China’s Singles Day is an annual frenzy of online consumerism that ranks as one of the wonders of the modern commercial world. The 24-hour sale far outstrips Black Friday in the US, on which it was modelled.
中国的“光棍节”(Singles Day)成了网上消费的年度狂欢节，可算是现代商业世界的一项奇迹。其24小时的销售额远超美国黑色星期五(Black Friday)——其模仿的对象。
Last year, Chinese and international superstars including Scarlett Johansson and David Beckham were enlisted to generate a buzz. Singles Day racked up $17.8bn of sales generating some 467m parcels, more than five times more than US consumers spent on Black Friday.
去年，包括斯嘉丽?约翰逊(Scarlett Johansson)、大卫?贝克汉姆(David Beckham)在内的一些中外巨星受邀为光棍节造势。光棍节当天销售额达178亿美元，生成约4.67亿个包裹，是美国消费者在黑色星期五支出的5倍以上。
The man behind this extravaganza is far from the showman you might expect. Daniel Zhang, the chief executive of Alibaba who developed the concept in 2009, is a mild-mannered, bespectacled accountant who speaks in a quiet hush in a Berlin hotel lobby on a swing through Europe.
这场狂欢背后的男人却不是你可能以为的那个爱出风头的人。现任阿里巴巴(Alibaba)首席执行官的张勇(Daniel Zhang)于2009年提出了这一构想。他戴着一副眼镜，性格温和，说话轻声细语，正在欧洲周游的他在柏林一间酒店大堂里接受了采访（见题图）。
Mr Zhang was chief financial officer of Taobao, Alibaba’s online shopping site, when the company was looking to expand into the business-to-consumer market. In Alibaba’s fluid management structure, he took responsibility for the project and launched Tmall, as the B2C business is called, on November 11, or Singles Day.
张勇曾是阿里巴巴在线购物网站淘宝(Taobao)的首席财务官，当时阿里巴巴正寻求进军B2C市场。在阿里巴巴的非固定管理架构中，张勇是该项目的负责人，并推出了天猫(Tmall)这一B2C业务。
“If people are single, they must be alone, so we should give them some shopping fun on Singles Day,” he says.
张勇说：“单身的人肯定是孤独的，所以我们应该在光棍节给他们一些购物乐趣。”
The concept has grown at a startling rate, like so much else in China’s freewheeling internet market, which has grown from 137m users in 2006 to 731m last year. Retailers offer big discounts on a wide array of goods and consumers save for months to snap up self-indulgent treats, ranging from Buddha-shaped pears to cars. Mr Zhang, however, says he restricts himself to buying jackets and shirts.
就像狂野生长的中国互联网市场的其他众多事物一样——中国网民从2006年的1.37亿增至去年的7.31亿——光棍节概念以惊人的速度成长起来。在光棍节，零售商对大量商品提供了大幅折扣，消费者们节省数月只为抢购心仪商品，包括形如佛像的梨、汽车等。不过张勇表示他限制自己只许买外套和衬衫。
The real showman at Alibaba is the company’s super-charged founder, Jack Ma, who has turned the Hangzhou-based start-up into a multinational empire with more than 500m users in some 200 countries. In 2014, Alibaba became the biggest stock market flotation in the world when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of $167.6bn. Today, it boasts a market capitalisation of about $380bn.
阿里巴巴真正爱出风头的人是该公司精力充沛的创始人马云(Jack Ma)，他已经将这家总部位于杭州的初创公司发展成了一家跨国企业，在200来个国家拥有逾5亿用户。2014年，阿里巴巴在纽约证券交易所( New York Stock Exchange)上市，市值达1676亿美元，创全球最大上市纪录。现在其市值约为3800亿美元。
Mr Ma has outlined even more ambitious plans: hitting 2bn users within 20 years and creating a global online commercial platform to promote a new model of trade, called Globalisation 2.0. While Mr Ma tours the world touting his vision to the likes of US president Donald Trump, Mr Zhang is entrusted with delivering Alibaba’s strategic ambition.
马云描绘了更宏伟的蓝图：20年内用户达到20亿，打造一个全球网络商务平台，以推动一个被称为“全球化2.0”(Globalisation 2.0)的新的贸易模式。当马云周游世界，向美国总统唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)这样的对象兜售其愿景时，张勇则被托付了实现阿里巴巴战略目标的责任。
“Jack Ma is a guy with many ideas. He is very, very creative,” says Mr Zhang. “But I’m the guy who always wants to put my foot on the ground.”
张勇说：“马云是一个点子很多的人。他非常非常有创意。而我这个人总想要脚踏实地。”
Outlining the three main means to achieve the company’s goals, Mr Zhang says Alibaba will continue to expand internationally; move more deeply into the offline world; and squeeze extra value out of its vast data assets.
张勇概述了实现公司目标的三大途径，他表示阿里巴巴将继续进军国际；更深入线下市场；并从其庞大的数据资产中汲取额外价值。
The first goal involves bringing the rest of the world’s products to China and Chinese products to the rest of the world. To that end, Mr Zhang visited Vinexpo in Bordeaux in June, where Alibaba has been working with French winemakers. As he sees it, Vinexpo has a physical platform, Alibaba has a virtual platform. Together, they can form a powerful combination.
