Jack Ma’s inspiring life story
PRIME Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s recent official visit to China was indeed a great success that would bring huge economic benefits to our country. As expressed by Dr Martin Jacques, a British journalist and the author of When China Rules The World: “The Sino-Malaysia relationship is crucial for the future of Malaysia.”
Apart from sealing the RM55 billion East Coast Rail Line project and more than 10 business-to-business deals worth RM143 billion, Jack Ma of Alibaba would also be appointed adviser for Malaysia’s digital economy.
As China’s economy is expanding at an impressive speed, establishing a close relationship with it is certainly a step in the right direction.
Although Ma’s e-commerce success has impressed me tremendously, his perseverance and foresight in mastering English has impressed me even more.
As a teenager, he took the extra mile to learn the global language by going to a hotel near his home, just so he could talk to Western tourists in English. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had learnt from the tourists, so he pursued a degree in English and graduated in 1988.
If he hadn’t taken the effort to master English, he wouldn’t have had the ambition to explore the great potential of the Internet in the United States in 1995, before starting a website company there.
With that exposure, he returned to China to form Alibaba in 1999.
In less than two decades, Alibaba has successfully expanded its business before making its historic listing in the New York Stock Exchange two years ago.
Learning English in China is far more difficult than mastering the language in Malaysia.
Although more and more mainland Chinese have graduated from overseas universities, English isn’t widely spoken. When I was in Shanghai in 2001, I noticed that many parents there were keen to send their children to kindergartens with outstanding English teachers. If our university graduates have failed in their endeavours to master English, they probably need to listen to the conversation between President Obama and Ma via “Obama interviews Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma” website. Ma spoke impeccable English, even though he didn’t have a conducive environment to learn the language in Hangzhou, China more than two decades ago.
I am glad that my daughter had managed to clear her English competency test conducted by a foreign language institution, before she was granted a two-year global opportunity to work in a sister company in the United States recently.
I hope our local graduates would be inspired by Ma to take the extra mile to master English so that they can compete effectively with foreign graduates in the workplace.
By the same token, many of our senior officers and their subordinates in the civil service and some politicians need to improve their English proficiency as well.