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

Liu, a Chinese business writer, with Martha Avery translating and adapting, wrote an early account of Alibaba and Jack Ma for a Western audience, published in 2009 before the company's international listing.

The account covers Ma's background as an English teacher in Hangzhou, his early internet venture China Pages, the founding of Alibaba in 1999 as a business-to-business directory connecting Chinese manufacturers with foreign buyers, the SoftBank investment, the launch of Taobao to compete with eBay in consumer marketplaces, the creation of Alipay, and the Yahoo investment.

The book is written from Chinese sources and reflects a Chinese business press perspective, which is both its distinguishing feature and its main limitation. It is largely admiring, treats Ma's public statements as accurate accounts of his reasoning, and does not examine the governance structures, the regulatory relationships or the variable interest entity arrangements that Western investors most need to understand.

The reference has not verified the specific claims and figures in this account. Duncan Clark's later book, written by someone who knew the company from the beginning and who understands what Western investors need explained, is the better source on the same subject and covers the more consequential later period including the Alipay transfer. This volume's interest is as an early Chinese-perspective treatment rather than as the authoritative history.