Alibaba Group billionaire Jack Ma’s annual AliFest conference in Hangzhou features an intriguing, one might even say unlikely, keynote speaker Friday morning: John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay.

Why unlikely? This would be the same eBay that got trounced in China by Alibaba’s online marketplace Taobao.com. In fact, Ma created Taobao to do battle with Meg Whitman and eBay, and he not only won, he utterly vanquished his foe.

Taobao now enjoys more than 80% market share in China. EachNet, a once leading (though not profitable) online marketplace in China that eBay purchased for $180 million, is now mere background radiation on the Chinese Internet, with low single-digit market share. Whitman surrendered in 2006, entering into a joint venture with the Chinese portal Tom Online to operate EachNet.

The victory wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The tale of how it was achieved is recounted in detail in an upcoming book by Helen Wang, The Chinese Dream: The Rise of the World’s Largest Middle Class. Wang (also a contributor to the Forbes China Tracker blog) writes about her encounter with the Alibaba camp in 2004:

When I asked a senior manager at Alibaba whether the company was worried that it would be bought by eBay, I was blown away by the answer: ―We will buy eBay!

That might have been a laughable notion at the time, when Alibaba.com was still just an up-and-coming e-commerce company serving small to medium-sized businesses. Little more than three years later, Alibaba.com went public in Hong Kong, raising $1.5 billion. It was the second-biggest Internet IPO after Google. Alibaba had become an empire, and, as Wang notes, Ma was hailed in The New York Times as “China’s new Internet king.”

Now Donahoe, who became Whitman’s right-hand man on global e-commerce as eBay was on its way to defeat in China, has accepted an invitation to speak at Ma’s annual Alifest conference. The two men don’t appear to have business to discuss – they already sealed a deal earlier this year allowing the use of eBay’s PayPal to settle transactions on Alibaba’s online wholesaling platform, AliExpress. That came a year after Ma visited eBay’s headquarters during a U.S. trip.

And there is no indication that eBay will ever try to dethrone Taobao in China. If anything, Taobao continues to encroach on eBay’s home turf, acquiring two U.S. companies in recent months — Vendio in June, Auctiva in August — that will help it do more business with eBay’s merchants in the U.S.

So what are we to make of Donahoe’s journey to Hangzhou? He may be stumping for PayPal, which is growing quickly in greater China. Beyond that, the visit may not amount to much of substance. But if I may take a bit of poetic and historical license here – in other words, if I may exaggerate wildly for my own amusement – this is almost like Napoleon’s top lieutenant returning to Waterloo to speak at the invitation of the British Empire: He came, he saw, he was conquered.