| The article does not do a really good job at explaining what the government it doing but basically it is: 1. Creating competition between states/cities (Beijing vs Shanghai) which has similar advantages to the free market EVEN if both groups are part of the government. This tries to reduce waste and puts natural pressure on companies (including ones that are state owned). 2. Encouraging close proximity (like silicon valley) by using grants, lower taxes, etc. This encourages lots of companies in the same industry to be close together and often in the same building. This encourages transfer of ideas and staff between companies. (economic development zones) 3. Limiting the number of economic development zones so that they are not all over the place. To just ignore anything that Chinese companies have done and say it is all stolen or copied is rather biased. Alipay and WeChat are probably the easiest example to look at. They both started very different (WeChat was just a copy of What's App, which is a copy of MSN messenger, which is a copy of AOL messengers, which is a copy of IRC which is a copy of netsend, which is a copy of telegrams, which is a copy of smake signals, etc... - everything is based on what came before it) Slowly based on competition with each other they have stolen each other features and now do basically the same things. Forget about America (Facebook keeps copying features from WeChat). Hope this helps to explain what the article does not explain. |
Upvote.
From talking to Chinese students overseas, it seems to me like Weibo and the like are actually ahead of FB/Twitter in many ways, including a functioning and scalable micropayment system. Sure, government support might be helpful, but you couldn't run anything of that kind and at that scale without some of the best tech people in the world.