米高樂 mikkol.com

I remember vaguely around 1996 I got my first CD-rom. Few years later when I returned to HK during school summer, the “fake CD” industry blossomed and no matter in old shopping malls, to streets at night, you can buy these music CDs, or VCDs, or software CDs everwhere. And then we have hardware supplements such as DVD / VCD / MP3 players afterward. Then LV-look-alike bags. Then cotton blanket that turned out to be made by medical cottons. That should be the start of our modern age of China goods.

Many like me have a question, asking, why why why people of republic China, why do you enjoy duplicating goods? To me such phenomenum explains 3 things: 1) they resemble a little child who failed a test, sneaked the test copy of a perfect grade, photocopied it, and showed it to his/her mom saying “I did it!” i.e. sense of pride in a short term; 2) “Since the factory is here, people are here, instead of just producing the world-quality goods for them (the sourcer), why not I use the evenings to put my labels on?” i.e. buckets of wealth in a short term; or 3) These westerners are stupid enough to use 1 bucket of milk for 1 bucket of money, why don’t I mix 1/2 of milk, 1/2 of milk-look-alike, to produce 1 bucket of money? i.e. tons of wealth in a short term, risking life of everybody. It’s not difficult to find the 3 categories of people above.

You may say greediness is not a exclusive term to Chinese. But I think the key factors that make Chinese people so unique at this 21st century is that, we have loads of geeks who want to jump categories above. People often say if you study more, you will get out of proverty. Realty shows that life isn’t as simple as it says. Some people look dumb, but they earn lots of money. Some people are smart, who might’ve studied a lot,  but they earn little from teaching, doing factory jobs etc. How do these geeks have the “face” to talk to their elders they earn little from their so-called “professional jobs” (which could be better than avg.), and hard to compare with some dumb guys who only had to hook up w/ gov’t officials to be successful?

And the 2nd point is that, China is a huge place with tons of people, and people are born to have business mindset. Look at this: if I am scientist that as a recipe to create fake eggs. These fake eggs only need $1 instead of $5 real eggs a dozen to produce. Selling it for $10 to this city A with 2 million population, even if only 1% of people buy my eggs, I get almost 180k profit instead of 100k - that is, 20k for 180k! Then I could flee to hsing tao, take a beer and on my boat to another place in Canton, get a new identity and play the same trick. And think of this nation as a whole, we have TOO many people many, eating 1 egg will take just few days of their lives, but it’ll ultimately keep our race a better place in the future bu taking out the poor ones…
So do these scientists thought, I would’ve imagined.

China is so unique to keep these life cheaters alive and growing. Not until gov’t does more and more control, which westerners hate and love us even more, there’s no better China unless the whole poor generations are dead and the new ones cannot imagine how bad life could be. “We’ve been poor enough! Time to do something!” should be the voice of many in China.