Recently, Pinduoduo, which bills itself as a platform for “consumption downgrading,” went public and stirred up plenty of controversy; I also said a few things on Weibo.
It is not the case that anything with market demand is worth doing. For example, what is equally hard for city people to understand is that in China there are widespread customs such as abandoning baby girls and trafficking in people. Should there then be an app for human trafficking to serve them? If this app were hugely popular, should we then educate those city people who are thunderstruck that you just don’t understand China? Nonsense! Everyone knows that the lower strata of society have a demand for counterfeit goods and child brides; Pinduoduo is not better informed, just more shameless.
What enrages me is that a platform for counterfeit goods can openly talk about the way to its success, while those who despise it are instead made to suffer contempt: you don’t understand China… Perhaps I do not understand China, but I understand principle, I understand shame, I understand aesthetics. Shameful things do not suddenly become glorious just because they are welcomed by the poor. If making money is justified, then the poor are justified; if making money off the poor is the most justified of all, then aesthetics and ethics collapse altogether. If this is China, then not understanding it is fine by me!
These two passages basically make my position clear, so I won’t say much more about Pinduoduo itself. I’ll take this opportunity to talk about my views on the problem of “shanzhai.”
From the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution, China was broadly gripped by a spirit of anti-intellectualism, especially looking down on intellectuals as social elites. People are particularly fond of invoking the name of the underclass, of the poor, to attack and belittle the intellectual elite. This spirit has by no means diminished to this day; any example that shows elites failing to understand the masses is eagerly relished.
In fact, whether one is poor or rich, there is always the danger of a closed mind. It is not only the poor who cannot imagine the lives of the rich, nor the rich who cannot imagine the lives of the poor. In truth, every person finds it hard to imagine a completely different way of life. Workers do not understand farmers, salespeople do not understand programmers, civil servants do not understand scientists… But broadening one’s horizons depends on nothing more than study and research. Personal experience is of course one way to widen one’s perspective, but even if you have experienced the life of a farmer, you have not experienced that of a worker; if you have experienced that of a textile worker, you have not experienced that of a waiter. How many kinds of life can one person possibly experience single-handedly? What truly enables people to break out of the perspective of the “individual” and think about problems is always just two words: knowledge and learning. It is the texts and data accumulated over countless years, gathered from countless regions, and凝聚成 through the contributions of countless people, that form the road to heaven by which one can break free of the limits of “being just one person” and think about problems.
So regardless of whether one is born poor or rich, once you have set foot on this road to heaven and become a scholar, become an intellectual, there is no reason to feel inferior. Of course, the sea of learning is boundless; the more one learns, the more one realizes one’s ignorance—let alone the fact that I know not only nothing about the lives of the poor, but also far too many other ways of life and ideas. But as long as I have grounds and confidence, I have the courage to speak. Any proposition that can stand up, any proposition worth researching and discussing, is neither voiced from the standpoint of the rich nor from the standpoint of the poor; it must be voiced from the standpoint of the intellectual.
The basic atmosphere in China now is one in which intellectuals are demeaned, while two seemingly contradictory logics are in vogue: “making money is justified” and “the poor are justified.” Pinduoduo combines both by “making money off the poor,” so when it appeared it gave the impression of being especially self-assured. But because it was in fact too far out there, it still ended up provoking a good deal of resentment.
Asking for knowledge is the same in principle. On the road to knowledge, the rich are always relatively smoother sailing than the poor. The children of the poor start behind at the starting line, and along the way they are also more cautious and hesitant, making it hard to give their all. But in any case, compared with the other roads of politics, business, talent and skill, and so on, the road of study is still relatively the fairest one; it is the road by which the poor are most likely to stage a comeback.
Here I seem to have wandered off topic again, but in fact this is related to the subject I want to discuss—the problem of the so-called latecomer advantage.
The logic of “I’m poor, therefore I’m justified” is not only used for “the poor”; it is also used for “poor countries,” and used to defend many practices of late-developing countries.
The standard defense of Pinduoduo is: Pinduoduo is only three years old; you can’t be too harsh on it. Look at Taobao back then—wasn’t it also founded on counterfeit and shoddy goods? …Or: we are a developing country. Look at the Western powers back then—colonialism, black slaves, exploitation, pollution… They committed every evil under the sun; now it’s my turn to develop, so why are the demands on me so high?
