Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Now this I can make real easy for you. Name 5 innovative products DESIGNED in China by Chinese? You might name Hanlin 920, but for that one the innovation took place overseas, at E-Ink in Taiwan, not in China. I have been to China hundreds of times, can speak and read Chinese and even I cannot come up with five examples.
Chinese products have a long history of a being a race to the low end of the price range. Take a walk through Chinese malls, except for the expensive imported items all the local stuff is just "me-too". There is no innovation (even hardly any new design for garments or shoes), and why should anyone go through the trouble and expense of developing something when, as soon as the goods hit the store, the first copy products appear? Companies like Adidas have seen copies of their designs hit the stores before they themselves did (local companies paid Adidas employees to smuggle out the designs during development).
No copyright and no patent protection sort of does make sense for dirt poor countries. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all started out this way. But they reach the point --- like China does now, when they need to upgrade, when they need to promote innovation, because they cannot just compete on price anymore as costs are too high. But for even half developed countries without these protections there is only a race to produce at the lowest price, at the expense of jobs in developed countries, of course. When making dirt cheap products, who can afford to pay good wages? How can you create any value beyond production cost without them?
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A.) You have illicitly shifted the burden of evidence from yourself. You made the claim about Chinese creativity. The onus is on you to provide the evidence for it.
B.) The claim was about creativity, not innovative products. All innovative products may very well be creative, but creativity as a category is far more extensive than innovative products.
C.) You have not provided any evidence that this purported lack of creativity is due to a lack of copyright and patent protections. You have simply assumed it in your reply.
As to how you create value beyond production costs, that is a phenomena inherent within the capitalist mode of production itself. Laborers produce more value in a given time period than they require to sustain themselves and their families during that same time period. The difference between what they receive in wages and the value that they produce, once constant capital costs have been subtracted, is the profit. How much the workers receive in wages above and beyond their subsistence costs is a matter of struggle between the workers and the owners (the concept of what constitutes 'subsistence' varies from country to country and region to region throughout history, of course). So yes, you can definitely produce value beyond the production costs while creating copies of products designed elsewhere.