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141-489: Jack Ma Yun ( Chinese : 马云 ; pinyin : Mǎ Yún ; born 10 September 1964) is a Chinese business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of Alibaba Group , a multinational technology conglomerate. In addition, Ma is also the co-founder of Yunfeng Capital , a Chinese private equity firm . As of February 2024, with a net worth of $ 25.6 billion, Ma is the seventh-wealthiest person in China, as well as

282-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where

423-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and

564-473: A $ 1 billion investment in upfront capital for the potential purpose of expanding Alibaba's corporate operations. Since 1999, Ma served as the executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which has remained one of China's most prominent high-technology holding companies in the two decades since it inception presiding over nine major subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall , eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com , AliExpress.com , and Alipay . At

705-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and

846-557: A Comprehensive Qualification Report based on the student's performance and social activity. The result of the Qualifying Examination and the Report would be given to the college as a reference when admitting. Failed students have three chances to take makeup examinations. Chemistry, biology, geography and history examinations are held in the summer of senior one; Chinese, mathematics, English, physics, politics examinations took places in

987-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese

1128-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of

1269-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of

1410-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only

1551-485: A foreign language. The subjects taken in the Examination affected the degree Examination, or implemented flexible systems for selecting the subjects to be tested, resulting in a number of different systems. A multi-phased reform was announced in 2014 and was slated to be completed by 2025. As a pilot examination system used in order to promote education system reform, this examination system was implemented in most parts of

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1692-719: A fortune of US$ 25.2 billion. As of November 2024, Ma's net worth was US$ 25.2 billion, according to Forbes . Ma was born in Hangzhou , Zhejiang, on 10 September 1964, as Ma Yun . He became interested in learning the English language as a young boy and began practicing it with English-speaking visitors who frequented the Hangzhou International Hotel. At the age of 12, Ma bought a pocket radio and began listening to English radio stations frequently. For nine years, Ma rode 27 km (17 miles) on his bicycle every day to work as

1833-489: A joint venture to offer a digital wallet service in Hong Kong. Ma announced on 10 September 2018, that he would step down as executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding in the coming year. Ma denied reports that he was forced to step aside by the Chinese government and stated that he wants to focus on philanthropy through his foundation. Daniel Zhang would then lead Alibaba as the current executive chairman. Ma stepped down from

1974-411: A knack for leading and employing specialists of expert ability from every conceivable technical domain. At a press conference in 2010, Ma made clear with regards to the lack of his technical expertise by revealing to the public that he had never written a line of computer code , nor had ever made one sale to a customer, and that he only acquired a personal computer to do business with for the first time at

2115-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as

2256-584: A pawn shop mentality and criticized the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly." On 3 November 2020, the Shanghai Stock Exchange halted Ant Group's IPO. According to Chinese bankers and officials, financial stability was the objective behind the intervention. Ant Group had sought to maintain a position as a technology company, although it was deriving approximately 90% of its revenue from financial services. This position brought it into conflict with

2397-466: A period of two or three days, depending on the provincial administrative regions where it is held. All students must take exams on Chinese and mathematics . Candidates can choose one subject from English , French , Japanese , Russian , German , or Spanish for the foreign language portion of the exam, with most students selecting English. Students must also choose between either the Arts track ( 文科倾向 ) or

2538-566: A record high of 9.5 million people applied for tertiary education entry in China. Of these, 8.8 million (93%) took the national entrance exam and 27,600 (0.28%) were exempted ( 保送 ) if the students demonstrate exceptional merit in the quality of their work and understanding of the academic subject. Out of the 9.5 million applicants, 5,460,500 (57.48%) were admitted to universities or colleges. Everyone else (700,000 students) took other standardized entrance exams, such as those designed for adult education students. In 2017, 9.40 million students took

