Chinese online gaming tycoon eyes education revolution
NetDragon Websoft's Liu Dejian had a replica of the Starship Enterprise built to house the company, and now he hopes to make stratospheric changes to the global education industry, writes Brandon Zatt. Pictures by May Tse
Our HK Express plane banks over the East China Sea and swoops down through the clouds, hugging the Fujian coastline as unmistakable shapes pass below: the Pentagon, then the Pyramide du Louvre decked out in the grid patterns and coloured boxes of Mondrian. On one side sits an X-wing Fighter; on the other, the white walls of Yellow Mountain Hui-style homes poke out from thickets of bamboo and groves of plum trees. Ahead, just up the beach from a popular surf spot, the Starship Enterprise shimmers in the sun.
Familiar things in unfamiliar places; welcome to the wonderful world of Captain Liu.
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You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd entered an imaginary realm when stepping onto the campus of NetDragon Websoft, where spaceships sit beside steam-powered locomotives. Is that a fairway or a landing strip; a launch pad flanked by guardian deities or simply an elaborate sun shade? The piece de resistance at the complex, and mission control for NetDragon chairman Liu Dejian and the team of designers he's assembled into one of China's most successful online gaming, internet and technology firms, is the building constructed to resemble Star Trek's Starship Enterprise.
With a vast fortune and a fertile imagination, Liu, who is known to staff and friends as DJ, resembles a real-life Tony Stark. He has an enduring passion for Lego - he sets aside time every day to construct cars, planes, buildings, anything that comes in a collector's set - and the campus he's created embodies the kind of imaginary gaming world that helped Hong Kong-listed NetDragon make its mark. It's a composite of East and West, of future and past and of science fiction and science fact.
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Located just outside Fuzhou's Changle International Airport, and probably first "discovered" by commercial airline pilots flying overhead, Liu's headquarters made international headlines last summer when he revealed the company had bought the rights to the Starship Enterprise from American television network CBS and spent more than HK$1 billion constructing premises in the spaceship's likeness. Yet while most reports focused on the building and the quirky entrepreneur's penchant for sci-fi, none asked why Liu is so determined to go where no man has gone before - nor exactly where it is that he's going.