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Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The country's

Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The country's MO is to steal designs and process and implement better. When the west finally figures out how to stop letting China steal/copy - then the West will continue innovating, and China won't have anything to make.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Except the same empty arguments were made against Japan, and were levelled against the nations producing the imported cotton cloth that people were starting to buy in preference to long established Lancashire cotton mills. "Don't buy Japanese electronics or motorcycles, they only make poor cheap copies" would be commonly heard in the seventies and early eighties. They easily - and quickly - moved past that phase, as will China. They mostly already have. In each case the complaining nations have been happy to supply tooling and equipment to enable this.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  but Japan doesn't rule the world
- dfrage 7y ago
  I absolutely don't know anyone who was saying that about Japanese electronics in the 1970s in my part of US flyover country. Sony was considered to be one of the very best in the world, and my family was greatly disappointed in the 1980s when Sony moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico and they had to fix many cold solder joints on TV sets. If you wanted a good reel to reel tape deck, Teac was your first choice. One thing left out of this formulation is that it was realized at some point, certainly by the 1970s for electronics, that the Japanese added "and improve", which no one says about the Chinese. Who are said to have a pattern more than a century old of steadily decreasing quality until the customer complains. Different culture, vastly different societal trust levels, Japan high, China low, different results.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Maybe US experience was different - I certainly remember that impression through the seventies, and the reputation mainly being with the Euro makes - Dual, Grundig, Quad, Tannoy etc. Sony TV had reputation for poor colour. I think they modified their NTSC designs to PAL, or shared something with the US standard. Enough to be noticed by customers anyway. That reputation stuck around a while, but was fading when Walkman arrived (early 80s?), and by the end of the decade they had a solid reputation among the best TVs. Couldn't tell you when they adopted PAL "properly". By the end of the 80s, Japanese makes had cornered the mass market, and were chipping away at the higher end, and many of the Euro brands fading, or disappearing.
    - dfrage 7y ago
      Sounds like it. None of the brand names you mention were known in my part of the US at the time, and I don't even recognize any of them today except for Gundig. For TVs, Japan very conveniently for the US shares the same NSTC standard, their only issue is that half of Honshuu, the big island, is on 50 cycle power, the other on 60 cycles (both at 110-120V for consumers like the US with our 60 cycle power). So with their two biggest markets being satisfied with the same gear, I can well imagine the fragmented European market suffering. Note also SECAM for France, countries it influenced, and apparently Eastern Europe per Wikipedia either initially so its subjects under Soviet domination couldn't receive PAL signals from across the Iron Curtain, or because it's insensitive to amplitude and phase variations from long cable or microwave links. What about radios? While Sony pioneered the small and inexpensive lo-fi radio with their own transistors, this was very big in the 1950s through the 1960s, but by the time I was paying attention in the 1970s no Japanese company had a commanding lead in radios in the US, they were pretty much a low end commodity by then, except for shortwave sets, which weren't big in the US by then. The first Walkman was released in Japan in 1979, the brand and general format was very big in the US by the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman Sony and Phillips also closely collaborated on the Compact Disc, its capacity was supposedly dictated by one Sony guy's insistence that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as conducted by Herbert von Karajan would fit on one (you have to split a movement between sides for a single vinyl LP release, that was very annoying). They also scored a big early hit two years later in late 1984 with a very small CD player, the head of the project estimated how small was possible with current technology, made a block of wood that size, and challenged his engineers to make one no bigger. Ah, the "Discman", it was per Wikipedia and my memory very important in the early adoption of CDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman
shaki-dora 7y ago
This stereotyping is as old as industrialisation. "Made in Germany" was originally a label forced upon the country by the UK, who wanted customers to chose their superior products over the newcomer's low-quality knockoffs. We all know how that turned out. It was then repeated with Japan, South Korea, and now China.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Except the same empty arguments were made against Japan, and were levelled against the nations producing the imported cotton cloth that people were starting to buy in preference to long established Lancashire cotton mills. "Don't buy Japanese electronics or motorcycles, they only make poor cheap copies" would be commonly heard in the seventies and early eighties. They easily - and quickly - moved past that phase, as will China. They mostly already have. In each case the complaining nations have been happy to supply tooling and equipment to enable this.

HillaryBriss 7y ago
but Japan doesn't rule the world
dfrage 7y ago
I absolutely don't know anyone who was saying that about Japanese electronics in the 1970s in my part of US flyover country. Sony was considered to be one of the very best in the world, and my family was greatly disappointed in the 1980s when Sony moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico and they had to fix many cold solder joints on TV sets. If you wanted a good reel to reel tape deck, Teac was your first choice. One thing left out of this formulation is that it was realized at some point, certainly by the 1970s for electronics, that the Japanese added "and improve", which no one says about the Chinese. Who are said to have a pattern more than a century old of steadily decreasing quality until the customer complains. Different culture, vastly different societal trust levels, Japan high, China low, different results.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Maybe US experience was different - I certainly remember that impression through the seventies, and the reputation mainly being with the Euro makes - Dual, Grundig, Quad, Tannoy etc. Sony TV had reputation for poor colour. I think they modified their NTSC designs to PAL, or shared something with the US standard. Enough to be noticed by customers anyway. That reputation stuck around a while, but was fading when Walkman arrived (early 80s?), and by the end of the decade they had a solid reputation among the best TVs. Couldn't tell you when they adopted PAL "properly". By the end of the 80s, Japanese makes had cornered the mass market, and were chipping away at the higher end, and many of the Euro brands fading, or disappearing.
  - dfrage 7y ago
    Sounds like it. None of the brand names you mention were known in my part of the US at the time, and I don't even recognize any of them today except for Gundig. For TVs, Japan very conveniently for the US shares the same NSTC standard, their only issue is that half of Honshuu, the big island, is on 50 cycle power, the other on 60 cycles (both at 110-120V for consumers like the US with our 60 cycle power). So with their two biggest markets being satisfied with the same gear, I can well imagine the fragmented European market suffering. Note also SECAM for France, countries it influenced, and apparently Eastern Europe per Wikipedia either initially so its subjects under Soviet domination couldn't receive PAL signals from across the Iron Curtain, or because it's insensitive to amplitude and phase variations from long cable or microwave links. What about radios? While Sony pioneered the small and inexpensive lo-fi radio with their own transistors, this was very big in the 1950s through the 1960s, but by the time I was paying attention in the 1970s no Japanese company had a commanding lead in radios in the US, they were pretty much a low end commodity by then, except for shortwave sets, which weren't big in the US by then. The first Walkman was released in Japan in 1979, the brand and general format was very big in the US by the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman Sony and Phillips also closely collaborated on the Compact Disc, its capacity was supposedly dictated by one Sony guy's insistence that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as conducted by Herbert von Karajan would fit on one (you have to split a movement between sides for a single vinyl LP release, that was very annoying). They also scored a big early hit two years later in late 1984 with a very small CD player, the head of the project estimated how small was possible with current technology, made a block of wood that size, and challenged his engineers to make one no bigger. Ah, the "Discman", it was per Wikipedia and my memory very important in the early adoption of CDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman

shaki-dora 7y ago

This stereotyping is as old as industrialisation. "Made in Germany" was originally a label forced upon the country by the UK, who wanted customers to chose their superior products over the newcomer's low-quality knockoffs. We all know how that turned out. It was then repeated with Japan, South Korea, and now China.