第一个方面涉及将全球其他地区的产品带到中国，和将中国产品带到全球其他地区。张勇于6月份参加了法国波尔多的国际葡萄酒及烈酒展览会(Vinexpo)，阿里巴巴一直与当地多家酒庄有合作。在他看来，Vinexpo拥有实体平台，而阿里巴巴拥有虚拟平台，两者结合可以形成一个强大的组合。
“Selling wine online is not simple. You have to get a lot of input from the wineries, from the chateaux, from the families who have been in the business for so many years. Then bring this culture from France to China,” he says.
他说：“在线卖葡萄酒并非易事。你必须从酿酒厂、酒庄以及浸淫该行业多年的家族那里大量进货。然后把这种酒文化从法国带到中国。”
The company is fixated on expansion in China, aiming to connect the online and the offline world. Long before Amazon snapped up Whole Foods, Alibaba had been buying bricks-and-mortar retail stores, enabling the company to track consumers from one realm to the other. Mr Zhang says China’s online retail market accounts for about 15 per cent of total sales. “It’s all about how to transform the remaining 85 per cent into digital,” he says.
阿里巴巴把焦点放在了在中国的扩张上，立志要连接线上和线下市场。早在亚马逊收购全食(Whole Foods)之前，阿里巴巴已经在收购实体零售商店，从而实现对消费者从一个活动领域到另一个活动领域的追踪。张勇表示，中国的在线零售市场约占零售总售额的15%。他说：“关键就是怎么将剩下的85%转化为数字销售。”
But it would be wrong, in Mr Zhang’s view, to describe Alibaba as an ecommerce platform. The company’s core strength is becoming clear as it sucks up data through its mobile super-apps, which cover shopping, entertainment, finance and social networking.
但张勇认为将阿里巴巴称为电子商务平台是不对的。该公司的核心力量越来越明显，它正在通过覆盖了购物、娱乐、金融和社交网络的移动端超级应用程序来获取数据。
“We are positioning ourselves as a data company,” he says. “We have half a billion customers with us with shopping intentions and a method to pay. We know who they are, what they want, what they hate.”
他说：“我们将自己定位为数据公司。我们有5亿个有购物意图和一种支付方式的用户。我们知道他们是谁，他们想要什么，他们讨厌什么。”
This data revolution has enabled Alibaba to create personal credit profiles, known as Sesame scores, for most of its users. In turn, that has facilitated the development of unrelated new businesses, such as Mobike bicycle hire, which assumes that those with high Sesame scores are trustworthy enough not to pay a deposit. But it has also led to privacy concerns as the government uses the data, too.
这一数据革命让阿里巴巴能够为大多数用户创建了个人信用档案，即“芝麻信用”。这进而促进了无关的新业务的发展，例如摩拜(Mobike)自行车租赁，后者假设芝麻信用分高的用户足以信赖，无须支付押金。但由于这些数据也被政府使用，因此也引发了隐私问题。
Mr Zhang has a formidable path ahead of him if he is to realise Mr Ma’s vast ambitions. But he appears unflappable about the challenges and has grown used to accidental events.
张勇若要实现马云的雄心壮志，等待他的是一条艰难的道路。但是面对挑战他似乎毫不慌张，而且已经习惯于意外事件。
In 1995, as a freshly minted finance graduate in Shanghai, Mr Zhang was set to join Barings, the British bank. Then the rogue trader Nick Leeson’s huge losses triggered the bank’s collapse. A spell at Arthur Andersen ended when the accounting firm was hit by the Enron scandal and Chinese operations were subsumed into PwC. Mr Zhang later gained experience working at Shanda, the online gaming company run by one of China’s richest businessmen, Chen Tianqiao.
1995年的上海，刚从金融专业毕业的张勇本准备加入英国巴林银行(Barings Bank)，却赶上流氓交易员尼克?里森(Nick Leeson)造成的巨额亏损连累这家银行倒闭。他在安达信会计师事务所(Arthur Andersen)的职业生涯又因这家事务所受安然丑闻打击、中国业务被并入普华永道而终结。张勇后来进入中国网游公司盛大工作，该公司的经营者陈天桥是中国最富有的商人之一。

Mr Ma’s outsized personality and the lure of working in such a fast-changing world won him over and he joined Alibaba in 2007. But Mr Zhang still commutes to his home city of Shanghai at weekends to see his family. “I’m single in Hangzhou, that’s why I can spend so much time on work,” he laughs.
马云非凡的人格魅力以及在这样一个快速变化的领域工作的诱惑，赢得了张勇的青睐，他于2007年加入了阿里巴巴。不过张勇每到周末仍会回上海看望家人。他笑道：“我在杭州是单身汉，所以才能将大把时间花在工作上。”
The observer
观察员
Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, says Mr Zhang’s skills, experience, and temperament have complemented those of Mr Ma. “He is the necessary adjunct of Jack,” Mr Clark says. “He has a lot of street cred internally having built up Tmall. And as a finance guy he has the ability to speak to investors.
《阿里巴巴：马云的基业》(Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built)一书的作者邓肯?克拉克(Duncan Clark)称张勇的才能、经验和性情都刚好补充了马云的。“他是马云必不可少的臂助。把天猫做大为他在公司内部赢得了大量口碑。而且作为一名财务人员，他有与投资者交流的能力。
“Daniel does not seek the limelight. But the culture within Alibaba is very much the smart boffin types. They do not always look like corporate titans.”
“张勇并不爱出风头。不过阿里巴巴的内部文化也基本属于技术牛人那类。他们并不总是像企业巨人。”