Alibaba To Train a Million Youngsters In E-commerce

An anonymous reader writes: Alibaba has announced its plans to train a million teenagers and graduates living in rural areas of China to kick-start their own businesses. The Chinese e-commerce giant reached an agreement today with the China Communist Youth League to support the teenagers with funding, training and partnerships. The company's internet financing branch Ant Financial will set aside 1 billion yuan to invest in the training of recent college graduates who want to return to their home-towns and launch businesses.

So the Young Communist League...

[Nova Express]

...is supporting grass roots capitalism.

Somewhere in the afterlife she didn't believe in, Ayn Rand must be smiling...

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[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese Communism is more Chinese than Communist, every form of Chinese government is always more Chinese than anything else. In effect this is the same as China has always done, e.g. allowing military assets to be used for other activities.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Ayn Rand must be smiling...

So are the Russians

Ayn Rand was Russian. She was born in St Petersburg.

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[dbIII]

Since she accused Twentieth Century Fox of being communists she already couldn't tell the difference.
It's fiction, but I suggest reading Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes" to get an idea of what sort of society Rand really wanted us to go back to.

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[Maritz]

No doubt you think you're making some kind of brilliant point. Hilarious.

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[castionsosa]

It might just be useful, especially if oil/gas prices skyrocket making transportation of goods prohibitively expensive. Having stuff made locally/regionally can not just cut down on shipping, it can add to customization, although it is hard to beat economies of scale that we have now, but with advances in metal sintering, and machines that can sinter, then machine (additive/subtractive), it may be cheaper just to make specialty parts nearby.

I wouldn't scoff at China. During 2008, when the economy tanked,

Just in time for AI to make the exercise pointless

[Daniel Matthews]

Why is there a need for people to do this work? How many online shops selling the same thing using images and advertising materials ripped off each other do we need? Call me cynical but this really just looks like party insiders finding yet another way to bleed millions out of a "plump pig" and the flow of money will mostly go into far fewer pockets than people imagine.

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[ShanghaiBill]

How many online shops selling the same thing using images and advertising materials ripped off each other do we need?

The Chinese do the same thing in the off-line world. It is common to see an entire street of tiny shops, all selling the exact same merchandise. Since the shops are tiny, they can only offer a very limited selection. Since the neighboring shops are all selling the exact same selection, they can only compete on price, so they are all selling for a few cents over their cost, and making almost no profit.

Of course it would make sense for them to consolidate into a single large shop, with higher prices and mu

Sounds Like a Plan

[CrashNBrn]

Now if only there were some enterprising companies like that in North America, I'm sure I could get my business off the ground for $153.
(1billion yuan, 153,000,000 USD, 1 million students...)

like the Alibaba namesake

[frovingslosh]

Alibaba is a company based on the concept of cheating the American devil of as much as they can. Now they are going to train 1,000,000 more Chinese in "E-commerce". What could go wrong?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate freedom?

This is actually a great opportunity for everyone

[einar.petersen]

Actually a lot of the posters here should be rejoicing. In my experience Chinese youngsters in general are extremely good at selling stuff online, this could be a great boon for American companies/brands as export of American goods and good news for any other country as well. A lot of young Chinese today are engaged in selling to the ever growing Chinese middle class, and you might just find that export of your product might as well happen to small players as to a few big corporations that won't pay you mo

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[Anonymous Coward]

50 cents for you, comrade, but with a formal warning for not using Western style paragraph breaks.

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[einar.petersen]

Would be nice to see who was throwing accusations in the air, but I suppose when flinging unfounded mud and sowing fear uncertainty and doubt it is difficult to show your true face hence people may see you for what you truly are. I have never given a hoot for rules and regulation in writing, so your paragraph grammar fudding is completely off the mark, sorry that you live with such a limited world view that you can't see an opportunity staring you right in the face! I have mentioned nothing political pro

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[einar.petersen]

Funny... But don't quit your day job you are not quite ready for prime time comedy yet !

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[castionsosa]

Encouraging startups is just good business. Eventually something will turn out that will revolutionize things, and this project might just move the world technical design mantle from the US to China, similar to how in the 1990s, so many startups popped up, most failed... but a lot still remained which gave useful products.

One of the biggest problems in the US is that there is a failure to understand that eating your seed corn is stupid. You have to plant crops in order to expect a meaningful harvest later

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the few cogent comment in the entire discussion (at least when I loaded the page). We're conditioned from birth in the West to believe that the Chinese aren't capable of doing anything right. Depending on which generation you were born into, either it was starving children, the red scare, or Chinese knock-offs and their own mistakes as they begin to figure out how to build their own cars and infrastructure.

That hubris is good and all--that the West is pinnacle of human civilization and that