A woman uses Alipay, Alibaba's payment tool, at a supermarket in Chengdu, Sichuan province. [Provided to China Daily]

"Amazon, for instance, would not be able to operate the way Alibaba has done because it would come across legislative barriers when making acquisitions."

Wang believes that is why it is wrong to compare China's so-called BAT (Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, Alibaba and Tencent) companies with the Silicon Valley pioneering giants that emerged in the 1990s.

"The likes of Facebook and Google might have been groundbreaking in themselves but they emerged in a Western business environment that was quite well established. The Chinese firms have developed rapidly in an environment which in itself was very fluid and dynamic."

Max von Zedtwitz, the San Francisco-based managing director of Glorad, a partly Shanghai-based research center and think tank which specializes in innovation, says there are always risks for a company like Alibaba, which was something of a first innovator in China.