BEIJING — Diners often plunge their chopsticks into shared entrees at even the most upscale restaurants here. This mouth-to-plate maneuver might be considered a faux pas in the germ-phobic West, akin to George double-dipping a chip in "Seinfeld."
But appreciating such cultural differences is what Baidu.com Inc.'s chief financial officer, Shawn Wang, says gives the Chinese search giant unique insight into the country's 1.3 billion people as it competes with American rivals such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
That knowledge informs innovations large and small, such as Baidu's bowing to local preference in popping up a new browser window when users click on search results. It can also produce features, such as its MP3 search for digital music downloads, that infuriate the entertainment industry.
"It's just different people, different culture, different behavior," Wang said. "These are things that connect people together in a way people in the West couldn't imagine."
On Tuesday, Baidu became the first Chinese company to join the Nasdaq 100 index, placing it among the world's most valuable technology companies.
Founded in 2000, it boasts a stock market capitalization of $13.3 billion and conducts more than 60% of search queries in China, the world's fastest-growing major Internet market.
Baidu's success mirrors the ferocious growth of China's technology industry, which is led by scrappy innovators who are used to fighting for loyalty on the Web like the street-corner barkers they grew up around.
Consider Baidu founder Robin Li, 39. He was born in an impoverished region 200 miles southwest of Beijing and endured the privations of the Cultural Revolution. He was a sophomore at Beijing University during the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.
He has been quoted as saying that the experience prompted him to leave China after graduating, although now he says he was merely following the crowd.
"At that time China was still pretty much a planned economy," Li said. "There was not much opportunity for us to do anything with big impact."
Li traveled to the United States, earned a master's degree in computer science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and made his way to Silicon Valley in 1997. He worked on search engines at Infoseek Corp. for two years before returning home.
