopian flavor.
By the mid-2010s, technology had ceased to symbolize this open and liberal space and had taken on a much harsher, geopolitical tone. Digital platforms like Alibaba had given way to hardware manufacturers—chips, 5G, digital infrastructure—like Huawei, which were much more closely tied to the state and national security. From selling online services to building factories and conducting hard science, Ren Zhengfei's rhetoric has always been much more patriotic and aligned with the Party than Jack Ma's. The founder of Huawei has a worldview—due to age and life experience—much closer to Xi Jinping's. Jack Ma criticized the Chinese government and for a time fell out of favor. Huawei was hurt by American sanctions, has recovered and become the technological arm of China's geopolitical rise.