Corrupting Our Youth One Sing Contest At A Time, and Time-Travelling Still Possible

Super girl, o boy o boy!

In the year 399 BC, Socrates was sentenced to death by drinking a cup of Hemlock, because he corrupted the youth. In hind sight we hold his contribution to educate the population in high esteem. How will our progeny judge a TV programme such as Super Girl? At least now the creators of this programme are affected by a similar criticism that once hit Socrates: "vulgar, manipulative, poison for our youth". Read more here.

"I don't want to be vulgar ...

"Market access ban is the modern hemlock cup"
The Death of Socrates 
Jacques-Louis David 1787

We can debate about whether the ever o so impressionable youth can spend their time wiser (hurray for programmes about "practical information about house work"). But especially in a stressful hyper competitive society as China's, people also grave for some entertainment after a day chock-full of study or work. I think the more choice the better. Hopefully then the audiences gravitate toward higher quality. State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) might not be in the best position to be a media critique. And it might be better if the government sticks to facilitating the preconditions for culture to blossom, which includes providing a varied TV programmes schedule with uplifting but also entertaining programmes. Therefore, and based on China's WTO commitments, China should give market access to foreign TV and film providers. Limiting them market access does not only harm foreign media providers (it does also indirectly, because it creates a huge demand for pirated works). It also harms Chinese audiences that miss out on good programmes and Chinese media providers that are not stimulated to meet high international standards.

... but I support their freedom of being vulgar."

I am quoting my colleague Tan Fugui, who inspired by Voltaire said this to me after reading this article. Tan Fugui adds: "a precondition, people have freedom of being vulgar as long as they dont penetrate other peoples right territory, for example, not involving outsider's privacy etc."

Must be harsh for American Idols producers to see that even their knock-off version is kept off the tube.
Read my 2005! blog post about the American Idols knock-off with Chinese characteristics, here.
Read my 2006 blog post about copyright allegations against Super Girl's producer here.

Time-travelling to Alternate Reality

Do you remember that SARFT forbid time-travelling, read here. Well, last weekend I went to the movies in CoCo Park, Shenzhen. And it seems that time-travelling is still possible ..., at least in the movie Source Code.

Spoiler alert
Via "Source Code" Captain Colter Stevens is in the body of Sean Fentress during the last 8 minutes of his life, just before a train blew up. With Source Code and some alleged quantum mechanics, that creates an alternate reality he is able to visit this last 8 minutes many times (using the memory of someone who is technically dead) in order to find who is behind the terrorist attack, so that this information can prevent future attacks. Stevens find a way to alter at least one parallel universe and is able to save the people on the train and can even contact the people of the control centre at Source Code via SMS.
End spoiler alert


The prohibition of time-travelling is to prevent to mislead or confuse uneducated people. Or is it because the future can be changed by going back in time? Or that future projections of many a science-fiction work (such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eigthy-Four which he wrote in 1949) is a kind of critique of contemporary society? But this could happen in a parallel society such as Avatar (that was blocked in 2-D, not 3-D, read here). But why stop there: one can start to interpret the Smurfs (very popular in China) as social criticism. Maybe Source Code slipped through the censor because it is too far fetched even for the credulous and gullible.

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IP Dragon Book Review: Poorly Made In China

Paul Midler's book Poorly Made in China is remarkable. He not only wrote a first hand account of the challenges companies face when they manufacture their products in China, but did it in a lucid, literary style, something you would not expect given the prosaic character of the subject. How exciting can the production of soap and shampoo be, let alone read about it? Well, Mr Midler shares his travails, surprise, doubt, confusion and discovery in a way that you virtually experience it. He describes the factories so that you can almost smell the fumes, taste the paint. It helps that Mr Midler uses a first person narrative, but also the protaganists become real (even though all names of persons and companies have been changed, except for Mr Midler's), and to some extent it is not even impossible to identify with the culprits. The book gives ample illustrations of the infamous quality fade: manufacturers who start to use less and less of a certain ingredient, change some production method, all to save some money.

Counterfeit Culture is one of my favourite chapters. It includes an unforgettable scene about Bernie who is managing the China business for Johnson Carter and wants a breakdown of the ingredients King Chemical uses when it is manufacturing their soaps and shampoos and Sister, who is the co-owner of King Chemical: "Sister said that she was not compelled to provide a breakdown. The details were their trade secrets, she insisted.
This infuriated Bernie. "The product line came from my sample set. What trade secret? It's my fucking product!"

