Jack Ma never went to Harvard: Setting the story straight about Asia’s richest man

ven though Duncan Clark wasn’t an author, he decided to write Alibaba because he felt that someone should tell Jack Ma’s intriguing story. Photo: Straits Times/ANN

Earlier this month, China had its yearly bout of examination fever when about 9.4 million students sat the two-day nationwide university entrance examinations known as the gaokao.

Three decades earlier, a lad named Ma Yun from Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, took that test. He scored 1/120 for mathematics on his first try, 19/120 on his second and 89/120 on his third.