There is indeed some sense in this logic. Norms and standards for children and adults at different stages of growth are very different. But that does not mean that in all matters one can escape punishment by saying “he’s still just a child.” On the contrary, in some respects, it is precisely children in the process of growing up who are held to stricter standards. Adults have the right to give up on themselves and drift along until death, but children are instead compelled to correct their attitude and study diligently, because to let adults off is to respect their freedom, whereas to leave children unattended is to be irresponsible toward education.
If we compare Pinduoduo to a child and Taobao to an elder, then the elder’s lack of discipline in childhood was because the conditions for education and the cultural environment were both too backward at the time. Now that everything has progressed, it is only natural that we can no longer use the environment in which the elders grew up to judge the new generation (not to mention that even by the standards of that backward era, they would still fail). If we compare late-developing countries to children and developed countries to adults, then the logic is similar: it is not the case that the demands on late-developing countries should be lower in all respects than those on developed countries. On the contrary, in some respects one certainly cannot be too demanding; but in other respects the demands should be even higher, and only then can late-developing countries eventually overtake from behind.
So the question is: in what respects can late-developing countries, precisely because they are late-developing, be granted tolerance and understanding; and in what respects can requirements not be relaxed?
It is obvious that those development processes that are relatively linear cannot be bypassed by late-developing countries. For example, urban population going from 20% to 80% must pass through 50% along the way. And some problems that would not arise when urbanization is either extremely low or extremely high will become prominent in the middle of urbanization—for instance, the “three rural issues,” the problem of migrant workers, and so on. At the same time, uneven development such as “letting some people get rich first” is also very difficult to avoid. Even so, at most one can say that there is no need to be overly harsh, but investigation and reflection are still necessary. After all, in the development histories of developed countries, there, too, were investigations and reflections from different social strata, as well as many bottom-up protest movements including agitation and strikes. If you insist on saying that issues such as inequality between rich and poor are unavoidable in the course of development, then you must also admit that conflict and resistance between different strata are equally unavoidable.
And some other processes are obviously things late-developing countries can bypass. The most典型 example is the level of theoretical science. From Copernicus to Newton, Westerners spent more than a hundred years and took many detours, but when we late-developing countries learn, we do not need to start from Copernicus or from Newton; we can directly introduce the most cutting-edge textbooks and study the most cutting-edge scientific theories.
In natural science, there is probably little controversy about this. But what about the broader “sciences” such as sociology, political science, jurisprudence, economics, philosophy, and the like? There the controversy begins. Some people think we do not need to learn the most cutting-edge things from the West, or even to learn from others at all; we can simply develop our own distinctive scholarship. That is to hand over the latecomer advantage on a platter. You have to know that Western scholarship from the classical to the modern has gone through hundreds or even thousands of years, and if now we are still starting from the Song and Ming as the basis for developing our own learning, then at the very least you would have to look hundreds of years into the future before achieving even a modest result. If you want to overtake on a bend, you must first catch up with the Western frontier; only after absorbing the power the West has accumulated over centuries, and then feeding it back into our own development, can one even begin to talk about taking a different path with Chinese characteristics. But if you do not first digest the achievements of the West and instead simply put Chinese classical learning and Western modern learning side by side, how could you possibly compete?
So whether it is natural science, social science, or the humanities, one cannot be satisfied with one’s own backward learning in the name of being backward. It is understandable to work hard but clumsily and haltingly in one’s learning; in fact, misunderstandings that occur in the course of latecomers’ learning are often precisely the origin of the new paths they eventually take. Learning imperfectly is normal, but refusing to learn is not normal and cannot be excused.
A newbie who has just entered the game clings to an old-timer’s powerful thigh, asking for guidance and asking to be led along; that is nothing to be ashamed of. Japan learned from Germany, the United States learned from Britain, the French wanted to learn from China’s civil service system, medieval Western Europeans sought knowledge from the Arab world and Byzantium… Rising stars taking advanced civilization as their model, and ardently looking up to the rich knowledge and culture of foreign countries, is a perfectly natural thing. The ancestors could only grope their way forward and clear the wilderness themselves, whereas later generations can hug the old-timers’ thighs—that is the greatest “latecomer advantage.”
And in the realm of technology, the controversy is even greater. “Shanzhai” is one strategy by which a latecomer operates in the technological sphere, but is this strategy any good?
