Positive:
- Adds the voice of a civic minded, non-profit entity to the board. Maybe less brutal than pure capitalism?
- Less risk of Frankenstein's monster (e.g. dual use adware)
Negative:
- Govt is now married to them, and the tech graveyards are littered with the corpses of behemoths who lost their edge.
Wat. We are talking about the PRC here. A totalitarian communist regime. "Less brutal"?
The other thing the government has done (at least in the last couple of decades) is a big push in to transportation infrastructure - bridges, highways, high-speed rail. All of these things help in opening up the economy of previously isolated regions.
Ironically enough, much of China's transportation infrastructure is supposed to turn a profit, leading to still fairly high logistic costs.
It's not, however unlike other countries, by being authoritarian they can get things done. Compare for example a proposed high-speed rail line between Melbourne and Sydney, which has been under investigation since the 80's and it still hasn't gone beyond the basic planning stage.
And it's not like there isn't demand, Melbourne->Sydney is currently the 5th busiest air route in the world.
Same thing happens in northern China also :-)
I get if you have a problem with the bad things they did but it's disingenuous for people to say all the positive consequences of the side they support was because of specific actions on their sides part, while the side they dislike had good things happen by coincidence or in spite of themselves
Deng Xiaoping was a smart chap. He knew China needed capitalism, but also knew that after decades of railing against capitalism there was no way the people would support it and no way to implement it without undermining the government, and so 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' was born.
The fact that China has managed to prosper where places like Russia that underwent a similar type of regime have been stuck in the mud is a testament to the enduring Chinese culture.
The PRC has black prison sites for political dissidents and the famine from the great leap forward. Capitalism has child slaves working cocoa farms or pharmaceutical companies giving aids tainted medicine to third world countries because it would net them a profit.
State intervention in a capitalist economy does not the abolition of the value-form make, it makes a state capitalist economy.
China? Civic? What? Is today opposite day?