My personal experience/conclusions drawn from business, experiences in grad school etc. (so obviously not worth much and poorly sourced from a data perspective) are that certain seemingly obvious concepts like "cheating" or "stealing" are just fundamentally understood differently and not ingrained in a Western compatible way culturally in China. There seems to be deep differences there that manifest in all kinds of ways.
> We examine the unique manufacturing ecosystem that has emerged, gaining access to the world’s leading hardware-prototyping culture whilst challenging misconceptions from the west. The film looks at how the evolution of “Shanzhai” – or copycat manufacturing – has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called “Silicon Valley of hardware".
1: https://www.bunniestudios.com 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
This idea of "cultural differences in the idea of stealing" is a bit silly. It's based on self-reports of the people who are stealing, and making massive amounts of money from the theft. Rationalizations, in other words.
In all honesty, if I could "steal" from a culture with a far superior level of technology without repercussion, in order to sell products mainly within my own culture, I'd do it too. It's still a benefit to the whole group, isn't it? The same story plays out every time this power dynamic comes up, and in far more varied patterns than people talk about (e.g. Japan "stealing" transistor designs to start its electronics giants, with the cooperation of a few Americans but still against moral values).
Also the story goes that the Wild West was so famous for not enforcing Edison’s patents, an entire industry formed to take advantage: Hollywood.
Using the word "stealing" is fundamentally wrong about intellectual creations.
What frustrating me more is that Roborock cannot use the double-roller design iRobot has due to patents.
Every major English-speaking social media/web forum has been embroiled with open hatred towards everyone and everything Chinese regardless of context or politics for more than a half decade by now.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/
What did he do? He worked in a factory and memorized details about the machines, and then went to America and rebuilt them.
Is that what Chinese companies are doing? Do they get someone hired at the company, who then memorizes things, and then goes back to China and rebuilds them?
No one would care if China was operating the way Slater operated. That is common even with Americans moving from one American company to another. What is not common is directly stealing designs and schematics and billions of bits of other information through nefarious means, by breaching a company's cyber security or infiltrating their supply line.
I wanted to work in the US designing hardware with my Computer Engineering degree, but I couldn't even find a job doing that. Now I'm in B2B software like everyone else.
In a lot of cases, Western companies go as far as outsourcing the entire design process to China. Entire consumer product categories are just white labeled Chinese designs.
We are long past the point of China doing some crude copy and pasting. It isn't Soviet Russia making exact copies and producing poor quality facsimiles. The West needs to stop thinking of China's economic might as something that was only acquired by "cheating."
This is where we are at: Huawei has better image processing software than Apple. Roborock has more features and a more intelligent robot vacuum than iRobot. TikTok is better than Instagram or Facebook. BYD sells more EVs than Tesla. Which Western company makes an off-street EV utility vehicle with a dump bed, air conditioning, and infotainment like this one?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixJDOH864U
This isn't really at all about China "copying" or "stealing" Western IP, because Chinese products are quite often better than Western ones at lower prices.
The idea that China isn't its own R&D powerhouse is, at this point, an insult to the individuals who are creating all of this stuff.
Why can't American companies study the Chinese products and do the same in turn?
So USA can only watch, while China can actually steal.
In the car industry, it's standard practice for every company to buy every model from every other company to study it.