2679-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate

2820-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin

2961-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with

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3102-505: A speech that criticized Chinese financial regulators for putting too much priority in minimizing risk. In 2019, Forbes Magazine named Ma in its list of "Asia's 2019 Heroes of Philanthropy" for his humanitarian and philanthropic work supporting underprivileged communities in China, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. In 2024, Jack Ma ranked 8th in Forbes "China’s 100 Richest 2023" list with

3243-449: A tech company, increasing fears of a bubble. Ma made a public appearance again on 20 January 2021, speaking via video link to a group of rural teachers at a charitable event, the annual Rural Teacher Initiative. In November 2022, Ma was reportedly living a low profile life in Tokyo , Japan, for nearly six months, and occasionally traveling abroad. In March 2023, photos and videos of Ma touring

3384-506: A technology company or operate as an independent technology entrepreneur on his own. Even though Ma's formal educational background and extensive training was in English rather than in a technical subject, his dearth of technical expertise did not deter him from being able to competitively distinguish himself from the quintessential Chinese technology mogul. As Ma with his distinct profile stands out among his entrepreneurial contemporaries throughout

3525-621: A total of a $ 25 million foreign venture seed capital from the American investment bank, Goldman Sachs and the Japanese investment management conglomerate SoftBank . The program was expected to improve the domestic Chinese e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for online Chinese enterprises to establish a presence for themselves to compete, especially fostering the growth of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as addressing challenges surrounding China's entrance into

3666-506: A tour guide of Hangzhou for foreigners in order to practice his English. He became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name. When Ma was 13 years old, he was forced to transfer to Hangzhou No. 8 Middle School as he kept getting in fights. In his primary school days, Ma struggled scholastically, and it took two years for him to gain acceptance at an ordinary Chinese high school, as he only got 31 points in mathematics on

3807-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c.  1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct

3948-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than

4089-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which

4230-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of

4371-414: Is an adherent of both Buddhism and Taoism . On 24 September 2014, in an interview with Taobao , Ma attributed the strength of American society to the country being rooted in its Judeo-Christian heritage and expressed his belief in the importance for China to implement a positive value system in order to overcome the aftermath and legacy of the bygone Cultural Revolution . In 2017, Ma advocated for

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4512-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,

4653-492: Is graded variously across the country. In the winter of the year before the examination year, students are required to register for the examination. The registration is usually completed on the official website of the provincial academy of educational recruitment and examination, and examinees are required to fill out an online form, which includes name, gender, date of birth, identification number, address, domicile, political status, school, phone number, and other information about

4794-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of

4935-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate

5076-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles

5217-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,

5358-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because

5499-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for

5640-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it

5781-466: Is usually 750. Generally, the exam takes place from 7 to 8 June every year, though in some provinces it can last for an extra day. The Gaokao has been delayed on rare occasions, most notably due to the COVID-19 pandemic . The first Gaokao was held on 15-17 August 1952. The unified national tertiary entrance examination marked the start of the reform of National Matriculation Tests Policies (NMTP) in

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5922-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while

6063-684: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system

6204-558: The China International Electronic Commerce Center , a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation . In 1999, he quit and returned to Hangzhou with his team to establish Alibaba, a Hangzhou-based business-to-business marketplace site in his apartment with a group of 18 friends. He started a new round of venture development with 500,000 yuan. In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba won

6345-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in

6486-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with

6627-579: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and

6768-633: The New York Stock Exchange . As of 2016, Ma is the owner of Château de Sours in Bordeaux, Chateau Guerry in Côtes de Bourg and Château Perenne in Blaye, Côtes de Bordeaux. On 9 January 2017, Ma met with United States president-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower , to discuss the potential of 1 million job openings in the following five years through the expansion of the presence of Alibaba's business interests in

6909-453: The People's Bank of China (PBOC), which since 2018 had sought to regulate Ant Group as a financial holding company. After Ant Group filed for its IPO, PBOC had issued draft guidelines stating that it would regulate companies such as Ant Group as financial services companies, not tech companies. During the IPO, financial regulators became even more concerned about Ant Group due to its high valuation as

