Thorough and informative 23/4/2006 article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson about Google and its role and development in China. The introductory paragraph reads:
For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word. It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in Beijing.
Here is a printer-friendly rendering of the article, which, depending on your printer and browser set-up, will fill about 12 pages if as I did you decide to print it before you read it. In a related vein, you may also be interested in The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk, from the 27/4/2006 edition of the Economist.
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