The photo that changed history

A NEW book about the life of Jack Ma has revealed a little-known story of how an Australian family helped set the Chinese billionaire on the path to founding e-commerce giant Alibaba.

In Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, which goes on sale tomorrow, author Duncan Clark reveals how in 1980, electrical engineer and Communist sympathiser Ken Morley took his family on holiday to the recently opened up China.

It was while in Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang that Ken’s son David met the young Jack Ma, then known as Ma Yun, by a lake.

“I remember the day we met him very well,” Mr Morley, who now runs a yoga studio in Newcastle, told The Australian Financial Review.

“I had gone down to the West Lake in Hangzhou to flick matches and this boy came up to me who could speak English.”

Ma decided at an early age he wanted to learn English, so would ride his bike to a nearby hotel to practice on foreigners by offering free tours.

Many he kept in touch with — one American tourist, whose husband and father shared the name ‘Jack’, suggested Ma Yun take the name for himself to help make contacts.

After meeting up the following day to play frisbee, the scrawny teenager became penpals with the Morleys. Morley senior helped teach Ma English by returning his letters with corrections, along with a letter of his own.

Over the three decades the families remained close, with Ken visiting most years to help at the university where Ma taught English. He even helped buy his first apartment in Hangzhou, outside Shanghai.

In 1985, the family brought Ma to Australia for his first-ever overseas trip. “We did all the usual things like go to Taronga Park Zoo,” Mr Morley told the AFR.

In late 2004, Ma made a special trip to visit Morley senior just before his death, and then sent a “very heartfelt letter” that was read out at his funeral. “I think dad saw something in him,” Mr Morley said.

Ma, who was famously rejected from nearly every job he applied for including KFC, would go on to become China’s richest man and among the top 20 richest people in the world.

In 2014, Alibaba’s $US25 billion IPO was the largest global public listing in history.
An adviser to Ma in the early days of the company — he first met Ma in 1999 in the small apartment where he founded the online juggernaut — Clark offers an insiders’ perspective of the rise of former teacher.

“Jack has this ability to make you feel that he’s speaking to you, even in a room with a few thousand people. You feel yourself swept along,” Clark told The Wall Street Journal.

“I often find it interesting when Jack is speaking to turn and see the people he’s speaking to. I’ve seen grown investors cry. He does it in English as well as Chinese.”
Asked how he managed to track down the younger Morley for the book, Clark said he “started calling these random David Morleys in Australia”. “In one part of New South Wales, there was this yoga studio,” he said. “I emailed the website, and he’s like, ‘Yep, that’s me. How can I help?’”

Clark highlighted the irony of the story. “Ken Morley was a Communist,” he said.
“He was a union organiser who had brought his family here [to China] in 1980 to visit the socialist paradise. The irony of this — Ken himself had said he may have created this capitalist icon, but it wasn’t his intention. But he has a lot of affection for Jack.”