It is said that technology and science have already formed a tight alliance, and when I was just talking about science in the broad sense I included the humanities as well. So why should technology be discussed separately? It is because, as forms of knowledge, their modes of dissemination and learning are not quite the same.
What I mean here by science is scholarship whose main成果 are publicly published literature. With extremely low cost one can obtain the latest papers and works, and in the internet age the cost of access is further reduced to the point of almost nothing.
Technology, by contrast, takes “patents” as its main成果. It still depends to a considerable extent on an environment formed by all kinds of public knowledge, but the leading-edge part is “private.”
Private knowledge in technology also comes in two cases. One is generally the secret of production processes; such secrets are completely undisclosed. If enterprises do not actively transfer these trade secrets, late-developing countries can only steal them through industrial espionage. The other is what must be disclosed, generally at the level of product design. After all, products have to be sold; once the product is made public, the tricks and mechanisms that can be seen from the product itself are no longer secret. In this case, the patent system still relies on legal norms to ensure that the profits generated by this publicly disclosed knowledge remain private. The knowledge itself is public, but if you want to use it, you have to pay patent fees.
The former kind of “secret transmission” of technical knowledge is nothing new; producers throughout history and across the world have each had their protected “family secret recipes.” But what ultimately fused technology and science, and allowed technology to develop explosively, was the latter form of knowledge: “publicly private” knowledge. Many extreme libertarians attack the patent system, thinking it imposes an artificial restriction on the free flow of knowledge. In fact, the meaning of the patent system is exactly the opposite: it is meant to protect and promote the publicization of technical knowledge. Without the protection of the patent system, artisans, merchants, or entrepreneurs hoping to make a profit would always try to keep the relevant knowledge secret and not let others know it; but under the protection of the patent system, people can, while still pursuing profit, openly disclose the relevant knowledge so that others can learn, imitate, and apply it.
Faced with patent protection for advanced technology, late-developing countries often show much less respect. Spies who steal secret scientific and technological knowledge may even be regarded as national heroes. Compared with stealing secrets, “shanzhai” seems much gentler. If not by shanzhai and theft, how could late-developing countries possibly catch up with the advanced ones?
There are two layers to this question. First, do shanzhai and theft really help one to overtake from behind? Second, even if they really do help one to overtake from behind, is a development path that uses any means necessary necessarily desirable?
First let us talk about the second point. A country’s strength includes many dimensions: scientific, technological, economic, humanistic, artistic, political, diplomatic, and so on. Even if we rely on state-wide shanzhai to shorten the gap at the technological level, or even to overtake from behind, the result is often that we pick up the sesame seeds and lose the watermelon: we form a culture that does not respect originality; at the political level we encourage the abuse of power (because when technological innovation’s role in market competition declines, entrepreneurs are more likely to invest in power relations rather than in technological research); at the diplomatic level we become a target for all and suffer extra exclusion and suppression; and so on. Taken together, it is more likely to be a losing proposition.
Of course, what we are discussing here is the strategy of “late-developing countries.” If you think that China is no longer late-developing, that it is already the world’s leading champion, and therefore should make its own new game rules, then that is outside the scope of my discussion. Still, I want to remind those who dream of a strong nation that the logic of a strong country and the logic of a poor country should not operate at the same time. You cannot say one moment, “I am strong, so I should set the standards,” and then the next moment, “I am poor, so I cannot be too harsh.” That does not hold together. If you are a strong country, then the logic of a poor country is not even on the table. If, after all, you admit that you are lagging behind, then what I mean is: face up to your present condition of backwardness, which is to say, face up to the West’s condition of advanced development and respect the many game rules already formed under Western dominance. If you do not follow the rules of the game and, as a newbie who has just entered the game, spend all day thinking about rewriting the rules, then you cannot blame others for sidelining you.
But even more crucially, what if shanzhai and theft, even at the technological level, fail to produce a positive effect? Then they have no redeeming value whatsoever.
I do indeed think so: why do we need to steal or shanzhai? Because on our own we cannot produce these innovations, so we simply take them from others and bring them over. But after we have brought over their ready-made achievements, do we thereby learn how to innovate? We still do not know how to innovate; we have merely obtained some tools or applications.
What is called technological catching up still depends on improving innovative capacity, not merely introducing some ready-made technological products. Is it really so hard to introduce ready-made technological products? In a globalized market economy, as long as the country opens its doors, if we truly need these technological products, foreign companies will voluntarily and willingly bring in the latest products. When those companies move slowly, we can adopt ways of cooperating that follow the rules, such as paying patent fees and producing them ourselves, or any other rule-abiding form of cooperation to introduce these products.
