Why chinese are copycats

Take a fresh approach to raising your profile with potential clients. Features providing insights into the marketing industries. Creating compelling content your customers will love. As Chinese businesses begin to lead the world in research and tech, anti-counterfeit efforts are finally bearing fruit — but marketers are having a hard time convincing clients of the need for original creative. A decade ago, counterfeiting and piracy were issues discussed only in hushed tones in China.

Any public acknowledgment of the subject was seen as bringing shame upon local governments and central authorities in Beijing. However, in recent years the taboo has been lifted.

That acknowledgment has also trickled down to courtrooms, where Chinese judges have earned a reputation for being pro-patent. This is music to the ears of both foreign and local brands.

Between and , judges heard more than 87, copyright-related cases. The e-commerce firm currently holds the most patents in the world. While IP laws may have changed, the culture of copying has not disappeared overnight, especially in the advertising industry.

According to an industry source who works in a production house in China and did not wish to be named, there is a culture of finding loopholes and tricks to legally own or control an IP. The holders then demand high fees from incoming foreign brands to return their IP. If the brand is unwilling to pay, they will face difficulty doing business in China — or even get sued themselves.

It seems foreign brands are quickly catching on to this and countering the practice using the same method. Counterfeit operation Supreme Italia used a loophole in Italian law to successfully sell fake Supreme goods in China. The American skateboarding shop and clothing brand does not have any stores in China, and so the counterfeit group managed to gain ownership of the sales and distribution rights for the Supreme brand in China.

The source also shares the example of a creative director based in Shanghai who, when interviewing artists to join his team on four separate occasions, was shown his own work by candidates claiming it as their own.

Although these artists were not hired, they eventually found work elsewhere despite not being able to deliver upon the quality they claimed they were capable of.

It allows artists and studios to continue counterfeiting with impunity. Today, WeChat has over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Justin Kan, founder of Twitch.

You will begin to see a lot of Chinese innovations diffusing into the US. Sources: Forbes. Subscribe to us and stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices for growing your E-commerce business. The reason is that all Asians share some typical traits in appearance — black hair, dark narrow eyes, distinctive face shape and low height.

On the contrary, Male-female relationships in China Nearly 35 million young men in China will hardly ever find a real date or even have sex in their lives Every Sunday in a Shenzhen park, called Lianhuashan, you can witness quite a peculiar scene: some elderly people are It basically implies cutting Get access to our Knowledge base Subscribe to us and stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices for growing your E-commerce business.

Welcome to our community! As reported by the BBC at the time, in a marketing ploy Chinese property developers came up with a new promotional device; make their custom designed communities look just like a town from somewhere else in the world. There are places in China that recreate the canals of Venice, the chateaux of Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, a Scandinavian village, and so on. In a interview about her book, Bosker opined on what drives this mimicry;. This perspective has helped create a copy-friendly climate where knockoff White Houses and Monet-manufacturing centers can flourish.

In the United States…copycats are seen as cheats. Traditionally, people saw there as being many distinct types of copies, each with certain merits and purposes. China is no stranger to copying, as this example shows.

While there may be some loose connection to Confucian values, much of the current IP rip-offs in China are driven purely by commercial advantage, or greed by another name. In a recent blog, Why is Piracy so Common in China? A Historical Perspective I examined this question using the example of Chinese publishing houses in the early 20 th century in Shanghai. At that time, Chinese copyright laws were basically non-existent or at least non-operative but the Shanghai publishers did not let any vague concept of Confucian values get in their way when it came to self-policing of copyright infringement.

Printing and publishing were regulated by their guild and discipline was enforced on those who reproduced the works of guild members without permission. Of course foreign publishing houses were not admitted to the guild so pirating their works was fair game! Other examples of copying and free riding are found in the area of trademarks. China is awash in knock-offs from fake watches and luggage to auto parts and medicines.

Apart from counterfeiting, use of confusingly similar trademark names is also a problem. In a well-known case a few years ago, Starbucks successfully sued a Chinese coffee chain that was using a very similar logo and a Chinese translation of the Starbucks name that was confusingly similar.

The case was one of the first where a western brand was successful in a Chinese court, but it seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. His answer was revealing to me. This is a classic advertising free-riding technique. In the West however, the tactic is for the new product to compare itself favourably to Brand X, using the reputation of Brand X to attract consumers to the new, competing product. So are the Chinese a nation and culture of copycats, unable to innovate without copying either illicitly or openly?

That characterization seems hard to square with the contribution that China has historically made in the area of inventions , including paper-making, movable type, gunpowder, the compass, silk, umbrellas, iron-smelting, and porcelain. Oh, and I forgot golf.