Even before China’s annual “Internet summit” got underway here, Charles Zhang, the stylish founder of the Web portal Sohu.com, was holding court in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel, standing before a crush of reporters and television cameras.Soon after, two other Chinese Internet superstars, William Ding, the 34-year-old chief executive of Netease.com, and Ma Huateng, also 34, the founder of Tencent.com, made their way toward the hotel’s grand ballroom, pursued like a pair of rock stars.Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com and the host of this one-day conference, said the night before he had turned 40. His dinner guests that evening were Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, and Bill Clinton, who addressed the Internet forum.In a country where Internet use is exploding and another Bill — Bill Gates — is widely admired, about 600 people packed a Hyatt ballroom last Saturday afternoon to listen to some of the nation’s young Internet millionaires talk about the future.“These are the Internet legends of China,” said Ho Ben, 28, the general manager of a toy company that sources online goods through Alibaba.com, China’s largest business-to-business Web site. “I’m a great admirer of these guys, not only because they’ve made our lives different but because they’ve made our business much easier.”Ma — the architect of China’s biggest Internet deal this year, a partnership with Yahoo — convened this annual gathering of some of China’s largest Internet companies to discuss the state of the business.This year, it seems, China’s small cadre of Internet moguls has many reasons to celebrate. America’s largest Internet companies and venture capital firms are now flocking to invest here. The biggest deal came early last month, when Yahoo agreed to invest $1 billion in the six-year-old Alibaba.com. As part of the deal, Yahoo even agreed to hand over its Yahoo China operations to Ma, who is considered one of China’s Internet pioneers.Last month also brought the spectacular Nasdaq debut of Baidu.com, China’s biggest search engine company. Its shares soared on their first day of trading in one of the most successful initial public stock offerings since the end of the Internet bubble in 2000 and 2001. EBay has also made big moves, acquiring China’s biggest online auction company, Eachnet.com, and promising to invest $100 million in China this year.Much of the excitement has been ignited by reports that there are now more than 100 million Internet users here, ranking China second only to the US. And with Internet use growing at a phenomenal pace, up from about two million users in 1998, venture capital firms are descending upon China, hoping to find the next Yahoo, Google or eBay.This year’s summit, however, was partly overshadowed by reports last week that Yahoo had provided information that helped authorities in China sentence a Chinese journalist to 10 years in prison for leaking “state secrets” to a foreign website.Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, declined to discuss details of the case, in which the 37-year-old journalist sent anonymous e-mail messages to a website based in America, according to court documents. But Yang said Yahoo had no alternative other than to comply with Chinese law. “I don’t like the outcomes of what happens with these things, but we have to comply with the law,” he said. — NYT