In other words, whether one shanzhais or not basically does not affect our ability to enjoy new products, and basically does not affect whether we can improve our innovative capacity. The only thing it almost affects is this: who gets the money, and how much money they get.
Some people think we should not let foreigners make more money, and even less should we let ordinary people spend more money. If counterfeit goods let ordinary people pay less and let Chinese people earn more, wouldn’t that be wonderful? But more crucial than whether the people making money are Chinese or foreign, isn’t the real question whether we have allowed the researchers and innovators to make money? The reason genuine products are expensive, apart from tariffs and the like, is more importantly that the process of technological research and innovation requires enormous investment. It is precisely the patent system that ensures these huge investments will not easily become wedding clothes for others, so enterprises dare to spend large amounts of manpower and material resources to promote innovation. Counterfeit goods are of course cheaper because they abolish the entire step of “giving generous profits to the R&D side.”
So in the overall environment, the key is not whether Chinese people make money or ordinary people make money; the key is that the innovators do not make money—whether they are Chinese innovators or Western innovators.
In an environment of widespread shanzhai, innovators do not get enough fame and profit. Inventors are not as good as civil servants; doing innovation is not as good as currying favor through relationships.
Is it possible to let Western innovators not make money, while letting Chinese innovators make money? That idea is even more dangerous. If innovators can gain benefits, but not by harvesting the fruits of market efficiency and instead by having them bestowed from above through policy, then what is being incentivized in such a case is less the innovator than “power.” So-called innovators no longer care about technology itself and its market effectiveness; instead they fix their eyes on their superiors, on project funding. Truly practical-minded innovators will be defeated by shanzhai makers, while those who are good at currying favor will instead gain fame and fortune. This is not only not an encouragement of innovation; it is, on the contrary, a kind of reverse elimination.
The only true support for innovators is to let them reap fame and fortune from the harsh competition of the market.
Then how can innovators in late-developing countries possibly compete on the same stage with innovators in advanced countries? We are behind by so much—if we do not steal or snatch, how could we possibly catch up? The answer is that, for any specific individual technology, it is indeed almost impossible to overtake from behind, because the advanced side will not stand still and wait for us to catch up. Even if we stimulate innovation in the best possible way, they too are constantly innovating; because advantages keep accumulating, the gap may keep growing rather than shrinking.
However, “technology” is not a single monolithic block; it contains countless possibilities and countless relatively independent paths. The so-called “catching up” in the technological sphere often always relies on new technologies that open up a fresh path, rather than retracing the old technological route once more.
Westerners may well still not have built a cavalry force surpassing the Mongols; they defeated the East with artillery rather than with stronger cavalry. Even today, the quality of the iPhone’s antenna may not be better than Nokia’s; Apple did not overtake Nokia by relying on a more advanced antenna. Even today, Kodak’s film may still be the finest around; its decline was not fundamentally because someone else had pulled ahead in film technology and then outflanked it.
In the chip arena, Intel’s position in computer chips is hard to shake, but in mobile phone chips, companies like MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Samsung have opened up a new landscape.
We simply do not need to overtake the West in every technical field—so what if Kodak remained number one forever in film? Real “overtaking” in technology must mean blazing a new trail and opening up new space, not competing on an existing stage. And whether by stealing secrets or by shanzhai, all we can obtain are those ready-made things; even if we stole Nokia whole, could we create a smartphone?
“Blazing a new trail” is the real “latecomer advantage”: precisely because we are latecomers, we may come into contact with newer ideas before new technologies have become widespread, and thus perhaps skip over certain entire technology trees and open up a brand-new landscape. Such blazing of new trails is hard to achieve through top-down planning and support, and even less can it be achieved by simply copying others’ ready-made accomplishments.
So, those who think shanzhai can make a country strong are all the kind who drop the watermelon and pick up the sesame seed: they have only seen that, in the short term, it lets the domestic schemers earn a bit more money and lets the domestic poor spend a bit less, but it cannot turn the poor into modern citizens who respect knowledge and follow rules, and still less can it turn schemers into innovators and inventors. The road to national strength can only rely on promoting innovation; promoting innovation must mean respecting innovators; respecting innovators means letting innovators win both fame and fortune. That is the simple truth.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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