Reviews
"The speed with which our Taobao website took off surprised the US media completely—they had thought eBay was invincible! They weren't willing to believe a pure Chinese website could compete with major players such as eBay, Yahoo!, and others. But Taobao's user data forced US analysts to look at us with new eyes. Only then did they realize that C2C competition within China was far fiercer than anything they had imagined." —Reuters
"China’s Taobao is one of the world’s largest e-commerce websites, a combination of eBay and Amazon, only bigger. Its 500 million registered users trade almost 50,000 items of merchandise every minute on average." — BBC
“In the next 20 to 30 years, the internet will change the landscape of global trading. We're really hoping to bring e-commerce to all of China's [many] villages, so that rural people can get a taste of the city life and sell their own products in the cities. Let the rural people return to the earth, let the intellectuals return to the farms, and send the products of their agriculture all over the nation.” —Jack Ma
"In the typical narrative of what have become known as 'Taobao villages,' a group of locals starts selling handicrafts online and taps into a lucrative consumer market, bringing money and success to the village. Some villages near to factories also sell mass-produced manufactured goods." —The Economist
"Taobao has even transformed village economies." —National Public Radio
Author Biography
Dr. Lili Cui is a Research Fellow at the Shanghai University of Finance & Economics, focusing on how the digital world has enabled social innovation. She is well-known for her research on Taobao Villages in China.