![]() ![]() The fact that we can even get outraged over one girl’s prom dress is a product of our privileged position within the world’s cultural and technological hierarchies - one that we risk surrendering, if we don’t get serious about who’s really doing the appropriating in this relationship.A white high school student who wore a traditional Chinese dress to her prom last Saturday in Utah has received more than 8,000 tweets taking issue with her fashion choice. To rapidly globalizing powers like China, it is practically a national sport to copy our products, with corporate horse-races to see who can imitate our latest innovations first. When we talk about cultural appropriation, we often fail to realize how little other people across the world care about it. goods and services on a grand, even possibly a nation-threatening scale. No, this isn’t just about Levi’s Jeans and prom dresses anymore. And China is hardly putting on the brakes.Ī comprehensive new cybersecurity law passed by the ruling Communist Party allows the government to conduct unannounced security reviews of any technology companies operating in China that “could affect national security.” China’s reported completion of the J-20, one of the world’s most technologically advanced stealth fighter jets, was bolstered heavily in part by industrial espionage on U.S. These visits can be had for a duration of up to 2 years, and they include tours of high-security premises and sensitive defense technologies. laboratories per year, according to the Institute of World Politics. Like prey who would prefer to be duped into capture, we let the Chinese make 5,000 visits to U.S. What is truly worrying, however, is how China has let loose its copycat animals upon the most sacred of our technology - defense. It appears likely that these domestic brands got a major leg up from their former tenants – probably without their permission. To return to the phone example, China now boasts a domestic smartphone market that captures over 70 percent of Chinese consumers, up from zero ten years ago. These “homegrown” smartphone makers now produce phones in the same factories that Apple and Samsung used to make their wares. revenue per year, and that doesn’t even include the indirect revenue lost by training up future domestic competitors to crowd out U.S. technology companies to give up sensitive operations research for the Chinese government to “review.”Īltogether, theft of trade secrets directly accounts for between $150-500 billion in lost U.S. This includes extorting American electric car companies to give up control of their technology in exchange for permits to sell to Chinese residents. trade secrets, happily taking whatever we are too clumsy to watch carefully. A scathing 2018 New York Times report notes that China will “Beg, Borrow, or Steal” their way into U.S. ![]() The reality is that China is voracious, shameless, and extremely skilled at turning our cultural exports into their profit - and then acting like they don’t know any better.īut Chinese appropriation of American property goes far beyond mild economic mischief into putting our companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. We love to look upon China as a pristine land of straw umbrella-hats and cute rice paddies. Talk about exploiting other people’s cultural products for “consumerism,” as one Twitter personality described the use of the Qipao prom dress. A 2012 report pegged illegal music downloads as comprising 99 percent of total music downloads in China. By comparison, China generates close to $1.5 billion in box-office receipts every year. In 2011, illegally pirating Hollywood movies raked in $6 billion for the Chinese economy. How dare a Westerner attempt to wear a cultural garment that the Chinese stylized from the West! And, as it turns out, dresses aren’t the only thing the Chinese have “stylized” from the West.įor one, Chinese hackers, rippers, and burners have been taking our digital cultural products almost 20 years running. The Qipao is actually a Western-Chinese hybrid dress, which, of course, only adds to the absurdity of the fact that even though the Chinese first appropriated Western fashion to design this dress, it is now being attacked as Western cultural appropriation of Chinese fashion. ![]() I write this because of a debate stirred over many corners and fathoms of the Internet about a Utah girl who wore a “traditional” Chinese dress called a Qipao. ![]()
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