7050-677: The Science track ( 理科倾向 ). Students who choose the Arts track receive further testing in History , Political Science , and Geography ( 文科综合 ), while those who choose the Science track are tested in Physics , Chemistry , and Biology ( 理科综合 ). The overall score received by the student is a weighted sum of their subject marks. The maximum possible score varies from year to year and from province to province, although it

7191-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c.  1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded

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7332-591: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at

7473-662: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Gaokao The Gaokao lasts approximately nine hours for

7614-419: The 1980s captured Ma's attention. This led him into the realm of internet entrepreneurship where he embarked on establishing his first business in 1994, subsequently resulting in the formation of a second company upon acquiring a deeper understanding of the internet's emergence and the promising commercial prospects it offered. From 1998 to 1999, he resigned from China Telecommunications Corporation, later starting

7755-498: The 2018 students. This system gives students a wider choice on what subjects they are being tested on comparing to "3+X" system, but limits students' choice against the "3+3" system. By 2024, most regions of the country would implement the system as the successor of their "3+X" system. To promise the legitimacy of the Grading Exam courses, the final scores of the four courses were transferred to band scores before they were counted into

7896-504: The 45th wealthiest person in the world, ranked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . Born in Hangzhou , Zhejiang, Ma earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English upon graduating from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988. He became an English lecturer and international trade lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University following graduation. The rise and expansion of the software and personal-computer industries during

8037-483: The Academic Proficiency Examination for Senior High School Students (普通高中学业水平合格性考试), unofficially called "Huikao (会考)", including 12 subjects students learned in senior high school. The examination are always very simple to pass. Their results are credited as "qualified" and "failed", "qualified" accounts for 97% of the total number of examination and "failed" accounts 3% of the total, in the end hand in

8178-518: The Alibaba Group with his colleagues in 1999. The company was initially founded as a B2B e-commerce marketplace website, yet the company later expanded into a wide range of industry domains across the Chinese economy. In 2017, Ma was ranked second in the annual "World's 50 Greatest Leaders" list by Fortune . He has widely been considered as an informal global ambassador in Chinese business circles, and has continued to remain an influential figure in

8319-438: The Chinese business community and scene of startup companies . In September 2018, he announced that he would retire from Alibaba and pursue educational work, philanthropy, and environmental causes; the following year, Daniel Zhang succeeded him as executive chairman. In 2020, the Chinese government stopped plans for an IPO called for the digital payment solutions company Ant Group , a company that he founded, after he delivered

8460-753: The Chinese high school entrance exam. In 1980, while he was riding his bike to practice English with tourists, he met Ken Morley, who was traveling with his family with the Australia-China Friendship Society. Ken's son, David, became pen pals with Ma and kept in touch after the family left China. Years later, the Morleys hosted Ma in Australia, changing the course of his life completely. Ma later said: "Those 29 days in Newcastle were crucial in my life. Without those 29 days, I would never have been able to think

8601-442: The Chinese high-technology industry, many of whom typically have a foundational background in computer engineering and science as part of their formal academic training and educational makeup. Instead, Ma parlayed his educational background to use in an entrepreneurial context by fashioning himself as a promoter, businessman, manager, administrator, and organizer who possessed the soft skills , emotional capacity , and personality with

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8742-401: The Chinese work practice known as the 996 working hour system . When asked in 2019 to give his views on the future, Ma again stated that 996 was currently a "huge blessing" necessary to achieve success, but went on to state that artificial intelligence technology might lead to a better life of leisure in the future, where people would only have to work four-hour work days, three days a week. At

8883-547: The Gaokao, 7 million of whom were admitted into colleges and/or universities. The percentage of first-class admission (Yi Ben (一本), deemed as good universities in China) varied from 9.48% to 30.5%, with the lowest admission rates in Henan province and Shanxi province , at less than 10%. Below are the changes of the exam scope in 2017 from 2016 (in most areas of China, where the students use

