Monday, June 14, 2010

Piracy: 1350

Sima Yi ordered one hundred skilled craftsmen to disassemble the devices before him and construct new machines according to the dimensions of the captured models.Within half a month they had built some two thousand that were identical to Kongming's and able to move as well.
--From the Romance of the Three Kingdoms--

Reverse engineering is a Chinese tradition!

3 comments:

chickelit said...

And they could probably promulgate the despersion of known technology among their masses and the rest of the world for a couple generations before having to develop innovation, which they've also done before.

chickelit said...

The area where I'm most concerned is piracy of entertainment and the like. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't see an emerging entertainment culture which is China-based. Japanese stuff is more poised to sweep up more of the Western world but in China their government still seems concerned about depriving people of the basic tools.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't see an emerging entertainment culture which is China-based.

Japan has it, South Korea has it, the overseas Chinese have it to some extent. I think the Chinese government doesn't want local intellectuals to gain an overseas base of support (fans) which would allow them to become independent of the government and thereby gain the ability to freely criticize it.