Mr Midler dryly determined: "the factory was claiming intellectual property rights over its copying methods."

In the same chapter Midler convincingly debunked the myth that Marco Polo ever went to China, how in a Confucian sense the manufacturer feels superior to its customers, how whistle blowers in China are not revered even though they become complicit in working at a factory that manufactures lethal products and he shows that poverty is not always the cause of quality fade. Mr Midler illustrated China's reference for counterfeit products over authenticity with the story of emperor Qianlong. When the emperor found out that a small jade cup was not made during the Ming Dynasty, but was made by the grandfather of the curator he praised the counterfeiter: "The emperor even had a special box commissioned for the jade cup, which he saw as a model of sorts, and on the box he had inscribed a kind of treatise on the art of counterfeiting."

Many Western importers seem all too willing to do business with Chinese suppliers who offer to manufacture their products against prices that are too cheap to even break even. And after they find out that their manufacturer uses stagecraft and trickeries, or manufacture in larger batches then they authorised (third shift counterfeiting), they often have invested so much time, effort and money to smoothen the relationship with this supplier, that they do not want to start all over again.

There is a nice saying in the book that the Western importers play checkers and the suppliers chess. Mr Midler means that the manufacturers are doing business in a non-linear way.

Many manufacturers lure importers of Western countries that abide by intellectual property rights laws to place orders, so that they get their hands on the design and marketing of their products. The manufacturers then produce more products than is authorised. This third shift surplus they trade with countries that do not observe intellectual property rules stringently. As Mr Midler put it: "Manufacturers that produced products using unique, original designs provided by importers, realized that they were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the situation by moving designs from one part of the world to the other, while earning a premium in the process. This was not customer segmentation, but an arbitrage opportunity."

And if these manufacturers have the know-how of a product, they sometimes do not even have to violate intellectual property rights to get new customers. Mr Midler explains that not only technology transfer takes place but also disintermediation; in that case, the supplier deals directly with the importers' retailers, thereby removing the importer from the business equation.

Disclaimer: Not reading this book about manufacturing in China is at your own risk.

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China's National Intellectual Property Strategy, What's The Progress? Website To Stay Updated

September 11, 2008 IP Dragon published 'China's National IP Strategy 2008: Feasible Commitments or Road to Nowhere Paved With Good Intentions.' To "popularise" and to keep those interested in the progress of China in implementing its National IP Strategy a website was launched on June 5th, see here (Chinese).

The site has 10 main categories:

• Important news;
• Media viewpoint;
• National strategy;
• Ministry developments;
• Regional strategy;
• Industry strategy;
• IPR protection;
• International developments;
• Strategy research;
• Strategy special.

Below I summarise the first article in the category 'Important news':

Li Changchun (a Politburo politician at the Standing Committee): 'Cultural Industries Are the Resource for Intellectual Property Rights Output'. June 16th, 2010, Mr Li's article 'Correctly understanding and handling the cultural construction and development efforts to the relationship between a number of aspects of major socialist culture with Chinese characteristics and the path of development.

Mr Li understands that by developing Chinese culture new intellectual property rights will be created. This will involve many jobs, for which no plants are needed nor land. For this the relationship between culture and intellectual property must be researched. Also the relationship between culture and economy; culture and technology must be correctly understood. And the relationship between domestic and foreign culture. "Foreign culture must be actively absorbed."

Read the full article here in Chinese.

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Promotion and Protection of China's Culture: Hard Copyright For Soft Power

In The Economist special report on China and the US called 'Overkill' where the author James Miles postulates the opinion that China is piling up more weapons than it appears to need, Mr Miles also writes about the need for China to develop its soft power:

"Soft power was mentioned for the first time by a Chinese leader in public in 2007. Culture, said Mr Hu [Jintao, China's president IP Dragon] (oblivious, it seemed, of the cold-war overtones of his remarks), was of growing significance in the “competition in overall national strength”. China should therefore “enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country”."

Read The Economist article here. Copyright can protect cultural manifestations, so makes copyright crucial to develop China's soft power.

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