1999 vs 2019. Can You Believe 20 Years Have Already Passed?

Twenty years ago, in 1999, marked the end of an era… 

The end of a century.

Do you still remember that year?

Where were you in 1999?

Were you born before that year?

20 years… Time flies.

Many inspiring stories began 20 years ago. Let’s have a look.

01

At the beginning of 1999, Jack Ma, 35 years old, rekindled his dream of the Internet. He resigned from his state-owned enterprise and took several subordinates who were willing to go with him. The day before they left Beijing, they went climbing the Great Wall.

On the fifth day of the Lunar New Year in 1999, he gathered 17 friends in his home in Hangzhou.  They raised RMB 500,000 to start alibaba.com.

Four days after its founding, Alibaba placed a job ad in a newspaper with the slogan, "If not now, When? If not me, Who?

Now, Jack Ma has announced that he is going to retire, and online shopping has become a normal part of our life.

02

That same year, Robin Li left Silicon Valley to return to Beijing with $1.2 million in venture capital. Together with his partners, a total of eight people, he founded Baidu.

Today, Baidu has an exponentially growing market share.

03

In 1999, Pony Ma's company, Tencent, developed OICQ, the predecessor of QQ. The number of registered users soared which, less than a year after the launch, exceeded one million. Despite such early popularity, they still couldn't find any profitable model to build upon.

Pony Ma had to invest all their money into buying the company servers, which became an unbearable burden for Tencent. He had to sell QQ everywhere with the price of 1 million, but no one dared to buy. Those investors who turned down Ma surely regretted it down the line.

For the next decade, QQ dominated.

But now, the older I am, the less I use QQ and the more I use WeChat. But it records the Chinese's two generations' growth.

04

In 1999, Liu Qiangdong, who had just graduated from school two years prior, rented a counter in Zhongguancun with RMB 12,000 of savings to sell burners and CDS.

Now, JD mall is booming. However, Liu Qiangdong was caught in a cheating scandal.

05

In April 1999, the second episode of Princess Huanzhu was released, and it won over the audience that year with approval ratings of 65%.

Many years later, the show still leaves us with eternal memories. 

I still remember watching it over and over again every Spring Festival when I was a child.

06

In 1999, Stephen Chow's movie "The King of Comedy" topped the box office with nearly HKD 30 million worth of sold tickets.

Now his hair is growing grey, but at least he’s still making movies.

07

That year, at the age of 18, Yao Ming joined the national basketball team. 

Three years later, he became the overall pick in the NBA draft.

08

On National Day in 1999, the People's Bank of China issued the fifth set of RMB bills.

Although they’re still in circulation, today most of us pay for everything with our own phones and can travel almost anywhere around the country with nothing but our WeChat Pay or Alipay e-wallets.

09

October 1, 1999, marked the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the new China. Tiananmen square held a grand military parade known as the "century parade."

 10 

On December 20, 1999, Macau returned to China.

Now that the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge is open, there is no barrier between mainland China and Macao. 

In 1999, mobile phones were available, but landlines were still dominating the majority of calls made. I remember when I was in primary school, I often called my friends using our home’s landline. Sometimes I was afraid that their parents would answer the phone because I had to greet them and they might want to ask me a lot of questions, like how my homework and studied were going… Haha

There was no online shopping, no smartphones, no apps...

No many families owned a computer yet; most people surfed the web at Internet cafes.

Nowadays, we don't necessarily need to go shopping outside as we can purchase our clothes online and are sent to our home within days, if not hours.

We live with our smartphones and have a ton of apps for pretty much anything - food delivery, news, social networking, email, messaging, gaming…

Life is more convenient, but everyone has become a phubber (phone snubber), the consequence of which has seen a deterioration in direct, genuine communication between people.

1999 was an impressive year.

That was the year of the millennium.

That year, the world's population topped 6 billion.

That year, the last generation born after 1990 was born.

So much has changed over the last 20 years…

Although time surely flies, cherish every moment you have with the people you care about.

Source: Baidu

Editor: Crystal Huang 

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