Let's put on our businessman's hat and talk about the economics. I don't want us to just focus on geopolitics and sweep away what I think is the big elephant in the room: what the hell do we do about the economy? That's ultimately people's livelihood and what's really important to all of us at the end of the day. So from your standpoint, Joe, you're one of the most important businessmen in this region, if not the world, and you've seen it all. How are you handling this, especially from your perspective, not any specifics, but generally from the perspective of a new factor introduced into this whole situation? How do you see this? How do you work your company in the midst of what we have discussed up to now?
Yeah, Victor, thank you so much for the question. And I do want to thank CFI for giving me the opportunity to exchange views in front of such distinguished guests and also a very distinguished panel here. Before I address your question, Victor, I do want to echo something that President Tadic has said about the lack of communication and lack of understanding. I'm from Taiwan, I was born and raised in Taiwan with parents originally from China. Henry Kissinger once said that before the normalization of relationships between the United States and China, the two countries met 160 times on the issue of Taiwan, and there have been three joint communiqués on that particular issue. So I have to ask today: people that are in the American government, how many of them actually understand this history and have read the communiqués? I'm saying that because a lot of people really have to go back to history. I think it's quite relevant that we're going back to 45 years of history. But before I address the technology questions specifically, the 45 years has been relevant to Alibaba for the last 25 years. I can't say 45 because we've only existed for 25 years, founded in 1999. In fact, the first website that Alibaba developed was in English. It was back in 1999, really on the cusp of China entering the WTO in 2001. Thanks to Ambassador Barshefsky, who worked so hard to make that happen, Alibaba flourished because of the WTO, because you literally have millions and millions of small businesses and small factories in China that can now directly export to the United States and to the rest of the world. And since those days, China has evolved from being a manufacturing base to now also the world's largest consumer market. Again, you think Alibaba is a consumer shopping website because of Taobao, but we didn't start Taobao until 10 years after we started that import-export website. So I've tracked the development of China's development, which very much supports and underlies the development of Alibaba today. And about American companies: 880,000 American companies doing business in China, and 90% of them are profitable. The last time I checked, American companies make over $10 billion US dollars of operating profits in China. There's a very, very good symbiotic relationship between China and the United States. So that's the backdrop from my own Alibaba experience. Your question about technology is actually one of the most difficult issues to address, because technology has become the flash point of tension. From the US perspective, they're fearful that technology would drive further economic gains from China. From China's perspective, all the restrictions that have been put in place today, for example export restrictions on high-end chips and things like that, is really an excuse to slow down China. So both sides have very different perspectives on the same issue. What I think needs to be done is, rather than focusing on technology as the flash point, I hope that the next set of conversations between China and the United States can focus on some of the multilateral issues. We have trouble spots in the world: there's Russia-Ukraine, there's Israel-Iran. In those areas, both countries have common interests. If the conversation can start with people getting together and figuring out how to resolve some of these hot conflicts, rather than focusing on the trade or technology restrictions as bilateral issues, I think maybe there are trouble spots in the world that are even more important to resolve than focusing on these flash points.
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