Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. By Duncan Clark. Ecco; 287 pages; $27.99 and £18.99.

NOT since John Rockefeller has a businessman defined a country’s transformation as well as Jack Ma does. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil capitalised on the rise of petroleum and the internal-combustion engine, a combination that powered a century of American greatness. He became America’s first billionaire and its richest man by far. Through both ruthless dealing and visionary philanthropy, he came to personify American capitalism.

Alibaba, which Mr Ma and a handful of collaborators started in a cramped apartment in Hangzhou in 1999, is now one of the world’s biggest internet companies. It utterly dominates e-commerce in China, and has also made inroads into internet finance, cloud computing and logistics. Its flotation in New York in 2014 was the biggest public offering ever, and with a fortune worth perhaps $23 billion, Mr Ma is one of China’s richest men.

How did a poor boy who barely scraped into a teacher’s college manage this? Like Rockefeller, Mr Ma spotted a confluence of technologies and market opportunities. The rise of the internet came just as China was gearing up to join the World Trade Organisation in 2001. Duncan Clark, an expert on China’s technology sector, explains the result in a fascinating new book: Mr Ma “stands at the intersection of China’s newfound cults of consumerism and entrepreneurship”.

It began with Mr Ma’s homesick search for a pint of Chinese lager. As an English translator, he got the chance to travel to Seattle in the mid-1990s and to use the internet for the first time. Told that one could find anything in the world online, he searched for “beer”. He found American beer, German beer and so on, but no Chinese beer. His country was, it seemed, living in the dark ages. That gave him the inspiration he needed.

With liberalisation would come rising incomes and global travel, reasoned Mr Ma, and soon hundreds of millions of Chinese would clamour for the goods and services enjoyed by the comfortable classes elsewhere. Unlike those in America, the land of Sears and Walmart, China’s retail chains were fragmented and stodgy. This, Mr Ma calculated, meant that e-commerce could quickly become a potent force.

He was right. China’s online consumers are now the world’s most voracious, buying over $14 billion-worth of goods on Alibaba’s platforms on just one day last year (a promotion known as Singles’ Day). That is far more than Americans purchase on Cyber Monday, when online retailers heavily discount goods for Christmas shoppers. Alibaba now sees some 3 trillion yuan ($464 billion) in e-commerce transactions flow yearly through its portals, triple the figure seen in 2012.

The cult of the entrepreneur is strong in China too. Though state-owned enterprises and national champions lumber on, it is private enterprise that has created nearly all net new urban jobs in China over the past two decades, and private firms account for perhaps two-thirds of all economic output. China is producing millions of new entrepreneurs each year, and (unlike Rockefeller, who was widely reviled as a monopolist) Mr Ma is idolised by them.

eBay for lunch

How did he come from nowhere to overcome such American rivals as Yahoo (which later became a big investor in Alibaba) and eBay? The answer lies in the most powerful cult of all: a team of martial-arts heroes with Jack Ma as its leader. Alibaba’s campus in Hangzhou features numerous artistic references to Jin Yong, a celebrated writer of martial-arts novels. Employees take nicknames from his novels and other pulp fiction, and use these names for internal communication. Team-building exercises regularly have employees doing handstands, and office romances are often made official at mass weddings (pictured), witnessed by Mr Ma. The company’s philosophy is a “six-vein spirit sword”, and during an interview conducted last year at his headquarters, Mr Ma several times got up to punctuate his answers with an actual sword from his wall.

Mr Ma does not believe in religion or communism, saving his faith for a kind of inclusive capitalism. Unlike the founders of other big Chinese internet firms, Mr Ma distributed shares to employees from the beginning, and continued to find ways for them to cash in during Alibaba’s spectacular rise. As a result, his share is smaller than that held by comparable tycoons. Western technology founders like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg structured share offerings so that they retained a tight grip on their creations. Mr Ma formed a partnership before Alibaba’s flotation, and shares control with several dozen colleagues.

Mr Ma rejects Milton Friedman’s nostrum that “the business of business is business”, namely that companies exist only to make a profit and that philanthropy should be strictly personal. He has set up a philanthropic fund, but uses Alibaba itself as a vehicle for social change, helping people book doctors’ visits, for example, or selling cheap water-testing devices and encouraging his customers to upload results for big-data analysis. Given his ambitions, perhaps it is a good thing that Mr Ma plans for Alibaba to flourish “at least 102 years”: begun in the last year of the 20th century, it may yet leave a mark on the 22nd.