October 18, 2007
TOOTHLESS DRAGON:
Toothless laws are no match for China graft (Catherine Jiang, 10/19/07, Asia Times)
A Hong Kong-based American businessman who asked to remain anonymous but who represents a large Western multimedia company in Asia, including China and Hong Kong, said he believes China is serious about dealing with corruption, but not "100% serious"."China does things that will get media headlines and coverage, but they are at the stage of making examples of a few, hoping that others will follow and be honest, but they are not seriously digging deep and going after everyone," he said. "That's partly because there are still people in relatively high and untouchable positions who are corrupt."
He cited DVD piracy as a major example. "One example - many of the plants that illegally manufacture pirate DVDs are thought to be owned in whole or in part by high ranking officers of the Chinese military," he said.
"China is not entirely serious about protection of intellectual property because they figure that piracy provides employment," he said. "But they are getting more serious now because they are seeing the impacts on Chinese citizens who are also trying to develop new technology and suffering from piracy.
We've had such protections for so long that some have forgotten that not protecting ideas stifles innovation. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2007 7:07 AM
How about our own corruptions? We call them "earmarks" and "campaign contributions". China may have firms that are owned by high officials. We have firms that are opened by high officials for their sons and relatives: Harry Reid's lobbying and other firms that hire his sons and nephews, that received millions earmarks from Reid; John Murtha has a couple of software firms that produce software to the military that never worked; Pat Murray has a $4 million boat for the navy that was donated to the U of Washington because it was not sea worthy. In the rest of the world, citizens have to pay their politicians to get things done for them. In our world, taxpayers are forced to pay politicians to do things detrimental to them.
Posted by: ic at October 18, 2007 1:51 PMNo, we aren't. We choose politicians who will represent us, by doing things like bringing federal funds back to the district. If people didn't want the stuff they'd vote those guys out. Democracy is just brutal to the ideology of the porkbusters.
Posted by: oj at October 18, 2007 4:13 PMOver-protection is no better of course...
Posted by: Benny at October 18, 2007 6:44 PMOr it wouldn't be called "over".
Posted by: oj at October 18, 2007 7:08 PM