In addition the scandals around lead paint and poisonous dog food there is another important trend happening in Chinese manufacturing, and this one might be more enduring. People throughout China now understand that being the world’s manufacturing district has its advantages, but also its limitations. Hence, I have heard from many Chinese the desire to shift from “Made in China” to “Made by China,” by which they mean not only to make the world’s goods, but also to conceive and design them.
Consequently, innovation is becoming a popular topic there.
It’s a long way to originality, but as the Japanese learned during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the path to originality often lies through imitation.
The September issue of Popular Science displays this thinking with a cover story on the iClone, a copy of the iPhone, albeit with improvements. It’s quite a good article.
(By the way, I hadn’t read Popular Science since I was kid, but I was impressed. There were a lot of really interesting stuff.)
The Asset Tail That Wags the Creating Dog
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You reckon the “Made in China” phase was a necessary platform upon which the “Made by China” phase can be built? Or they could have jumped straight into the latter?
I don’t think they really gave it much thought earlier on.
(Who are “they”, by the way? It would worthwhile to give this some thought, as it is otherwise a bit crude to be lumping the entire population of 1 b plus into a single category…)
Anyway, my guess is that the “made in” label simply had to be on every product for US import requirements, so “they” put it on.
Then much later on, quite recently, “they” realized that a deeper meaning could be found in the concepts of “made in” versus “made by”.
So I would say it was a recent opportunistic discovery linked to a widely-used language pattern.