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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

From what I can tell, Chinese companies will freely steal technology from other countries and companies, which is obviously frustrating and not great, but then they relatively quickly start exceeding the technology they stole, quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels saying Chinese companies are stealing. Yes, they are, and it's frustrating, but then those Chinese companies add features at a rapid pace that the American companies can seemingly not keep up with.

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I'm not sure how many Chinese HN users we have...but I'd personally love to see them chime in occasionally on this topic.

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.

I'm not sure it's part of personal or societal culture. The Chinese people I know, granted who are all highly educated and also some of the nicest people I know period, do not abide by this culture of stealing/copying and find it as frustrating as anyone. So in my opinion, it's more of an economic and possibly state-driven culture.

Bunnie Huang [1] has written/spoke on this topic. I think he mentions it in the Shenzen documentary [2]. Quote from the documentary page:

> 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

"Stealing" and "cheating" was also the US way before it became the top dog. Intelectual property on patents has always been used as a tool for the current world powers to try to cement themselves as permanent world powers. But it doesn't work, other countries are also sovereign, and they don't have to respect US laws made to create US monopolies.

Most of the accusations about IP theft don't even involve actual registered IP. The fact that users on HN repeatedly fall into this pit shows how much the discussion has deteriorated on what's supposedly a platform less saturated with junk info like mainstream forums.

Well, can IP be stolen? It is a state-protected monopoly. If you steal my IP, we both have these IPs.

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.

I think if a culture finds out that doing a particular thing benefits it greatly, and that it cannot be punished for doing that thing... it will do that thing.

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).

On this note it’s always useful to reflect upon the era where the US also had a cultural acceptance of “stealing” technology from the UK, since America wasn’t always such a tech leader.

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.

No sane human being would willingly step into an openly hostile environment to share their genuine opinions when there is a very obvious risk of being dehumanized, dismissed, and viciously attacked with but not limited to slurs and abusive wording, Chinese or otherwise.

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.

In Chinese culture, copying (I would not use the word "stealing") symbolizes respect for a product and has roots in Confucianism (however, let's avoid potential exploitation of this). But don't forget that Americans behaved similarly in the 19th century [1], and Brits did the same to Dutchs. So I guess this is a common pattern for raising powers.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is the go to argument here? And it wouldn’t be complete without 200 year old whataboutism. I am unimpressed.

This pathetic point always gets brought up when talking about China's IP theft, but it should be telling that it is literally one individual from 200+ years ago who is always mentioned.

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.

The truth is, Chinese companies don't have any need to directly copy Western designs, certainly not anymore. They have the factories and ecosystem to rapidly design and build new products with a high level of quality and precision.

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.

> quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels

Why can't American companies study the Chinese products and do the same in turn?

Do American companies manufacture anything in China? Yes. Do Chinese companies manufacture anything in USA? No.

So USA can only watch, while China can actually steal.

Do you need to see manufacturing processes to steal features? Is it not possible to reverse engineer a lot of it?

In the car industry, it's standard practice for every company to buy every model from every other company to study it.

It still is easier to copy, when you own manufactiring process.

They already do, see facebook/tik tok

Perhaps because there has been nothing worth stealing there, and hence a culture of “stealing” never appeared. This might change of course, if/when China starts pumping out radically superior products.

Sadly I think this is just encouraging US companies to make products that phone home, and require a service contract. It's much harder to copy that part, and more lucrative.

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