A Tour of the Alibaba Empire: The Peak of China’s New Capitalism and a Little Mao?

The statue of a staunch, naked Chinese man half the height of the architecture next to him greets visitors at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters. Our guide, Susie, says the statue is meant to represent company values— namely, direct speech free of any hidden agendas.

I’ve been interning with enoVate, a young startup, for the past few weeks so it was interesting for me to walk around a building (er, seven buildings) that employs over 7000 workers. While Alibaba now has offices in more than 50 cities across China, Japan, Korea, Europe and the United States, founder Jack Ma has stressed the importance of maintaining Alibaba’s startup energy and identity saying, “The company will remain a ‘start-up’ no matter how long it has been in existence.” That is, a startup with its own Starbucks among other amenities.

Jack, a former English teacher fondly nicknamed “ET” by his employees after the Spielberg character, started Alibaba.com in his hometown Hangzhou in 1999 with a team of 18 founders. Since then Alibaba has grown to become the world’s largest E-commerce Company and Alibaba.com now houses the world’s largest business-to-business marketplace for both global and Chinese domestic trade. Susie explains that Jack chose Hangzhou because of its closeness to small and medium size cities and the fact that Zhejiang province is especially active in export business.

Susie wasn’t the only employee I met that was beaming with Alibaba pride. Even though the company Starbucks is closed on Saturdays, many employees were still hard at work. Inside, offices are equipped with large drums to communally celebrate workers’ successful deals and keep the office energy high. Chinese medicine stations and jump ropes were abundant as were mirrors on desks, which call center employees use to make sure that they are smiling and giving off friendly vibes to clients. Alibaba works to provide real home for its employees; Alibaba couples and families are common and even encouraged by company leadership.

As I walked past the naked man statue for the second time—this time with the rear view, I started thinking about ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics.’ I learned that Alibaba currently provides the government with free CPI (consumer price index) data from smaller regions. Before Alibaba, it took a very long time for local heads to get back to Beijing with this information. I thought about Google and EBay’s Sino misadventures. Despite investing enormous amounts of money and hiring local Chinese talent, no major American Internet company has been able to find footing in the Chinese market. Alibaba and other successful Chinese Internet companies have all realized that on some level they must cooperate and work with the government. Maybe it’s my American Cowboy roots but from my perspective in enoVate’s one-room office, working with the government seems about as far from ‘start up’ as you get. It will be harder for Alibaba and other companies as they get bigger to retain the independent innovative spirit of a young company as their guanxi with the big man develops.