Jane Sun Crossed the Pacific, Then Bought the Search Bar

Jane Sun was a sophomore in the law school at Peking University when someone offered her Florida.

She took it. The University of Florida’s business school finished the undergraduate degree, with high honors. Years later she came back to Peking University for a master’s in law. In between she learned a different language: how an American public company talks to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sun—孙洁, Jane Jie Sun in the filings—spent five years as an audit manager at KPMG in Silicon Valley, then ran the SEC and external-reporting division at Applied Materials, the semiconductor-equipment maker. In 2005 she went home to Shanghai as chief financial officer of Ctrip, a travel website that still looked, to much of the world, like a local shop for a country just beginning to fly.

James Jianzhang Liang had founded Ctrip in 1999. She spent the next decade making it look like a grown-up to Nasdaq, then rose through the operating jobs—chief operating officer in 2012, co-president in 2015. On 16 November 2016 the board made her chief executive. Liang stayed as executive chairman. Skift, the travel-industry news site, noted that she was the first woman to run a publicly traded online travel agency. She told the same reporter the handoff had been planned for about a year, and that she would still report to him.

A week later Ctrip agreed to buy Skyscanner, the Scottish flight-search company, for $1.74 billion.

A Chinese booking company had just bought the search bar a large share of the world already used. Liang had founded the house. She was the person who could take it abroad without pretending Ctrip was already global.

What she assembled still defines the company. Ctrip and Qunar for customers inside mainland China. Trip.com for everyone else. Skyscanner as the layer that sits above other sites. In October 2019 shareholders renamed the parent Trip.com Group. At the twentieth-anniversary event she said the company had started with a call center, gone all-in on mobile, and was setting out again. The English name was a claim: this was no longer only a China story.

That claim became ordinary. The app might say Trip.com. The Chinese parent behind it is why a hotel in Osaka and a train in Shanghai can live in the same checkout. She did not invent outbound Chinese tourism. She built the pipe that made the outbound wave, and the return traffic, look like one company.

She has said she spends about half her time in Asia and half of it elsewhere. Singapore’s Business Times, naming her Outstanding Overseas Executive at this year’s Singapore Business Awards, printed two rooms she has not forgotten. In one, colleagues turned and walked away, having taken her for a secretary. In another, a table of Silicon Valley chief executives asked where her husband was.

The husband is John Wu, an early Yahoo engineer who later served as chief technology officer at Alibaba and now runs his own fund. They live in Shanghai and have two children. She has been moving between those rooms—China, Florida, the Valley, the travel circuit—for thirty years, and she still gets asked the secretary question.

She has answered it, in part, by hiring. She talks often about a company where roughly half the employees are women, and about a duty to leave the door more open than she found it. Fortune put her on its most-powerful-women lists for years. The lists are real; the work that matters is still the company.

This year the state caught up with the platform.

In January, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation opened an investigation into Trip.com for suspected abuse of dominance, weeks before the Spring Festival travel rush. Bloomberg and Caixin carried the one-line government notice. In late July the regulator confiscated 1.658 billion yuan in gains and added a 3.521 billion yuan fine. The bill came to 5.179 billion yuan. Xinhua called it the country’s first antitrust case in online travel, and the first aimed at monopoly tactics built into digital tools.

The findings were specific. Exclusive hotel contracts. A “lowest price across the internet” rule. Traffic tools that locked inventory into the platform. On an investor call after the decision, Sun and Xiaofan Wang, the chief financial officer, said the company had killed the automated price-tracking tool at the center of the case and was dismantling the old hotel-distribution tiers. The penalty lands in the second-quarter accounts. Hotels get some deposits back.

She accepted the punishment in the company’s public language and promised reform. That is what a CEO says. The same person who taught Ctrip to speak to American markets now has to unteach it a domestic habit: using the platform’s weight to decide what a hotel may charge anywhere else.

Liang still chairs the board. She still runs the place. The group talks about Singapore as well as Shanghai. The brands she assembled are how a great many people, Chinese and not, now touch a trip.

She left Peking University for Florida as a teenager with a seat in a law school. She came home able to read an American annual report. Twenty years later the search bar is hers, and so is the fine.