Saved by SARS: How a Public Health Crisis Forced JD.com Online and Changed Everything

In 2003, a deadly virus brought Beijing to a standstill, pushing Richard Liu's thriving electronics business to the brink of collapse. This is the story of how that crisis became the catalyst for one of China's greatest e-commerce empires.

What you'll learn from Richard Liu's story:

• How to turn constraints into competitive advantages
• Why crisis can be the ultimate business filter
• The power of taking action over endless planning
• How core values become your strongest foundation

The Brink of Collapse

The Last Winter in Zhongguancun

In the early spring of 2003, a chill still lingered in the Beijing air. But in Zhongguancun, the epicenter of China's tech universe, a feverish ambition was burning, expanding limitlessly. Inside the electronics market of Haidian Building, a deafening roar of voices filled the air; every inch of space was crammed with people desperate to change their fate. In this chaotic gold rush, the counter for "JD Multimedia" was one of the most dazzling.

This was Richard Liu's first moment in the sun. He was no longer the poor university student who had once set up a stall outside Renmin University, but the renowned "Brother Dong" of Zhongguancun. His business card read "General Manager," but he preferred this title, bestowed by his sixty-odd employees. It wasn't just a name; it was a symbol of his status in this world.

JD Multimedia, the business he had built from scratch, had surpassed 60 million RMB in annual sales, making it the largest distributor of magneto-optical products in the country, with 12 chain stores in Zhongguancun, Shenyang, and Shenzhen. Liu's dream was clear and grand: to open more stores across the nation, to become China's own GOME or Suning, a king in the empire of offline retail. He held an almost religious faith in his business model—"authentic goods, transparent prices"—which made him a unique presence in a market flooded with fakes and scams, and earned him his most valuable asset: his reputation.

However, an invisible plague was brewing.

At first, it was just a few vague lines in the news, a strange illness from the south called "atypical pneumonia." No one took it seriously. But gradually, the atmosphere shifted. More people on the streets wore masks, their eyes tinged with caution. The once-torrential crowds of Zhongguancun began to visibly thin. A sense of impending doom, like a gathering storm, hung over Beijing.

The explosion came in an instant. In April, the government issued a shutdown order: all public venues, malls, and shops were to close immediately. The thriving Zhongguancun became a ghost town overnight.

In JD's conference room, the air was thick with smoke, so heavy you could almost wring water from it. The CFO's voice was hoarse and grave: "Brother Dong, if we don't open for a single day, the money in our accounts will only last us eight months."

The number landed like a boulder in the heart of everyone present. Eight months. It might sound like a long time, but for a company with 12 stores and over 60 employees, it was a death sentence on a countdown timer. Every morning they woke up, tens of thousands in losses stared them in the face. Rent, salaries, bank interest, mountains of unsold inventory... all of it was a relentless ticking bomb, devouring the company's lifeblood day and night.

Richard Liu's dream empire, the commercial territory he had built with countless sleepless nights, personally manning the counters and delivering goods, was bleeding out before his very eyes, dying with every passing second. And his most important assets—the employees who had followed him from the beginning, sharing warehouses, instant noodles, and the joys of success—were now looking to him, desperate for an answer.

Now, imagine this is your reality.

Do you choose a dignified end? Do you make the tough call, shut down the company, liquidate the assets, and distribute what's left to your team to preserve one last shred of dignity, then admit defeat and let everyone fend for themselves? It seems like the most rational choice.

Or do you bet the livelihoods of everyone on a realm you've never entered, one you even secretly despise—the chaotic, fraudulent, and ethereal world of the internet?

If it were you, what would you do?

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A Desperate Gamble

A Glimmer of Light on a Forum

This was not a hypothetical question for 29-year-old Richard Liu. In the spring of 2003, he didn't have the luxury of imagination. He had to act.

A dead silence had replaced the former hustle in the company office, punctuated only by suppressed sighs. Dissolving the company seemed like the only way out, the easiest way out. But Liu couldn't do it. He looked at the young faces, many of whom had joined him straight after graduation, entrusting him with their youth and their futures. He couldn't just surrender.

During a meeting steeped in despair, ideas were thrown around, but none led anywhere. Just then, JD Multimedia's director of technology, Sun Jiaming, offered a last-ditch suggestion: "Brother Dong, there's no one offline, but there are people online. What if... what if we try to sell online?"

In 2003, this suggestion sounded like a fever dream. For most brick-and-mortar businessmen, the internet was a virtual space filled with viruses, lies, and scams, far less reassuring than a physical counter.

