Forbes.com interviews Rebecca Fannin about her new book “Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race
My book is really about two groups of tech companies in China: the copycats and the innovators. In China right now, there are those who have copied Google or Amazon, like Robin Li, who founded Baidu, or Peggy Yuyu, who founded Dangdang.com–a kind of Chinese Amazon–or Jack Ma, who created Alibaba and Taobao.com and has now taken over Yahoo! China.
These are Chinese people who have been educated in the United States and had experience in Silicon Valley, and then went back to China and copied American business models but tweaked them to have Chinese characteristics.
These copycat entrepreneurs have become like rockstars in China. But now a lot of the startups there have seen the fortunes that Robin Li and Jack Ma have made, and they want to follow in their footsteps. With that generation, China is moving away from copycats [and] toward real innovation.