9024-558: The Internet and also started his first company, Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency ( 杭州海波翻譯社 , Hángzhōu Hǎibō Fānyì Shè ), an online Chinese translation agency. In early 1995, he travelled abroad to the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou municipal government with colleagues who had helped introduce him to the Internet. Although he found information related to beer from many countries, he

9165-510: The Internet had something great to offer. In April 1995, Ma and his business partner He Yibing (a computer instructor), opened the first office for China Pages, and Ma started their second company. On 10 May 1995, the pair registered the domain chinapages.com in the United States. Within a span of three years, China Pages cleared approximately 5,000,000 RMB in profit which at the time was equivalent to US$ 642,998 (approximately $ 1.18 million today). Ma began building websites for Chinese companies with

9306-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though

9447-779: The Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award for his work supporting underprivileged communities in China, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alibaba Foundation and Jack Ma Foundation launched various initiatives, some of which involved donating medical supplies to the United States as well as various countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

9588-533: The Ministry of Education and all the students across the country took identical examinations. However, reforms on the content and structure of the exam persisted, with one of the most salient issues being agency for individual provinces to customize their own exams. The Ministry of Education allowed the College Enrollment Office of Shanghai to employ an independent exam in 1985, which was the beginning of

9729-700: The Nationwide Exam Papers in Gaokao): Chinese Mathematics Foreign Language Physics Chemistry Biology Politics History Geography 9.75 million students attended Gaokao on 7-8 June with 7,909,900 or 81.13% being successful in being admitted to colleges or universities. Source: The number of higher education institutes in the People's Republic of China has risen annually since 1977. From 1999 to 2020,

9870-446: The United States. On 8 September 2017, to celebrate Alibaba's 18th year of its establishment, Ma appeared on stage and gave a Michael Jackson -inspired performance. He also performed a partial rendition of Elton John 's 1994 hit single Can You Feel The Love Tonight while being dressed up as a lead heavy metal singer at a 2009 Alibaba birthday event. In the same month, Ma also partnered with Hong Kong business tycoon, Sir Li Ka-shing in

10011-519: The World Trade Organization in 2001 . Eventually, Alibaba began to show signs of profitability three years later as Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system. Since 2003, Ma established Taobao Marketplace , Alipay , Ali Mama and Lynx. After the rapid rise of Taobao, American e-commerce giant eBay offered to purchase the company. However, Ma rejected their offer, instead garnering support from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang who offered

10152-601: The Yungu school in Hangzhou, China appeared on social media confirming the public appearance of the billionaire for the first time in several months. The school is funded by Alibaba and is located near the company's headquarters. He was reportedly persuaded to return from abroad by premier Li Qiang . In the same month, Alibaba Group turned into a holding company and its subsidiaries would separate into six independent firms; The Wall Street Journal reported on 30 March that Ma engineered this in talks with company CEO Daniel Zhang while he

10293-644: The adverse effects of hot weather on students living in southern China and possible flooding during the rainy season in July. Partial Provincial administrative units determine the schedule of the exams on 7 and 8 June. Under the Xi Jinping administration , some provinces have instituted reforms to eliminate extra points for ethnic minorities and students who exhibited "ideological and political correctness." Extra point schemes have been retained for Taiwanese students in an effort to lure them to mainland universities. In 2006,

10434-499: The age of 33. In 2011, it was announced that one of his companies had gained control of Alipay, formerly a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, so as to "comply with Chinese law governing payment companies in order to secure a license to continue operating Alipay. Numerous analysts reported that Ma sold Alipay to himself below market value without notifying the board of Alibaba Group or the other major owners Yahoo and Softbank, while Ma stated that Alibaba Group's board of directors were aware of

10575-470: The annual general meeting of shareholders for Alibaba.com in May 2010, Ma announced Alibaba Group would begin in 2010 to earmark 0.3% of annual revenue to environmental protection, particularly on water- and air-quality improvement projects. Of the future of Alibaba, he has said, "our challenge is to help more people to make healthy money, 'sustainable money', money that is not only good for themselves but also good for

