KAI-FU LEE : China Is Poised for…

China Is Poised for an I.T. Golden
Age
BEIJING — Chinese universities
graduate more than 600,000 engineering students a year. China has
consistently placed at or near the top of programming competitions.
And while we have not seen China become a leader in information
technology and computing, I expect that this will change in the
coming decade.

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Since the Internet revolution of the late 1990s, many successful
companies have been built by taking American ideas and localizing
them for China. These companies may have “copied” from the United
States at first, but they acted swiftly, focused on their customers
and developed their products, adding more and more local
innovations.

For example, Tencent, one of
China’s three Internet juggernauts, started with an
instant-messaging product named QQ, which was a replica of the same
system on which Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger were based. But
today, QQ has evolved to become a very different product — a
combination of instant messaging, social networking, universal ID
and gaming center. QQ has built the world’s largest online
community (about 700 million active accounts), while its American
counterparts continue to build instant messaging as loss
leaders.

I expect this type of innovation to proliferate, for three
reasons.

First, we are entering the age of open platforms, mobile
computing, pad devices, open-source and cloud computing. These will
create many opportunities for talented Chinese I.T.
professionals.

Second, development costs are the lowest in history. On the open
platforms, four or five good engineers can build an application and
validate it in just a few months.

Finally, the Chinese market is growing very rapidly, and more
innovations will come out of such large markets. We expect the
country to have 500 million mobile Internet users by 2012, and
perhaps twice that in five years. Great innovative mobile companies
are sure to follow.

An ancient Western adage — necessity is the mother of invention
— is appropriate here. The Year of the Dragon begins on Jan. 23,
and hundreds of millions of people will want to watch the New
Year’s gala on their computers. That has provided the impetus for
inventing P2P, or person-to-person, technologies to handle the
surge.

Chinese users have never had the habit of paying for software or
digital content, but Chinese companies have come up with many
clever micropayment strategies. For example, a Chinese e-book is
free at first, but once you read half of it and get hooked, you
have to pay a nominal charge per thousand words.

Traditional Chinese media have limited information, so sites
like
Sina Weibo have emerged, combining the viral propagation of
Twitter and the rich media of Facebook.

What else might we look forward to? Chinese parents care deeply
about education, yet schools in poorer cities are inadequate. Can
China invent effective distance-learning solutions? There are more
than 160 cities in China with more than a million people. These
urban environments are the perfect places to develop “solomo”
(social, local, mobile) applications: for example, finding a
fast-food restaurant offering a discount within walking distance.
Most Chinese people don’t have credit cards. Can Chinese phones
leapfrog those in the United States and become our electronic
wallets?

Which of these speculations will come true in China first? I’m
not sure, but I am sure that I have missed many other “killer
applications” from China. In a country full of energy, desire,
talent and ideas, there is no doubt that China will become a world
leader in information technology.

Kai-Fu Lee is the former head of Google China and the founder of
Innovation Works, a Chinese incubator and investment firm.

This article has been revised to reflect
the following correction:

Correction: December 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of
students who graduate from Chinese universities every year. Chinese
universities produce six million graduates. Of those, 600,000 are
engineering students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/kai-fu-lee-china-is-poised-for-an-it-golden-age.html?_r=1