There is a prejudice about the Chinese, that they will fake nearly anything.


I will start with a non-tech story a friend of mine from Shanghai told me: a colleague of his bought a Audi A6 in China for a really good price – a “lucky punch”, a bargain.  This made him happy.  A view months later there was a problem with the motor, and as the guy isn’t a great mechanic he took the car to the nearest Audi garage.  A day later the garage rang him up and asked him where he bought the car.  He told them he bought it in Shanghai, but not from an official Audi dealer.  The garage employee responded: “Hm… , well, OK, that maybe explains something, because actually your car is not a real Audi….”   Hard to believe?
I thought this was really priceless, that even German cars are now being faked (‘knocked off‘) in China.

Coming to another kind of fake:  five years ago I have been to one of the official tourist knock off markets in China that specialized in garments, handbags and watches.  I’ve since been told that this market was closed down due to the pressure from all the luxury brands on the Chinese (by the way, I have never seen a bigger Louis Vuitton store than in Shanghai) – so I really thought that the times of these markets were over.  Well, as it always happens in China: if something closes, it remains for this for some weeks and then it pops up in another side of the city…  and now, voilà, it’s not only cloths, shoes, and handbags – the new thing is, they even fake electronics nowadays.  Clearly, the iPhone is the #1 knock off you see everywhere.  And they even have a faked the software on it, the icons look pretty similar and it works more or less.   But if that’s  not enough, all forms of iPods of course, iPads (yes, 1 and 2) and Blackberry knock-offs are available too.   Sure, you’ll see all of our iconic Asian status symbols there!

But see yourself on the pictures (sorry I forgot to take one of the iPhone display showing the operating system).

Here in the west, the intrinsic value of individual innovation and intellectual property is such an ingrained ideal we can take it for granted sometimes.  Not so in Asia, where the blatant imitation of successful products is often the sincerest form of flattery.

This is especially true when it comes to popular culture and technology.  Twitter has been so phenomenally successful that it’s now arguably both a cultural and technological phenomenon  – so maybe it’s worth taking a look at a few of the Asian Twitter clones out there.

The first thing one notices is that most of these sites use the same shade of turquoise blue and the same style of font used in the original.  Again, to western eyes, copying the Twitter look and feel so slavishly might seem utterly shameless – yet it’s just another example of the how different the Asian mindset is from ours when it comes to such matters.

It should come as no surprise there are several Twitter knock-offs in China – but there are also more innovative sites as well.  Take, for example, digu (below).  This Chinese Twitter clone features an interface that pops up real-time geo-located balloons of posts as they occur (much like similar western sites such as twittervision).

It’s worth noting, though, that digu’s interface is really just a Google Maps-powered mashup.  It’ll be interesting to see if Google continues to make their API available to Chinese sites like digu  in the event they do end up pulling out of the search business in China…

Maybe you’ve heard -  Google has recently discovered a rash of China-based malware attacks targeting not only Google, but dozens of other major US companies (and certain gmail users) as well.  In response, the company has decided that the practice of censoring Google.cn search results – a practice the company had previously accepted as part of doing business in China since 2005  -  is no longer quite so acceptable.  Google’s decision to defy the Chinese government at the expense of the sizable investment the company has already made in the world’s most rapidly growing internet market was  remarkable – and it was announced in an equally remarkable fashion: via a post on the official company blog written by Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond.

China, for its part, is not blinking.

As Strother Martin once told Paul Newman, what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Will Google leave China?  It now seems almost as likely as Conan leaving NBC.

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By now you’ve probably heard about ghostnet, the large-scale operation originating from somewhere within China.  So far, 1,295 computers in 103 countries have been discovered to be infected by the sophisticated rootkit malware (rootkits are particularly tough to detect because they live at a very low level, as close to the actual machine as the operating system itself).  Like most such attacks, ghostnet was launched via ‘trojan’ malware (software embedded into commonly emailed file formats such as Word, Acrobat, or PowerPoint).  The file arrives as an attachment in an email “spoofed” to appear from a trustworthy source, and the malware executes when the user opens the seemingly innocent file.
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