10716-468: The availability of higher education in the Western world . Consequently, the examination is highly competitive, causing prospective examinees and their families to experience enormous pressure. For the majority of examinees, the exam is a watershed that divides two dramatically different lives. In 1970, less than 1% of Chinese people had attended higher education, and less than 1/1000 of the population of China

10857-450: The board of Alibaba on 1 October 2020. News outlets noted a lack of public appearances from Ma between October 2020 and January 2021, coinciding with a regulatory crackdown on his businesses. The Financial Times reported that the disappearance may have been connected to a speech given at the annual People's Bank of China financial markets forum, in which Ma criticized China's regulators and banks. Ma described state banks as operating with

10998-530: The candidate's band score. This system has been implemented in Shanghai and Zhejiang since the employment of comprehensive courses since September 2014. Since 2017, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Hainan have begun to use this program. The National Higher Education Entrance Examination is not uniform across the country, but administered uniformly within each province of China or each direct-controlled municipality . The National Higher Education Entrance Examination

11139-691: The chairman of the Hangzhou Federation of Students, with Ma having served in that capacity for two terms. In 1988, Ma earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Hangzhou Normal University. After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and international trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University . Ma also claims to have applied to Harvard Business School ten times consecutively, only to have ended up being rejected every time in spite of his persistent efforts. According to Ma's autobiographical speech, after graduating from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988, Ma applied for 31 different odd entry-level jobs and

11280-496: The company. The company's board also added another independent director. The Chinese government spoke positively of Ant Group's changes, including describing them as improvements in transparency and accountability. In early 2024, Ma replaced SoftBank as Alibaba's largest shareholder. In May 2023, Tokyo College, a research institute at the University of Tokyo , announced that Ma had been appointed visiting professor and would work at

11421-663: The context of the reforms of the National College Entrance Examination, this program will be suspended in Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong and Hainan provinces from 2020, and will be suspended in most provinces and cities in China from 2021. It will cease across Mainland China by 2022. The system was used in Zhejiang Province , with the last exam offered in 2016 to "Class-of-2013" (Chinese: 2013级, meaning admitted to senior high school in 2013, i.e., being Grade 10 in 2013) while "Class-of-2014" students have been taking

11562-604: The country, including Beijing City , Tianjin City , Hebei Province , Liaoning Province , Jilin Province , Heilongjiang Province , Anhui Province , Fujian Province , Guangdong Province , Jiangxi Province , Henan Province , Shandong Province , Hubei Province , Shaanxi Province , Sichuan Province , Guizhou Province , Yunnan Province , Shanxi Province , Chongqing City , Gansu Province , Qinghai Province , Inner Mongolia , Guangxi , Ningxia , Xinjiang and Tibet . However, within

11703-484: The course of his undergraduate studies. In recognition of his merits as evinced by his burgeoning academic achievements, Ma distinguished himself scholastically by consistently being ranked as among the top five students in Hangzhou Normal University's foreign language department due to the extensive English-language skills that he honed. He was also elected as the chairman of the student union and later became

11844-666: The death of Mao in September 1976. In late 1977, Deng Xiaoping , then under Hua Guofeng , the heir apparent of Mao, officially resumed traditional examinations based on academics, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, which has continued to the present day. The first such examination after the Cultural Revolution took place in late 1977. There was no limit on the age or official educational background of examinees. Consequently, most of

11985-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which

12126-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of

12267-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by

12408-571: The enrollment target for prospective majors in Hangzhou Normal University 's Department of English was not met, as some prospective students had the opportunity to be accepted and promoted into it, with Ma himself having ended up being promoted to the department's foreign language major. Having realized his aspirations to pursue higher education after enrolling at Hangzhou Normal University, Ma's academic performance began to improve substantially as he steadily achieved scholarly excellence over

