"The best time to buy umbrellas is when it's not raining." Those were the words
of a young businessman when the dot.com bubble burst was bringing disaster on
many like himself. He is like the best shoe salesman that an American company
sent to a primitive tribe. The salesman before him failed to sell anything. His
message to the company read: "hopeless. These people don't wear shoes." After
weeks of successful shoe selling the second salesman cabled: "wonderful. These
people don't wear shoes!"
You have heard of Amazon.com, Priceline,
E.bay and cheap tickets.com. I bet not many have heard of Alibaba Group. Just
because you haven't dealt with them should NOT make you skeptical of their reach
and power.
His name is Jack Ma or Ma Yun. He is a 50 year Chinese
entrepreneur who has been on the cover of Forbes. Ma was born in Hangzhou,
Zhejiang Province, China to a couple of cultural dancers. Poor? Yes, very. Ma
thought learning English would help him. A 45 minute daily bike ride took him to
a hotel to converse with foreigners. He guided them around the city for free to
practice English. Plenty of brains? Not particularly. He failed the entrance
exam twice for Hangzhou Teacher's Institute.
Don't laugh. Before
anyone in China understood the internet he persuaded companies to let him build
their web sites. Listen to Jack tell of his first attempt to convince buyers:
"the day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my
house. We waited three and a half hours and got half a page. We drank, watched
TV and played cards, waiting. I was so proud. I proved that the Internet
existed."
For a year he endured much frustration running an
information technology company: the government's China International Electronic
Commerce Center. In 1999 Jack started Alibaba. It's a business-to-business
site. We are talking 79 million members from more than 240 countries. How's that
for a Great Leap Forward? This is a company that forced EBay to close down in
China.
So just how well are they doing? In November 2012, Alibaba's
online transaction volume exceeded $13 billion. 320 million shares of Alibaba
are about to flood the market. Some investors are selling shares of other stocks
to buy Alibaba shares. Speaking of the "Alibaba Effect" a commentator wrote:
"Alibaba is selling 320.1 million shares, which means it could raise as much as
$21.8 billion, which would top Visa’s record-breaking IPO of $17.9 billion in
March 2008."
Stop thinking of China as a backward, communism
dominated, third world country. In recent years I have understood the power of a
prophecy that may well link China to the end times scenario. Revelation 16 verse
12 "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great Euphrates River, and it
dried up so that the kings from the east could march their armies toward the
west without hindrance. " Is that first century language for road preparations
going on in China today? The great western highway has already reached
Afghanistan. Roads in the "300 series" stretch from west to east (e.g., from
Lhasa in Tibet through to Dandong in Liaoning province)
The bible
says a 200 million strong army will march into the Middle East. This
unbelievable army, comprised of an unprecedented number of men, will possess the
firepower capable of killing one-third of all the inhabitants of the Earth! How
many soldiers does China alone have under arms? One and a half million. They
have 618 million ready for active duty to draw upon. Never before has a military
of this size been possible.
China has an awesome triad: numbers,
brains and wealth. A healthy respect for her should infuse our military
planners. Jack Mas are arising yearly. Even if they invented nothing, their
ability to translate modern technology into mass use is staggering. To my mind China is indeed one of the "Kings of the East" in Bible prophecy. The remaining riddle is as to why it would be in the national interest to invade the Middle east with that size army. Such is reading prophecy. It makes full sense only when the time has come.
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