AsiaInfo President Tian Suning (a k a Edward S. Tian) is building much of China's Internet backbone. (By Hilary Smith for The Washington Post)

Third of five articles

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 16, 1998; Page A1

BEIJING – America in the imagination of Tian Suning had always been a place of bright lights and big cities. So it was a shock to Tian when he arrived in Lubbock, Tex., in 1987 with $45 in his pocket and a full scholarship to Texas Tech. There were no skyscrapers. No Fifth Avenue. No White House. No night clubs. Instead, he found prairies, churches and ranches. The tallest building was 10 stories. When he asked for a beer, he got root beer.

For the next five years, he studied the ecology of the prairie, making mathematical and statistical models of the growth of bromegrass. He counted leafy stems and saw how bromegrass weeds competed in nature with sand drop seeds. He also spent several months studying the environmental impact New York City sewage would have if, as proposed at the time, it were dumped on the Texas grasslands.

For Tian, however, isolation was the mother of invention. To stay connected with the rest of the world, he became proficient with computers, and he caught the wave in the rising American Internet craze.

Today, Tian Suning, a k a Edward S. Tian, PhD, is back in Beijing where, at least when it comes to business, the grass is greener. In a little more than three years, he has become one of China's leading entrepreneurs. His company, AsiaInfo Group, has built much of China's Internet backbone by installing the American-made equipment needed to connect more and more Chinese Web surfers at higher and higher speeds. And it is now branching out into new areas by providing software solutions to big Chinese enterprises.

Founded by Tian in early 1995 with just four employees, AsiaInfo now has 320 employees, $45 million a year in revenues and an impressive array of backers and projects. He has provided the Internet infrastructure for Sichuan province, which has a population of more than 100 million. He is doubling the speed of the Net in Beijing, in an effort, he says, to prevent the information superhighway from becoming a parking lot. He's helping Chinese banks, which still do much of their business in cash, devise online "e-commerce" systems. He's advising a Shanghai securities firm about online trading. He's putting newspapers in Heilongjiang and Shanghai online. And to help him with future ventures, he recently arranged financial backing from three leading American venture capital firms.

In just 3½ years of doing business, Tian has already met the goal shared by most of his generation and followed the advice of the late senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who said "to get rich is glorious." But as with many of the most successful members of the Cultural Revolution generation, Tian views his mission as something even bigger.

"I want to bring the best part of America to China: an efficient information infrastructure that will change people's minds and people's ways of doing things," said Tian. "This is the responsibility of our generation."

Sitting in his modest office in Beijing's computer software district, Haidian, Tian brims with a sense of historic opportunity.

"I'm very confident," said Tian, who is reading Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" and just published a Chinese translation of Ron Chernow's "The House of Morgan." China, he said, "is like America at the turn of the last century. There is the opportunity to build a Standard Oil and giant companies that American founding fathers built because China is in the midst of an economic revolution and a technological revolution."

Tian Suning as a youngster in Gansu province during the Cultural Revolution (Courtesy of Tian Suning)

The numbers back him up. In China, 11 million new telephone lines are installed every year, equal to starting a new Baby Bell operating company every 12 months. The Internet is booming. Nationwide there are about 1 million accounts. In Guangzhou, 1,000 new users sign up every month. Within five years, the number of users is expected to hit 10 million. Intel estimates that China this year will overtake Germany and become the world's third largest market for personal computers.

"The Internet is today's equivalent of the steam engine," said Tian. "At the turn of the century, it was the sewing machine instead of information technology. This," he said, meaning China and the information technology revolution, "is like the Industrial Revolution, and that's why I feel very passionate about it."

Passion was once something reserved for devotees of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Tian was born three years before the Cultural Revolution began and millions of young Chinese descended on Beijing's Tiananmen Square waving their little red books of Mao's quotations.

Tian's parents were two of China's leading ecologists. Educated in forestry, they were sent to study in the Soviet Union, which was then China's main ally. But in 1961, relations with the Soviet Union soured and his parents reluctantly returned to China. Two years later, when their son was born, they named him Suning, which means roughly "thinking of Leningrad," the city they associated with their romantic young adulthood.

Back in China, they were sent to a desert research institute in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu, a backward province at the edge of China's far west. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Tian, only three, was sent to live with his grandparents across the country, in the northeastern industrial city Shenyang. Except for short visits, he would be separated from his parents for 11 years.

The situation in Shenyang wasn't much better than in Lanzhou. His mother's family had been wealthy and educated, which made them suspect during the Cultural Revolution enthusiasm for peasant virtues. Despite the family's earlier wealth, they lived simply. They didn't dare use money they had stashed away.

The family had good reason to be nervous. When Tian was 11, he returned to Shenyang from a stay with his parents in Lanzhou carefully carrying a basket of eggs. A neighbor spied the eggshells in the garbage and interrogated his grandmother about how she could afford such a delicacy.

"This is a very bitter memory for me," he recalls. "The neighbor was so jealous when he saw the eggshell in the garbage and said, 'You must be very rich.' "

But the persecution of his family and the disruption of Chinese schools also gave the young Tian an unusual introduction to learning. At night, his aunt, who had a degree in Chinese literature, would teach him, by candlelight, poetry from the Tang and Song dynasties. His grandmother, who once tutored the children of rich families, devoted herself to her grandson's education.

After the Cultural Revolution, life became easier. Tian went back to high school and in 1981 enrolled in Liaoning University to study environmental biology.

Environmental biology wasn't the most important thing he learned in Liaoning, however. English, the language of the Internet, was.