12549-436: The entrance exam a third time in 1984. On his third attempt, Ma scored 89 points on the math section, marking a significant improvement from his previous two attempts. Nonetheless, the minimum benchmark entrance requirement would have rendered Ma ineligible to be accepted into university, since his score was five points below the standardized minimum threshold for him to qualify. However, Ma's academic fortunes would change since

12690-489: The environment and public health. In 2008, Alibaba donated $ 808,000 to victims of the Sichuan earthquake. In 2009 Jack Ma became a trustee of The Nature Conservancy's China program, and in 2010 he joined the global Board of Directors of the organization. In 2015, Alibaba launched a nonprofit organization, Alibaba Hong Kong Young Entrepreneurs Foundation, which supports Hong Kong entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses. In

12831-430: The exam: In the spring before Gaokao, examinees participate in school-organized medical examinations, in order to find diseases that affect future majors. For example, students with myopia are not allowed to apply for military schools, and colorblind students won't be admitted by medical professions. It is also noting that "have a high school diploma or equivalent" requires students to firstly take Qualifying Examination of

12972-889: The examination and admission. The form requires students to choose elective-mandatory subjects they elected. Three subjects are universally mandatory: Chinese , Mathematics , and a foreign language — usually English , but this may be substituted by Russian , Japanese , German , French or Spanish ; less than 1% students substitute by other languages. The other six standard subjects are three natural-science subjects — physics , chemistry , biology , and three liberal-art subjects — history , geography , and political science ; applicants can elect 3 subjects to take tests from them. Six subjects students take test in Gaokao consist of three universally mandatory subjects and three elective-mandatory subjects which were chosen by applicants. However, there are general requirements examinees have to comply with: The following groups are prohibited from taking

13113-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable

13254-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has

13395-550: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although

13536-480: The help of friends in the United States. He said that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house", and on a very slow dial-up connection , "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page", he recalled. "We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed". From 1998 to 1999, Ma headed an information technology company established by

13677-464: The hopefuls who had accumulated during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution and many others who simply wanted to try their luck took the examination. The youngest were in their early teens and the oldest were in their late thirties. The examinations took place in the winter of 1977, and the exam questions were designed by each province individually. A total number of 5.7 million candidates took

13818-569: The institute until at the earliest October 2023. His research focus would include sustainable agriculture, food production, and lectures on entrepreneurship. The Financial Times described the announcement as "a rare public statement of the billionaire's commitments outside China." In 2017, Ma made his acting debut with his first kung fu short film Gong Shou Dao , directed by Wen Zhang and produced by Jet Li . The film stars Ma, Li, Donnie Yen , Wu Jing , Tony Jaa , Jacky Heung , Asashōryū Akinori , Zou Shiming , and Natasha Liu Bordizzo . It

13959-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into

14100-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses

14241-423: The lower and higher limit of the actual score of each grade; t 1 {\textstyle t_{1}} , t 2 {\textstyle t_{2}} represents the lower and higher limits of the band score of each grade. s 0 {\textstyle s_{0}} represents the candidate's actual score, t 0 {\textstyle t_{0}} represents

14382-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including

14523-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with

14664-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in

14805-513: The national college entrance exam. Initially, only 200,000 people were to be admitted to college. Although the Ministry of Education eventually expanded enrollment, with admissions being granted to a total number of 272,971 students, the admission rate of 4.8% was the lowest in the history of the PRC . These students are known as the Class of 1977 . Starting from 1978, the examination was uniformly designed by

14946-653: The newly established People's Republic of China . With the implementation of the first Five Year Plan in 1953, the NMTP was further enhanced. After repeated discussions and experiments, the NMTP was eventually set as a fundamental policy system in 1959. From 1958, the tertiary entrance examination system was affected by the Great Leap Forward Movement. Unified recruitment was soon replaced by separate recruitment by individual or allied tertiary education institutions. Meanwhile, political censorship on candidate students

