Hangzhou
Alibaba turned a lake town into a ¥2.18 trillion digital economy — 28.8% of GDP from tech, 63,000 e-commerce sellers, five years as China's most dynamic city.
One company — Alibaba — turned a scenic lake town into a ¥2.18 trillion economy. Between 2004 and 2014, former Alibaba employees alone founded 130 internet companies in Hangzhou. The core digital economy now contributes 28.8% of the city's GDP and the number keeps climbing: the target is 30% by 2027, with 240,000 digital enterprises. No city in the world has been more thoroughly reshaped by a single tech founder than Hangzhou by Jack Ma.
Marco Polo called Hangzhou the finest and most splendid city in the world when he visited in the 13th century. It was the capital of the Southern Song dynasty, the wealthiest state on earth at the time, and its West Lake was already a UNESCO-worthy cultural landscape. The Grand Canal connected Hangzhou to Beijing, making it the southern terminus of China's most important trade artery — a logistics advantage that predates Alibaba's logistics network by about 1,400 years.
The modern transformation began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded Alibaba in his apartment here. The company's revenue reached nearly ¥1 trillion (37 billion) in 2025. But the Wikipedia gap is not Alibaba itself — it's the ecosystem that Alibaba created. Hangzhou hosts 63,000 e-commerce sellers, 1,045 cross-border platforms, and provides digital infrastructure for 34 million small businesses across 220 countries. DeepSeek, NetEase, Ant Group, Geely, and HikVision are all headquartered here. The city attracted 190,000 university graduates under 35 between 2019 and 2023 alone, and topped the EIU's list of China's most dynamic cities for five consecutive years.
Hangzhou's GDP doubled from ¥1 trillion in 2015 to ¥2.18 trillion in 2024 — services now account for 78.1% of the economy, per capita disposable income hit ¥76,777, and Q1 2025 growth of 5.2% outpaced both the prior year and the national average. Cross-border e-commerce exports rose 12.1%, serving over 300 million overseas consumers.
The biological parallel is a keystone mutualism: Alibaba is to Hangzhou what mycorrhizal fungi are to a forest — an underground network connecting thousands of individual organisms into a single, resource-sharing ecosystem. Remove the network and the individual trees survive, but the forest's productivity collapses.