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The Final Victory Letter from Beijing October 1994 |
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Ever since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist ideology has looked all washed up with just a few die hard regimes hanging on until the last gasp. The Chinese have other ideas. They have decided to unhinge capitalism by outdoing the capitalists at their own game. The aim is to copy the America dream out of existence or at least until it becomes an unprofitable nightmare. We are talking serious oversupply here. The basic concept is to push the consumer/buying index through the roof in the eventual hope that the corporation/consumer partnership presently dominating world culture will in (hopefully) quite a short time, choke on its own vomit. Actually most Chinese can't see what all the fuss is about. In China there has never been a legal concept of copyright (and only this century really in the West). Culture belongs to everybody doesn't it? And besides which, they are surely now only being good capitalists, learning from the corporations they are copying (The same corporations are quite happy to use cheap Chinese labour when it suits them). At the moment 209 CD factories worldwide produce compact discs... of these China now has 30. Two Years ago they had only 3 factories. At the time of writing this article it is estimated that China has produced this year already (1994) 70 million bootleg copies (1996 update... recent government figures show 150 million bootleg copies for 1996 but it's probably much more) A fantastic achievement, I think you'll agree! Comparable only with their bootleg violin production over recent years. Of course, the US entertainment and world dominating (grunt grunt) Industry is now squealing, they are starting to loose millions of dollars. Poor bastards, doesn't your heart just bleed for Time-Warner, Sony-Columbia, Elektra-Nonesuch, etc. ? It's called 'Intellectual property rights' which has probably got to be one of the sickest misnomers ever. Theft, ownership, exploitation are very grey areas of culture particularly in the age of the computer. But now at last we have the chance to watch large empire amounts of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Disney go up in smoke... computer technology being the ultimate seed of destruction and all that. The Chinese government meanwhile pretends that it's cracking down on the pirates, there is no point in killing off the goose completely... just keep those golden eggs coming so we can copy them. For example 11 CD producers in Guangzhou province were told by the government in November to 'get rid' of their counterfeit discs. How this was to be done was left unclear... they probably dumped the whole lot in Hong Kong for immediate export. According to The China Daily some 7,700 stores selling CD's in Guangdong were inspected and 1.26 million discs seized. Even if this was true (unlikely) it 's still only a shovel of chicken feed designed to placate and keep everyone at the Gatt talks talking. I mean its not just CD copyright being grabbed by the short and curlies here, it's the whole cultural package. Everything imaginable is being copied... from pop fanzines to Marlborough cigarettes, from those stupid wrong way round baseball hats to Big Mac holiday brochures and play along Jurassic Park Holocaust games. Is China the first post modern economy? Possibly... and it could be the last economy (as we understand it) ever. There's millions of very smart kids in China and regardless of the problems of interfacing Mandarin and Cantonese with a reasonable sized computer keyboard (just too many characters), they are all into making their very own virus ( probably a spin off from the strong Chinese tradition in medicinal products?) I had the pleasure of meeting one Wang Yu who is working on a 'shopping' virus that should reap absolute havoc in a few years time when digital browsing, buying and payment (automatic account deductions) are the norm. The 'shopping' virus will be able to attach itself to any company's current and projected sales data. The instant a finished product (say a violin) appears as recorded data, it appears simultaneously also as data showing it has been bought and paid for. There is panic as no one before has had to deal with such mega greed on such a scale as this ( a kind of always another one on line Hydra head). Thus demand for violins in an abundantly unviolin world starts to burn completely out of control. We must invest for tomorrow says management. People unexpectedly like our product says management. The company borrows more and more finance, it has to expand or die. If we don't fill the violin vacuum, somebody else will, says management. There is an unprecedented desire for violins and we have a duty to respond to it, says management. Meanwhile the computer monitoring investment stopped waiting to be asked by management long ago, it cranks up the borrowing/investment index every time there is a sale (which of course by now is all the time... or millions every millisecond). Debt spirals in hitherto unimaginable chaotic graphic forms, world debt takes off into a mindless infinity of incalculable numbers of zeros and... pop. Can't someone turn it off? No body works at the terminal anymore, we fired them all years ago in an efficiency drive, says management. The company buys up other companies, first violin making companies and then any related companies, then finally... all companies. There are no employees anymore, there is no work anymore. There is communication... lots of it but unfortunately there is nothing to communicate... there is no content anymore. The world economy then not so much crashes as simply evaporates into space. Mrs. Yu pulls the plug on her son's PC; there's simply not enough electricity available in the house to watch her favourite soap on television. So it turns out to be just wishful thinking eh? Pity. P.S. A spokesman for Mercedes Benz arrived in China a few months ago and foaming at the mouth with market potential fever, announced that it was his dream that every Chinese person would one day drive one of his company's cars. But to give the guy some credit, he did mention later to an aid that if this happened, the world would of course cease to exist as an extra billion car's worth of pollution is unsustainable. |
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