Such lack of Chinese private brands with global weight can be attributable to, among other things, the country’s economic growth pattern that is reliant on quantitative expansion featuring low-end manufacturing and investment. Such a quantity-based model has elevated the country to the second place globally in terms of nominal GDP, but has failed to help the country churn out many big brand names that can be comparable to Coca-Cola and Google.

In terms of IPO scale, Alibaba will become the largest ever in history. Meanwhile, the capitalization of some Chinese Internet companies, such as Baidu and Tencent, has exceeded that of many American giants. But their influence, pitifully, has mainly been limited to the domestic market.

China is now implementing the second-phase economic restructuring as it upgrades its manufacturing sector, promotes the services industries, encourages consumption and, in particular, promotes innovation, especially technical innovation, to sharpen its global competitive edge.

To that end, it is further liberalizing its economic regulation to facilitate business doing and encourage market competition. A typical example is its move to simplify procedures for starting and operating businesses by eliminating approval items or transferring them to the lower-level governments.

If China can stick to such business-friendly stance and the local governments can seriously carry out the central platform, the Chinese economy would become more competitive after some years of painful transition, which will sow the seeds for the exceptional growth of more Alibaba-like grassroots companies.

The next Alibaba will hopefully stand out from those start-ups.