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 3-1/2 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."

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.

One day in the university library he met a disaffected Englishman who had moved to China during the Cultural Revolution. He turned out to be a good English tutor, introducing Tian to John Lennon records and George Orwell's "1984." "He opened my eyes and opened my mind," Tian said.

While a graduate student in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tian dabbled in publishing. He published a translation of Lee Iacocca's book "Talking Straight" that was done in only four days by a team of 12 student translators to beat another Chinese publisher. One problem: how to translate "pick-up truck." Another problem: copyright.

With some money in his pocket, he and a friend took their girlfriends to the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, the first major Western-style hotel in Beijing, for a drink. But it was 1985, and the hotel was trying to cater to foreign business people. Tian and his friends didn't look the part for such a hotel's clientele. In the lobby, they were asked for their passports and turned away.

"I was very humiliated," he recalls. "We were so angry. We had a beer in a small restaurant and my friend said, 'We have to make money and feel that we are something.' "

Eleven years later, after Tian came back from the United States, his friend called. The friend had made millions of dollars running a trading company that is now listed on a Chinese stock exchange. He said to Tian that they needed to go back to the Great Wall Sheraton.

"I said, 'This is stupid,' " Tian recalls. "He asked me what kind of car I had. I said, 'I drive a VW Jetta.' " The friend scoffed. "I said, 'We spend our money on computers instead of cars,' " Tian recalls. "He said he'd pick me up in his Mercedes 600." By that time, after the boom in the Chinese economy, the hotel was full of Chinese customers.

Tian and his friend were seated and treated like the other guests. But that wasn't good enough. "My friend called the manager and made a big fuss."

However, the earlier incident at the Great Wall Sheraton and some other embarrassing meetings with foreign businessmen convinced Tian that he needed to learn more about the West. So he took the standardized English test for foreign students and applied to schools in the United States.

And so, on to Lubbock, where he drove a pick-up for four years. In Lubbock, Tian said, the best hour of the day was sitting with a beer and watching public television's "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour."

But some of that bromegrass got under his skin. He was concerned about the environment and felt that he should follow in his parents' footsteps and make it his career. He felt a responsibility to the people at Texas Tech who had invested time and scholarship money in him. So he went to work for a year for something called the Green China project in Washington, D.C., but it didn't click. He still feels guilty about it.

"There are lots of hopeless battles for people who want to do environmental projects in China," Tian said. "One reason is that China doesn't allow real nongovernment organizations. Another is that industrialization and economic growth are the country's top priorities. But if we continue the current growth pattern there will be no way to avoid environmental disaster."

The solution: What else? The Internet. "The only way is to alter technology and alter the economic growth pattern," he said. "One fundamental problem is that the economy is built on energy, not on information."

In China, however, information has been treated as political propaganda, not as a marketable commodity. So the same equipment that Tian sells to make the Internet work faster, is also being used by the government to block access to sensitive Internet sites. Only those adroit with computers can still find ways to circumvent the electronic barriers.

Tian compares the Internet to the invention of the printing press. "People were afraid then too that information would not just be for the elite," he said. "People could read Confucius and get the wrong idea." Tian himself is still full of wonder about the Internet. He had a business meeting in San Jose; he booked a beach house online. He couldn't get home for his daughter's birthday, so he sent flowers by connecting to www.flowers.com. He sent a note: "Your daddy is building the Internet in China and you got this flower."

Like Tian, AsiaInfo is a strange hybrid.

In the early 1990s, a Chinese American in Dallas offered to give Tian money to start a company on condition that Tian return to China. "I said, that's exactly what I want," Tian recalls. So he started a company in Dallas designed to do business in China.

Because AsiaInfo is American, it has good access to technology. Because Tian is Chinese, it often has an edge on American companies competing for contracts. AsiaInfo buys equipment from giants like Cisco Systems Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., and it buys from smaller American software companies that don't know the Chinese market. Tian's company also has 170 of its own programmers finding software solutions for Chinese firms.

"If we bid against IBM, what's the difference we offer? We're small and they're big. We're three years old and they're 70 years old," Tian said. But, he added, "China is our only market. And one thing we represent is a new generation of Chinese companies and a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs."

Is he Chinese or American? "I really consider myself both. China gave me my birth and early education. America opened my mind and gave me the opportunity to start a company very easily. And it gave me the confidence about what a young man can accomplish."

China's values, he said, have changed. "We used to be such an idealistic society," Tian said. "After the Cultural Revolution, however, we believed in nothing. We were like the Beat Generation. I was one of them. Materialism became the natural choice for us."

Tian says most people feel their best days were at university and that he's trying to recreate a campus atmosphere at his company. He pays people $500 to $1,000 a month, plus that much again in retirement benefits, good wages by Chinese standards.

"We very forcefully want to create a new culture," he said. "In this changing environment and society, you can't rely on anybody. Only on ourselves."

When Tian worries about the future, he's not thinking about unrest, protests or political instability. He's not thinking about Mao, broken eggshells or even bromegrass. Asked about his biggest problem of the future: "management," he said.

"The market is no problem. The market is tremendous. But can you find enough personnel? How do you manage a high-growth company in China. Can we manage a $200 million or a $1 billion company? How can we transform from entrepreneurs to managers? That worries me."