A small company started by Chinese students who had studied in America ended up building the internet backbones of China's state phone carriers. That company was AsiaInfo. It turned imported routers into working national networks, then wrote the software that ran them and sent the bills. When AsiaInfo filed to go public in early 2000, China had only a few million people online. Investors were hungry for any way to own a piece of what came next.

Roads Made of Routers

The founders bet that China would build its internet the way it built roads: fast, at national scale, and through a few big state carriers. Those carriers had money and a mandate. They had little experience with routers, network design, or customer billing. AsiaInfo set out to be the systems integrator in the middle. It turned imported hardware into working networks, and later it wrote the operations and billing software that kept them running.

A Tripled Debut, Then CITIC

AsiaInfo priced at $24 a share in March 2000 and more than tripled on its first day. It was one of the last great openings before the dot-com peak broke. Over the next decade the company moved from building networks to selling telecom software. In 2010 it merged with Linkage Technologies to form AsiaInfo-Linkage. In 2014 a group led by CITIC Capital, including co-founder Edward Tian, took it private.

Cover: Landscape after Huang Gongwang, Wang Yuanqi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a Chinese mountain landscape scroll (a vast country, slowly connected).