They often found the information from Western financial media outlets insufficient for them to make sense of the Chinese market or to decipher the dry and lengthy government reports and regulations, she said.

Countless new policies and reforms emerge every day and the regulatory environment in China seems always to be evolving. Many readers who care to understand China are in need of accurate, reliable and insightful information to make sense of the country, to carry out research or to execute business strategies.

I respect the work of my foreign colleagues but I believe that they hardly tell the whole story of China. Perhaps no one can and that is why readers need a plurality of views to draw their own conclusions.

Newspapers may be in decline. But a service that supplies useful and high quality comprehensive information will always be in high demand as long as people rely on it to make decisions and to make sense of the world.

In that respect, I think Alibaba deserves praise for empowering the international reach of a traditional print media outlet that is struggling with declining profit growth and a shrinking readership.

What Alibaba should be careful about is that the effort should be about leveraging capital and technology for a greater voice of China, not for China.