Or call it neo-nationalism.
Recently I had to field a question (as speaker in a seminar) from a Chinese delegate who complained that in Europe some people were fraudulently registering “famous Chinese brands”. I replied that I was having rather fun reading and knowing about that, as in China, every day foreign brands are fraudulently registered and our technologies are openly copied. I told him that now Chinese might start understanding that IPR is not something for foreigners only and Chinese should help to enforce the laws, for their own benefit.
A few days ago US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke appealed to China to help enforce the law, stressing that American companies every year lose billions of dollar due to IP theft. Of course the same for European companies.
Yesterday China Daily showed how pirated copies on Windows 7 are on sale in Beijing (20 RMB). What’s new? Many Chinese will tell you – that’s perfectly “ok”.
Then comes the Chinese cyber-extremist and nationalist gang, attacking Google for unauthorized copying of Chinese books. While later the official complaint was rectified (*), Chinese were complaining that “Google was looking down on the Chinese” by doing it. Ooooooh, I see, the Chinese can promptly copy foreign books and openly sell pirated copies, that’s OK, but the other way around?
I always say, beware of countries who put their national flag everywhere, on each house, cars, buildings, inside offices, on T-shirts, etc. We Belgians are not exactly in that league. Cannot imagine we run around with a Belgian flag on everything, people would rather ask if there was something wrong in our head.
It’s one more item for my book: the one way hypocrisy of Chinese in IPR and neo-nationalism. Robbing foreigners is cool (and justified). But don’t touch Chinese brands, books etc.
The only way they’ll learn is by being served the same treatment.
(*) Stephen Chen wrote in the SCMP on 26 Oct 09:
A Chinese copyright organisation admitted it misled mainland authors last week by using the wrong legal term when it accused Google of infringing its copyright.
The allegation set off an emotional row. The authors, believing that their books were now available for unauthorised downloading from Google’s digital library in the United States – which is not true – levelled harsh criticism against the internet company in the mainland media.
The record was set straight by Jia Jifeng, legal director of the China Written Works Copyright Society, who acknowledged yesterday he had used the wrong term.