李开复：中国即将迎来信息技术的黄金时代

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.

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.