15087-460: The number of institutes increased dramatically from 1,071 to 2,740, which significantly contributed to the rapid growth in the number of NCEE examinees and accepted students. The subjects tested in the National Higher Education Entrance Examination have changed over time. Traditionally, students would undertake either a set of "liberal-art" subjects or a set of "science" subjects, with some shared compulsory subjects which were Chinese, mathematics and

15228-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of

15369-426: The provincial proposition. In the same year, Guangdong was permitted to adopt an independent proposition. Beginning from 2003, Beijing , Tianjin , Jiangsu , and Zhejiang were allowed to adopt independent propositions. Since then, 16 provinces and municipalities have adopted customized exams. Although today's admission rate is much higher than in 1977, 1978 and before the 1990s, it is still fairly low compared to

15510-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,

15651-505: The reformed version of Gaokao since 2017. The "3" and "X" are the same as the national "3+X" system, weighed at 750 points. The "Y" part consists of 18 questions, covering 9 subjects (Chinese, Maths, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, Politics, and Geography), from which students need to choose 6 questions to answer, weighed at 60 points. The total score is 810 points. This system used to be employed in Jiangsu Province , but

15792-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for

15933-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without

16074-448: The restaurant's image and possibly tarnishing its reputation." In 1983, Ma failed his college entrance exam for the second time. However, his math score improved, increasing from his previous attempt to 19 points. The following year, Ma remained relentlessly determined to pursue higher education despite strong opposition from his family, who wanted him to choose a different career path as an alternative option. Undeterred, he decided to take

16215-466: The same time, Ma expressed skepticism that AI could ever completely replace people, referencing to his theory that success requires a "love quotient" and stating that machines can never match this success. Ma also predicted that population collapse would become a big problem in the future. Jack Ma is the founder of the Jack Ma Foundation , a philanthropic organization focused on improving education,

16356-575: The same year, the company funded the rebuilding of 1,000 houses damaged by the earthquake-hit in Nepal, and raised money for another 9,000. In 2015 he also founded the Hupan School , a business school. In September 2018, Ma started the Jack Ma Foundation and announced that he would retire from Alibaba to pursue educational work, philanthropy, and environmental causes. In 2019, Forbes named Ma in its list of "Asia's 2019 Heroes of Philanthropy" and awarded him

16497-602: The score's belonging grade, and the grade's scoring range, the score was transferred in proportion by the following formula: s 2 − s 0 s 0 − s 1 = t 2 − t 0 t 0 − t 1 {\displaystyle {\frac {s_{2}-s_{0}}{s_{0}-s_{1}}}={\frac {t_{2}-t_{0}}{t_{0}-t_{1}}}} s 1 {\textstyle s_{1}} , s 2 {\textstyle s_{2}} represents

16638-505: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by

16779-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language

16920-451: The so-called "intellectual youths", to work as farmers in countryside villages. Against the backdrop of world revolution, millions of such young people joined the ranks of farmers, working and living alongside them. In the early 1970s, Mao Zedong resumed the operation of universities. However, new students were selected through evaluation by a revolutionary committee rather than through formal academic scores. This practice continued until

17061-480: The society. That's the transformation we are aiming to make." Despite achieving massive entrepreneurial and investment success in the Chinese high-technology industry and the fact that Alibaba is a high-technology company, Ma was never a technical expert on computer technology nor did he possess the extensive breadth of executive managerial skills and background experience or depth of technical know-how that would have nonetheless otherwise qualified him to competently run

17202-559: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to

17343-457: The total score. Example below is Guangdong's algorithm. When weighing the score, the candidate's score of one course are sorted from high to low, and divided into five group according to rank distribution. A grade from A to E was given to these groups. The band score is then calculated after confirming the grade. The band score has a range from 100 to 30, each grade has a typical range of 10pts to 17pts. According to each candidate's actual score,

17484-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in

17625-436: The transaction. The ownership dispute was resolved by Alibaba Group, Yahoo! and Softbank in July 2011. In November 2012, Alibaba's online transaction volume exceeded one trillion yuan. Ma stepped down as the chief executive officer of Alibaba on 10 May 2013, but remained as the executive chairman of the corporation. In September 2014, it was reported that Alibaba was raising over $ 25 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) on

