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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I'm certainly no expert but isn't it only cheating by western standards? Wouldn't it be interesting to have a culture that doesn't conform to that standard and see how it fares? Imho it's like a society where everything is GPL-ed, is it really so wrong? Sure social credit etc are horrible imo but I fail to see that the copying of smart ideas without punishment is inherently wrong. It's non-capitalistic, but inherently wrong? I dont agree with that.

Sure, one (sentient individual) should never be forced to share ideas (or anything for that matter, unless one chooses to deny others that right), but to battle that with government granted monopolies... hmm, idk... I feel like we should be a bit more open-minded.

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This soft bigotry against Chinese culture is really tiring already. Chinese culture and people are all over the world: America, southeast Asia, singapore, and so many other places... To think that cheating and IP theft and scams is somehow part of Chinese culture or that these are virtues unqiue to these exotic orientals and we should drop our Western preconceptions is so unbelievably condescending... And how offensive to Chinese people, both in China and overseas, who earn their achievements though their honest and diligent labor, the kind of work we value here too.

I would say, IP theft and cheating is a communist thing. I was born in Soviet Union. Since the ruling class were the simple workers and not engineers there is no motivation for these to do world class things. The don’t get fame, credits and wealth. So the government must get all advanced technology by stealing. I case of Eastern Germany everything was copied from the West: stolen,reverse engineered and released as domestic product couple years later. Whole industry was 1-2 generations behind free world.

Exactly, that's why Chinese culture in places like US, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan,HK, etc etc is generally associated with upper middle class professionalism and honorable success. It was decades communism and the associated violence and very intentional destruction of interpersonal trust that breeds a lot of what we see in mainland China today.

The out-of-print book East Minus West Equals Zero makes a case for exactly this.

A Thai person once told me they were raising a generation of copiers, when 1 person would start a karaoke bar, the street would be filled with them soon. I also heard stories of Chinese copying entire machines for manufacturers in the west and expecting support on them. I don't understand your reply I'm saying western culture may have strange standards, Or, different at least.

>I'm certainly no expert but isn't it only cheating by western standards? Wouldn't it be interesting to have a culture that doesn't conform to that standard and see how it fares?

That is a question most don't ask. They assume the laws they have and the way they go about such laws are what fits every culture -- and every people at every circumstances.

And they don't just believe that those laws would be good for those people: they also believe that they can readily and without problems adopt them too, as if it's just a matter of will.

Truth is, those laws are not some universal constants, but a result of both inheriting the Greco-Roman culture and Roman legal conceptions, and 2 millennia of iterating on them (and of course Europe itself was divided into islands of elites and peasant chaos up to the times of Hugo and Dickens, and the US of course had the "wild west" frontiers where the rule of law wasn't exactly what is today).

Maybe I'm reading "cheating" too literally but I can't imagine any scenario where I would want someone's expertise who copied other's work instead of creating the work themselves. At best I temporarily have a small lead, at worst I'll get sued or kill someone through hiring incompetence.

Cheating is ingrained into the culture. Two examples: if you visit an ancient building, it will have been rebuilt identically 7-8 times on the same spot (but still be considered the same building). When you were an apprentice craftsman in China, your goal was to make work indistinguishable from the master, at which point you would graduate and start making your own furniture/whatever it was.

IP theft is not just copying the idea, its stealing of non public documents/prototypes that helps you implement the same product without as much research.

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