Fake It Till You Make It The Good News About China's Knockoff Economy

摘要

No one knows for sure why some societies are more innovative than others. The United States is a highly inventive society, the source of a host of technologies-the airplane, the atomic bomb, the Internet-that have transformed the world. Modern China, by contrast, is frequently criticized for its widespread copying of foreign inventions and creative works. Once the home of gunpowder, printing, and other transformational inventions, China is today better known for its knockoffs of almost every imaginable product: cars, clothes, computers, fast food, movies, pharma-ceuticals, even entire European villages. The United States gave the world the iPhone; China gave it the HiPhone-a cheap facsimile of a groundbreaking American gadget.