But for a dying JD, any straw was worth grasping. They chose CD-Best, a popular online forum among hardware enthusiasts at the time.

And so, a scene that would later be immortalized in the annals of Chinese e-commerce history unfolded. There was no market research, no business plan, only a simple, primal instinct: to survive. Sun Jiaming himself created a post with a simple, direct title: "JD Multimedia, authentic products, fair prices." In the body, they copied their offline promise verbatim: "We'll pay you ten times the price if you find a fake."

The post went up. Then came the long wait. A day passed, then two... It was met with silence. Just as everyone was about to give up, a user with the ID "Wanda de Ba" (A Scar as Big as a Bowl) sent a private message asking about a CD burner.

Success!

The message was a bolt of lightning that instantly pierced the gloom in the conference room. Liu personally replied, confirming the order. The feeling was no less than Columbus discovering the New World. He carefully packaged the product as if it were a rare treasure. Then, to ensure nothing went wrong, he sent his most trusted employee on a bicycle, riding through the empty streets of Beijing in the April wind, to personally deliver the burner to the customer.

When the customer received the package, his face showed a mixture of surprise and satisfaction. This transaction was about more than a few hundred RMB. It was a spark that lit a bonfire on a frozen plain. It proved one thing: this path was viable.

Burning the Ships

A single spark can start a prairie fire. Soon, orders from all over the country began to pour in like snowflakes. A few orders a day turned into a dozen, then dozens. The employees went from having nothing to do to being in a frenzy of packing goods and replying to posts. The atmosphere in the company transformed from dead silence to feverish excitement.

But inside Richard Liu, a much more violent storm was raging.

He keenly saw, in these small online orders, a whole new world. A world with no expensive rents, no geographical limitations, where orders could come from anywhere with an internet connection. It could connect goods and consumers with unprecedented efficiency. A sudden realization struck him: this wasn't just a temporary measure to clear inventory. This was the future.

The thought kept him awake at night. A few days later, he gathered all his senior executives and announced a decision that shocked everyone.

"We are shutting down all of our offline stores."

The room fell silent, then erupted in fierce opposition.

"Brother Dong, are you insane? Our offline stores are still profitable! The epidemic will pass, what then?" "Exactly! The internet is full of scammers. How can people trust us without seeing us? What about logistics? Payments?"

The objections were rational, practical, the logic of any normal businessman. To abandon a proven, profitable model for a new, risky venture was commercially unimaginable.

Liu stood up, looked at the brothers who had followed him for years, and spoke with unshakable resolve. "We have no retreat. We know better than anyone how high the offline costs are. If we can truly sell to the entire country online, why do we need those damn expensive stores?"

"We must burn the ships. We must cut off our own retreat to charge forward into that new continent. Either we create a new era together, or we sink to the bottom of the sea together."

His words were less a persuasion than a declaration of a high-stakes gamble. He was betting his entire fortune, and the future of all his employees.

In the end, he convinced them all. By the end of 2003, JD Multimedia made its final cut: it closed all its offline chain stores to go all-in on e-commerce.

It was the end of one era, and the beginning of a much greater one.

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The Foundation of Trust

Agent No. 001 and His Values

On January 1, 2004, the website jdlaser.com went live. It was the humble, slightly crude blueprint of the massive commercial empire that was to come.

To save costs, Liu moved his office to a warehouse in Muxidi, Beijing. There, he was the boss, the procurement manager, the delivery man, and the company's very first customer service agent, using the forum ID "Lao Diao" (Old Tricky). The name came from a character in one of his favorite movies, New Dragon Gate Inn, and it captured his spirit of being "tricky, sharp, and able to penetrate anything."

The life of "Lao Diao" was a true reflection of China's first generation of internet pioneers. During the day, he and his team packed and shipped orders and replied to forum posts. At night, he slept in the office, a simple sleeping bag on a moisture-proof mat on the floor. To ensure he never missed a potential customer, he set his alarm clock to go off every two hours, waking him from his sleep to check for new messages or orders and reply to each one. When he felt tired, he'd splash cold water on his face, smoke a cigarette, and continue his vigil at the computer.

This almost masochistic dedication stemmed from his all-or-nothing bet on the online business, but also from a deep-seated insecurity and an even deeper conviction.

Why was he so obsessed, from the very beginning, with "only selling authentic products and always issuing invoices"?

