Baidu CEO's Letter Goes Viral After Cancer Scandal

By Bridget O'Donnell

Baidu saw itself at the center of a huge controversy last week when reports emerged that a Shaanxi student died from cancer after a hospital he found on the company's search engine failed to give him proper treatment.

Following 21-year-old Wei Zexi's death, the internet tech giant made international headlines and earned heaps of scorn for putting profits ahead of its users. Wei accused Baidu of "misleading him to a fradulent cancer treatment" and taking money to promote shady medical treatments in its results.

“Baidu, at that time I didn’t know how sinister it could be,” Wei wrote online just before his death. “Bidding for ranking on medical information, or the matter with the hemophilia page, should make it clear what sort of thing it was.”

Following the scandal, Baidu founder and CEO Robin Li wrote an internal memo to all employees on Tuesday addressing the scandal. According to TechinAsia, the letter has already gone viral online due to its "inspiring" statements, attracting over 18,000 comments on Sina alone.

Below, a condensed version of the full letter (translation via TechinAsia):

Don’t forget the startup spirit and abandon our dreams

To all of my Baidu colleagues:

The January incident with Tieba and the April incident with Wei Zexi have caused widespread criticism and questioning of Baidu. The anger of these users is more serious a crisis than anything Baidu has faced before.

These past few days, every night I’ve been thinking: why do so many people who use Baidu every day no longer love us? Why are we no longer proud of our own products? What is the true source of the problem?...

[In the early days of] recruiting we used to make these posters with a head and a terse phrase underneath it. For example, we’d put the head of [famous Chinese author who began as a translator] Lu Xun, and under it write: “Do you want to translate, or do you want to create the search for the meaning of China?”...

Even today, when I mention these slogans to other people, they get choked up. With that dream and that rallying cry, we went and listened attentively to users, understood their needs, and slowly won the Chinese market from a position of far inferior power [compared to Google]. Our value of putting users above everything else won us users...

But today? I more often hear different departments squabbling over KPIs, or see engineers making compromises to the user experience in order to balance them with commercial benefits. Because of this, users have begun to doubt the objectivity and impartiality of our commercialization and promotion practices, complain about our products’ installation tactics, and oppose the commercialization of products like Tieba and Baike.

Because of the short-term pursuit of KPIs that exists everywhere from management down to staff, our values have been squeezed and changed, with performance growth elevated above user experience. Basic reliability has been replaced with basic business [as a core value]. As we have drifted away from our early-stage startup values and mission, we have drifted away from our users. If we lose user support and we lose the strength of our values, Baidu really could be bankrupt in a month...

Every day countless people make decisions based on information they found in a Baidu search, and that reality demands a high code of conduct from our product. We need to stay on top of things, and be responsible for our users...

If Baidu wants to cover the long distance between “big company” and “great company,” we need to expand our strengths and hold fast to our culture of focus on simple reliability [for users]. We must hold fast to our value that the user comes above everything else to achieve our mission of helping people equally, conveniently, and quickly get the information they want, and to ensure that later generations will be proud of what we’ve done.

Robin

2016-5-10

[Images via China Daily, Bacely YoroBI]

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