Dear China: Stop Letting the World Steal Your Inventions

Dear China,

I love you. I really do. You’ve got a lot of things going for ya: one of the world’s longest-lived civilizations, an immense literary and artistic cultural heritage, and a massive and economically productive populace. But China, I’ve got something to tell you:

Stop letting the world steal your inventions!

Your historical inability to hold onto your own intellectual property — that is, your unfailing propensity for discarding your own inventions—is unparalleled in the course of human history. Exhibit A, your Four Great Inventions, known to every Chinese schoolchild as “symbols of ancient China’s advanced science and technology.” They are:

• Gunpowder. You guys invented this in the 9th century. That’s, like, over 1200 years ago. Then you turned it into fireworks, which were fun for a while until you realized this stuff was freaking awesome at killing people, so you guys invented flamethrowers, rockets, and guns. Yeah, you invented freaking guns 800 years ago. But by the Qing Dynasty it was “swords and spears versus foreign guns and cannons.” The Arabs, Europeans, and the Indians (who walloped the British in the 19th century with Mysorean rockets) all realized the potential. Why not you?

• Compass. You invented the compass, that thing people use for traveling around (viz. conquering) the world back when Jesus Christ was busy spinning fairy tales in Palestine. Yeah, that’s right, China had the compass in the year zero. Okay, admittedly you spent 1000 years using it on divination, but that’s excusable, since the rest of the world was still wholly preoccupied killing each other over said fairy tales. But finally you guys figured it out (yay!) and then…yay? No, because despite a few truly epic-ass expeditions you mostly didn’t use it. Instead, you let everyone else in on the game. The Europeans took it, perfected it, and pretty soon were using it to circumnavigate (read: conquer) the freaking world. Ouch.

• Paper. Taking a non-martial turn here, you guys came up with paper at the same time as the compass. Also like the compass, it took you a few hundred years before you started using it for its best use, writing (as opposed to wrapping stuff), but hey, you got there pretty quick. Unfortunately your tech stagnated somehow and…the Muslims beat you to the punch. Or rather to the paper mills, the technology for which they literally stole you from you in 751 and used to build the world’s first paper industry. Which then spread to Europe and later helped that continent out with…
• Printing. Printing! Awesome. For a thousand years you had a solid lock on printing tech. In fact, pretty much no one outside of East Asia so much as tried their hand at it. It was kind of dopey for a while though; you had to make custom blocks for each book. But then your boy Bi Sheng in 1040 had an excellent idea — instead of printing things page by page let’s make the type…movable! Sweet! Now you could reuse the blocks and start making millions of cheap copies, right? Wrong. That honor would go to Europe, whose Gutenberg reinvented very similar Korean and Chinese technology and then, thanks to the widespread availability of paper and the suitability of this type of printing to Latin letters, saw it take the hell off. By 1500 Europe had printed 8 to 20 million books with the technology, which in China remained experimental until the 19th century, when you reimported the technology from the West. Holy shit.

So why not let bygones be bygones? After all, you’re the world’s new economic superpower now, right? Honestly, it’s because I’m worried that the same thing is happening again. You’re often knocked for a lack of creativity but I don’t think that’s it — you invent stuff all the time, it’s just that you just keep letting everyone else take credit for it.

Did you know that some Chinese dude from the northern province of Liaoning invented e-cigarettes? Bet you didn’t, because he didn’t make any money or a name from it. China still manufactures them but there’s no intellectual property protection and other countries just take the rights and make their own. As a result guess who’s making the iPhone of e-cigarettes? Some guys in California, of course. And who reaps the fame and profits in this massive, fast-growing, multi-billion dollar market? They do.

Since there’s very little protective intellectual property and very little regulation, anyone and everyone can get in the e-cig market. “All you have to do is have a phone call to one of the six manufacturers or so in China that are producing these e-cigarettes,” Monsees says. “And oh, I want it to be an orange tip on the end and say Orange on the packaging. It’s an hour-long conversation, maybe, and a couple weeks to receive delivery, and you’re in the e-cig business.”

You just see the same thing over and over. China invented the hoverboard, this two-wheeled Segway-like scooter that was a hit in China before some kids from Long Island got the idea (and the mold) from a visit to a Chinese factory. Now it’s PhunkeeDuck winning the hearts of Justin Bieber, Wiz Khalifa, Kendall Jenner, Jamie Foxx, and Kevin Hart (and at maybe like 5x production cost, by the way), not the anonymous (!!!) Chinese inventors.

So I’m begging you, China. Be more like Mugatu. Invent it, profit from it, and scream it from the rooftops. Or the runway.