China’s Copycat Culture(October 31).docx

October 31, 2011, 11:37 pmChina’s Copycat CultureBy ALEXANDRA HARNEYThis is the first post in Latitude. Read more about the blog ?HONG KONG — If you’re worried about China overtaking the United States as one of the world’s leading innovators, consider this: While Americans mourned the passing of Steve Jobs last month, the Chinese had just finished closing near-perfect copies of Apple retail outlets in the southwestern city of Kunming. While one country celebrated a man who represented three decades of new ideas, another was still playing whack-a-mole with companies that do nothing more than copy.CHINATOPIX, via Associated PressA store in Kunming, China, posing as an official Apple outlet.This is not how Beijing would like things to go. For several years, Chinese officials have been rolling out an ambitious “indigenous innovation” policy that aims to transform China into a technology powerhouse by 2020. They’ve turned on a fire hose of funding, dousing sectors as diverse as genome sequencing, coal-bed methane, nanotechnology and nuclear power. They’ve wooed top Chinese scientists back from abroad and warned researchers in state labs to publish or perish. On paper, this strategy would appear to be working. Last year, China filed 12,337 international patents, a 56 percent increase from the year before. The Chinese telecommunications equipment makers ZTE and Huawei rank among the top five patent filers in the world, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. But the harder Beijing pushes its companies and scientists to come up with new ideas, the more they seem to copy the work of others. Instead of the next Apple, Beijing is getting the Apple Peel, the Apple Stoer, and the BlockBerry.Of course, technology has always spread by adopting the innovations of others. The journeymen of medieval Europe traveled around working with diverse masters to learn new techniques, and Jobs got his inspiration for screen menus and the mouse on a visit to Xerox’s research