The reason traced back to an earlier, painful failure in his entrepreneurial journey. In college, he had taken all his savings to take over a small restaurant near his university. Due to his lack of management experience and an overly simplistic view of human nature, he was cheated by his cashier and procurement staff. In just a few months, he not only lost all his capital but also ended up shouldering a debt of over 200,000 RMB.

That failure was a deep scar carved into his heart. It filled him with a visceral hatred for deceit and betrayal in the business world and taught him the immense weight of the word "trust." He swore that if he ever started another business, he would never make a single dirty cent, and he would never deceive a single customer who trusted him.

Now, he transplanted that "scar" directly into JD's DNA, where it became the company's core value.

In the wild-west era of early Chinese e-commerce, selling gray-market goods and evading taxes were the unspoken rules of survival for many online shops. Gray-market products offered higher margins, and not issuing invoices saved a significant amount of money. Everyone was doing it.

But Richard Liu chose the "stupidest" path. He insisted that all products must be authentic and licensed, meaning he had to forgo the higher profits from gray-market goods. He insisted on issuing an invoice for every single order, even when customers didn't ask for one, meaning he had to pay a much larger tax bill than all his competitors.

This "clumsy" persistence seemed like suicide to many, like turning your back on easy money. But Liu saw something further down the road. He knew what consumers craved most in a virtual world lacking transparency and trust.

He wasn't just trying to sell things. He was trying to build a platform that even he, as a consumer, would be willing to trust one hundred percent.

This insistence, which seemed out of place and even anachronistic at the time, eventually became JD's strongest fortress in the new world, and the logical starting point for all its future business models.

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Lessons from the Brink

Your 'SARS' Moment

Now, let's pull the camera back from Beijing in 2003 and bring it into your world.

The story of Richard Liu is far more than a legend of business success. It's a survival guide on how human beings make choices under extreme pressure and ultimately turn crisis into opportunity.

This story teaches us that sometimes, the most complete destruction can also be the greatest rebirth. From this story, we can distill three core strategies for action, applicable not only to entrepreneurs but to everyone navigating the journey of life.

Action Strategy #1: Use Crisis as a Filter.

A crisis itself is not to be feared; what's to be feared is losing your way within it. During the SARS epidemic, JD was stripped of everything: customers, cash flow, even its physical stores. But it was this very deprivation that acted as a powerful filter, forcing Liu to shed all the business assumptions and operations that seemed essential but were actually burdens. It compelled him to focus on the one question that truly mattered: how can we sell goods to customers more efficiently? A crisis, in the cruelest way, points you to the most essential path, the one that was obscured by prosperity.

Action Strategy #2: Validate with Action, Not Debate.

When JD's executives were fiercely debating whether to move online, they could have never argued their way to a certain future. The real answer came from that small forum post, from the employee who delivered a package on a bicycle. When facing immense uncertainty, don't try to persuade each other with PowerPoints in a conference room. Design a minimum-cost action, an experiment that allows you to talk directly to the real world. Let the roar of the market tell you the true direction.

Action Strategy #3: Turn Your Greatest Pain into Your Strongest Principle.

We all have our scars, the experiences that made us fall and suffer. Richard Liu's greatest pain was the experience of being cheated; his strongest principle became his unwavering commitment to "integrity." He didn't choose to forget that pain. Instead, he transformed it into JD's most solid business cornerstone. Your weaknesses, your traumas, the pit where you fell the hardest—that's often where your deepest insights and greatest strengths are buried. Don't avoid it. Face it. Turn it into your unique badge of honor.

Each of us, at some point in our lives, will encounter our own "SARS"—that sudden storm that threatens to upend everything.

When it arrives, don't just think about how to survive.

Like that young man searching for a way out of despair in 2003, listen for the faint signal in the storm. Identify the new shipping lane illuminated by the crisis.

Then, burn your ships, carve your scars into your coat of arms, and sail bravely toward the ocean that is yours and yours alone.

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Key Takeaways

1. Constraint is a Catalyst for Innovation: True breakthroughs often emerge from situations where there are no other options. A crisis can strip away non-essential business activities and flawed assumptions, forcing you to discover a superior path that was previously ignored.
2. Act, Don't Overthink: In a crisis, waiting for perfect information is a luxury you cannot afford. Richard Liu's team didn't spend months writing a business plan; they tested the market with a minimal action (a forum post), saw a positive signal, and then committed fully.
3. Your Values are Your North Star: When the external world is filled with uncertainty, your core principles are the only thing you can rely on. Liu's unwavering commitment to "authentic products" and "trust" ultimately became JD.com's most formidable competitive advantage.