BOOK REVIEW: Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World's Biggest Online Marketplace

THE CHAIRMAN of a billion-dollar corporate group who is known to describe himself as a "trickster" and "lunatic" makes the perfect protagonist for a business book, especially when his enterprise is named after a story from The Arabian Nights.

So it is not surprising that Liu Shiying’s portrait of Jack Ma, the Chinese internet tycoon, and Alibaba, the online marketplace he built, is a best-seller in China. Now it has been translated, with adaptations for the foreign reader, by Martha Avery.

It is part of the legend surrounding Mr Ma that people initially called him crazy and viewed his ideas with distrust in the mid-1990s when he tried to sell the idea of doing business over the internet in his home country, and that he managed to convince his compatriots nevertheless.

In just a decade, Alibaba has grown into a group with more than 12,000 employees.

Alibaba.com – its listed flagship and an online marketplace for trading between mostly smaller businesses – reported Rmb2.2 billion (€260 million) for the first nine months of last year and is sometimes dubbed China’s eBay.

This legend of success against all odds, further enriched by the detail that Mr Ma is an English teacher turned entrepreneur, has also made him a darling of international business conferences.

But the rags-to-riches tale, as told by Mr Ma when he gives crowd-drawing speeches, fails to explain fully the secret of his success – as does this book, however entertaining it is.

“People say that if you want to change the world, you should first change yourself. Ma seems to have done the opposite: he changed the world but preserved himself much as he was,” writes Liu. “He started out small and unremarkable, which he remains.” That is nicely put, but nevertheless reveals little beyond the fact that this must be one very stubborn man.

And he is indeed stubborn. From his perseverance in trying to get into university in spite of flunking the entrance exam twice, to his insistence on establishing an e-commerce platform in China, his life is proof of that. In his presentations at conferences, Mr Ma is sometimes awkward and unwilling to give a straightforward answer to a question – all features that Liu ignores in his book. Also absent is the most recent history of the internet, which does have a bearing on the story of Alibaba.

The book gives a detailed account of the difficulties Mr Ma faced when trying to convince would-be customers in 1994 that the web did in fact exist. It also recites statistics that bewitch western executives, such as China’s 230 million internet users, the world’s largest internet population. The fact that the figure should already now read 298 million only reinforces its power.

But other facts also relevant to Alibaba’s success have been ignored. One is the anarchy that prevails on the internet in China in spite of the authoritarian government’s determination to control online content.

The web in China teems with sex and violence – despite periodic demonstrative government clean-up campaigns. It is also full of sites offering fraudulent goods and services. Offers including phoney medical services, counterfeit banknotes and knock-off electronic gadgets and designer goods are often more easily found than the real deal.

In such an environment, combined with a patchy regulatory framework and a government that often leaves internet businesses guessing what is or is not legal, it is more than natural that a platform such as Alibaba attracts small businesses as the perfect haven.

Since suppliers can sell on the platform only if they pay annual membership fees, fraud would not pay off. With its clear rules, an easy-to-navigate layout and the membership system that transforms anonymous sites into trustworthy suppliers, Alibaba is like a shiny, bright, well-kept supermarket compared with grimy streetmongers.

Yet, overall, even without this context, the book is still entertaining. Avery occasionally gives the story a mystical air with allusions to proverbs and martial arts, but she has done a great job.

While Liu forgets sometimes that he is not telling a fairytale but the real story of a company and the life of its founder, Avery has turned the reverential original into a highly readable tale. – (Financial Times service)

Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World's Biggest Online Marketplaceby Liu Shiying and Martha Avery; Collins Business; £14.99 (€17)