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Comment by jjcc | Hacker News Reader

The movie mentioned in the report triggered a lot of discussions online. One question that troubled many Chinese was: Why Chinese need to smuggle cheap drugs instead of producing their own equivalent. The difference is obviously the IP cost of drugs owned by the big pharma because Chinese companies have the capability to produce the drugs. Then why China can not violate those IPs while India can? A popular explanation by some experts was: A US company had a disastrous accident in the 80's caused thousands of Indians death and blind. So US never put a pressure on India government to enforce the IP laws. But China is different. There's no way to have a scalable drug production without violate those drug IPs.

I don't know the explaination is accurate or not.

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There's even a book about this unpunished tragedy, by Dominique Lapierre: "Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster"

On the night of December 3, 1984, a cyanide cloud drifted over the streets of Bhopal, India, set loose by a leak in a nearby chemical plant. When the deadly fog lifted untold numbers of the city's residents--perhaps as many as 30,000, by some accounts--lay dead, while half a million others were injured. Dominique Lapierre, a French journalist and longtime champion of India's poor, joins with Spanish writer Javier Moro to recount the terrors of that night, about which the whole truth may never be known. The deaths are but one part of the authors' long, sometimes elaborate tale, which relates how the industrial conglomerate Union Carbide had come to build its vast chemical complex at Bhopal, one meant to be a glory of technology and, ironically, to save thousands of lives brought low by insect-wrought starvation. There are few villains but many heroes in the authors' account, which explores the margins at which good intentions conflict with the profit motive, at which cost-cutting omissions yield horrifically unintended consequences. It all makes for a thoughtful and disturbing book.

Bhopal incident. It's easily one of the worth industrial accidents in the world, and the then PM whisked Union Carbide's head out of India, instead of prosecuting his firm for the cleanup. That hasn't stopped the Americans from lobbying though.

China routinely violates tech IPs by Americans' own reporting; I'm surprised as to why they'd not do the same for drugs.

Here's very interesting difference of 2 cases about the statement "China violated many US IPs":

1.US IPs are violated in China. 2.Chinese government deliberately let Chinese companies violate US IPs.

They are not the same meaning. But media mislead Western audience to believe the second version by some tricky narrative and hide partial truth. The real situation is more complicated

Nothing happens in big business in China without a stamp of approval from Beijing. The reverse is true in the US, where Washington politicians need their report card signed by business interests, but it amounts to the same thing: there is no meaningful reason to distinguish between business elites and political elites in either system.

There was union carbide accident in the 1980's a tragedy.

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