In Germany there's an old idiom of it being the "country of poets and thinkers", and when going back to its origins it wasn't primarily about Goethe and Kant, G

In Germany there's an old idiom of it being the "country of poets and thinkers", and when going back to its origins it wasn't primarily about Goethe and Kant, Germans, being exemplary intellectuals (as it is understood today), but about the lack of copyright enabling cheap reproduction, so just about everybody had poets and thinkers (no matter the nationality) on their bookshelf (when compared to countries with copyright such as Great Britain). As cheap reproduction is an prerequisite for copyrightable artifacts (don't want to spend too much on creating copies after all), the first high value product in that space is reproduction. Once that infrastructure exists and running it becomes a bottom feeder (everybody can run a printing press), locking in artifacts and thereby recreating scarcity is more lucrative. And that's done through copyright. Workers (such as the "lots of people in China") rarely enter the picture, it's about who owns the means of production of the highest value goods. (side note: I'm not a fan of that scheme, but it seems rather inevitable given the incentives)