A recent television documentary made an arresting claim: that in China, copying is not always seen as theft, but sometimes as tribute. The suggestion was not that law is absent, but that the Western moral weight attached to originality does not carry the same force. The implication lingered — could this difference help explain China’s rapid industrial and technological rise?
It is a question worth sitting with.
In the Western imagination, ideas are possessions. We “own” them, defend them, patent them, and guard their borders. An idea is treated almost like land: discovered, fenced, monetised. This is a relatively modern notion, emerging alongside printing, capitalism, and the rise of the individual author. Originality became sacred; copying, suspect.
Yet this is not a universal human instinct.
In classical Chinese culture, learning begins with imitation. A student copies the master’s calligraphy stroke by stroke, sometimes for years. The goal is not novelty but absorption. Only after internalisation does variation appear — not as rebellion, but as maturation. To copy well is to show respect. To refuse to copy is to presume superiority too early.
From this perspective, an idea is not diminished by repetition. It is tested by transmission.
This difference matters. When China began its modern industrial expansion, the task was not to win aesthetic prizes for originality but to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty at unprecedented speed. Copying existing technologies was not philosophical defiance — it was practical necessity. Reverse engineering became a form of literacy. Iteration replaced invention as the first priority.
History offers perspective here. Britain once copied Dutch shipbuilding. America copied British textile machinery. Germany copied British steel processes. Strong intellectual property laws tend to arrive after innovation becomes domestic, not before. Protection is a luxury of those who have already caught up.
What is often missed in Western critiques is that copying was never the endpoint. China’s model was not “copy forever,” but “copy, internalise, optimise, then surpass.” Today, China files more patents than any other nation. Once ideas became home-grown, they too required protection.
The deeper difference lies elsewhere — in how value is understood.
In the West, we often venerate the idea itself. In much of East Asia, value lies in execution. A brilliant concept that fails to scale is not revered. What matters is what works, what endures, what spreads. In programming terms, a clever algorithm on paper is nothing without a functioning system. Reality is the final compiler.
This raises an uncomfortable question for Western culture: have we confused ownership with meaning?
Light does not diminish when shared. A flame passed from candle to candle loses nothing. Yet we increasingly behave as though illumination must be rationed. The fear is that without ownership, creativity dies. The counterexample suggests something subtler: creativity may actually thrive when ego loosens its grip.
This is not an argument against copyright or intellectual property. Societies need balance, not absolutes. But it is a reminder that ideas do not arise in isolation. Every thought stands on the shoulders of others — named and unnamed, written and unwritten.
Perhaps progress depends less on who first struck the match, and more on how widely the flame was allowed to travel.
In that sense, civilisation does not advance by guarding light —
but by trusting it to survive being shared.
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