17766-520: The use of big data and AI to as a means to implement elements of a planned economy , stating that this technology would eliminate the information gaps that limited planned economic models historically. In November 2018, the People's Daily identified Ma as a member of the Chinese Communist Party , something which surprised observers. Ma received international criticism after he publicly endorsed

17907-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese

18048-429: The way I do today." In 1982, at the age of 18, Ma failed the nation-wide Chinese college entrance exam on his initial attempt, obtaining only 1 point in mathematics. Afterwards, he and his cousin applied to be waiters at a nearby hotel. His cousin was hired, but Ma was rejected on the grounds that he was "too skinny, too short, and in general, protruded a bad physical appearance that may have potentially ended up hurting

18189-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until

18330-494: The worker-peasant-soldier group. For most provinces, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination is held once a year; however, some provinces hold examinations twice a year, with the additional exam referred to as the Spring Entrance Examination. Prior to 2003, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination took place in July every year. It now takes place every June. This move was made in consideration of

18471-508: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with

18612-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,

18753-416: Was admitted to universities. In the 1970s, 70% of students who were recommended to attend university had political backgrounds reflecting the political nature of university selection at the time. At the same time, the undergraduate course system reduced the time from 4 years to 3 years. According to incomplete statistics, from 1966 to 1977, institutions of higher learning recruited 940,000 people who belonged to

18894-515: Was enhanced. From 1962, the NMTP system was criticized due to its negative impact on the working class; In July 1966, the NMTP was officially canceled and substituted with a new admission policy of recommending workers, farmers and soldiers to college. During the next ten years, the Down to the Countryside Movement , initiated by Mao Zedong , forced both senior and junior secondary school graduates,

19035-467: Was filmed in collaboration with the Double 11 Shopping Carnival Singles' Day . In the same year, he also participated in a singing festival and performed dances during Alibaba's 18th-anniversary party. In November 2020, in the finale of Africa’s Business Heroes , Ma was replaced as a judge in the television show, with Alibaba executive Peng Lei taking his place, reportedly "Due to a schedule conflict". Ma

19176-481: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half

19317-473: Was rejected for every single one. "I went for a job with the KFC; they said, 'you're no good ' ", Ma told interviewer Charlie Rose . "I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy [rejected] ...". During this period, China was nearing the end of its first decade following Deng Xiaoping 's economic reforms . In 1994, Ma heard about

19458-670: Was replaced by another system in 2020. The total score was 480 points. This system was used after the New Curriculum Reform was employed in Guangdong province and now has been abandoned. This system was implemented in Shanghai since the employment of comprehensive courses but now abandoned. This was a pilot college entrance examination system implemented by the Jiangsu Province in 2003 after examining other testing systems, but it

19599-479: Was subsequently replaced by the "3+2" system in 2008. Subject tests will take turns into the embrace of National Standard. A new policy substituted the old one in 2021. This is part of the curriculum reform in China. This system was first introduced in 2019, when Hebei Province , Liaoning Province , Jiangsu Province , Fujian Province , Hubei Province , Hunan Province , Guangdong Province , Chongqing City announced their examination reform plan, and performed on

19740-422: Was surprised to find none from China. He also tried to search for general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So he and his friend created an "ugly" website pertaining to information regarding Chinese beer. He launched the website at 9:40 am, and by 12:30 pm he had received emails from prospective Chinese investors wishing to know more about him and his website. This was when Ma realized that

19881-455: Was traveling overseas. Ant Group made major changes to its ownership structure and corporate governance in January 2023. That month, Ant Group announced a series of changes in shareholder voting rights, and its founder Jack Ma will no longer be the actual controller of Ant Group. Ma's voting rights were reduced from 50% to 6%. Following these changes, no single shareholder has a controlling stake in

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