Everyone with half a brain realizes that the efforts behind Chinese industrial espionage and IP theft have helped fuel their economoy. They are masters of stealing and duplicating tech that they did not build, design and or create.
One only has to go to any trade show and watch vendors throw covers over their newest products when the Chinese spies enter their booths. These teams operate in the open and are pretty slick they will have one guy taking 100’s of pictures of the new product, one flipping through menus, one or two taking notes and one guy scouting out the next product.
Experienced vendors know who these teams are, and what they are doing and are often helpless to stop the spies from examining with great detail the latest and greatest products from a targeted company. I do not blame companies for trying to hide prototypes or limit exposure to products not yet on the open marketplace from this type of espionage.
The administration is hammering China with new tariffs which contrary to many thoughts on this I think is a good thing. I would like to see some additional penalties be put in place for much of the outright espionage and IP theft that happens as well.
One only needs to go on Alibaba to see the knock off’s. Equally depressing is that these knock off’s end up getting licensed and branded to be put on the market around the world under murky distributor brands. Like I said the Chinese are great at copying and duplicating. It is to bad that they could not spend an equal amount of energy in creating their own products.
But why spend time creating when you can just steal and copy.
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash