Well, you can call them clones, replicas, counterfeits or reproductions ... but, as far as I'm concerned, these cheap fake items that the Chinese keep making of the originals are mostly junk and not known to last very long.
And the Chinese have been making cheap fakes longer than anyone on this planet ... They just can't seem to design anything by themselves, so they just copy everybody elses products.
In a way, I could care less, but when they put the Corporate Logo of the real product on there cheap fake ... I think that is just going to far! ... It's just wrong!
And that Communist government over there just don't seem to care what these companies are doing. The Chinese government could put an end to it [if] they really wanted to.
Technology has been captured, copied, stolen, borrowed, cloned, reproduced etc. ever since man discovered he was a "homo sapiens habilis" and that he had a brain and thumbs for a reason.
That is how technology spreads.
Marco Polo stole silk worms and mulberry leaves and smuggled them out of China, despite laws against it. Illicit trade didn't start with him, but strangely enough, the West thinks his was a heroic act, not blatant, conscious theft of technology.
One of the causes of the American Revolution was the settlers in the North East appropriating British textile technology without permission or paying manufacturing rights...seen as 'patriotic' by many if not most present-day Americans and as quite legitimate.
So a holier-than-thou kind of attitude about industry and trade laws is counter-historical and falls into the "if my country does it, it's good and if somebody else's country does it, they're bad" type of silly thinking.
The Chinese invented papermaking, printing, gunpowder, the compass, waterwheel irrigation, many types of metal forges, paper money, noodles, steamers, many pottery techniques, terracing...and the list continues for pages. Including e-liquids and e-cig technology. All things that have contributed mightily to the improvement of the human condition.
Far from being enemies, the USA and China are
partners and it isn't a one-way street. If they weren't, you'd have trade barriers and official sanctions and boycotts in place. You'd be risking fines and other not-nice stuff every time you tried to order something from FT.
As common consumers, we are profiting from the spread of technology and the ability of industry everywhere to produce products we can afford and that make our little lives that much more comfortable. But production shifts definitely have their downsides, too - think of the redundancy of all the home textile weavers when mechanical looms took over, or the massive unemployment caused by the agricultural revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, or the decline of heavy industry in the 1980s. We're in that too, and it isn't a pretty sight. Yelling at or denigrating the Chinese isn't going to reverse any trends, however.
