China today stands as the most aggressively innovative force in modern history. What truly matters isn’t just the number of patents,it’s the sheer volume of high-tech, cutting-edge developments they’re churning out. These innovations are reshaping global industries at breakneck speed.
And soon enough, the West, clinging to its fading dominance, will have only one bitter word left to scream: “Stolen”
Keep in mind these are conspiracy theories. Literally. 1.4 million patent applications? How many people have to be “in” on it before someone speaks about the lie? At some point the lack of evidence is damning. This can’t possibly be true without clear and obvious evidence.
https://natlawreview.com/article/prison-over-200-fraudulent-chinese-patent-applications-yielding-900000-rmb
As I said in a different comment, fraudulent patents are taking government grants that could be going to teams working on quality work. Here are the conspiracy theorists of the people’s court of shehong city, sichuan confirming such a thing. This popped up from a cursory search on Google in English, but it is widely talked about in Chinese on Chinese platforms, it is a real thing that is happening
What that article also shows is that this issue is being taken seriously and fraud is being severely punished.
Did I imply something else? I didn’t say it was being ignored, although it’s obvious that there would be many cases that haven’t gotten caught, and it is an issue that exists which some commenters seem to think is a conspiracy theory.
No, it’s a fair point. Though i don’t know how you would extrapolate from “we know some fraud exists because we have examples of people getting caught and punished” to “therefore there must be many cases which haven’t been caught”.
I mean yes there are surely some cases, because no system is going to be 100% perfect all the time. But i would caution against making unfalsifiable assumptions and inferences about how frequently something occurs without real statistical evidence.
Let’s take for instance the hypothetical scenario that you never heard of anyone being caught doing fraud. Would that mean that no fraud or very little fraud is taking place, or would that mean that it is being insufficiently policed? How about if no one was ever caught? Does that imply little fraud or (deliberately?) poor enforcement?
If for both scenario A - there have been some fraud convictions - and scenario B - there have been no fraud convictions - your conclusion is: this means there must be a lot of cases that haven’t been caught, then how could any evidence ever convince you that this is not the case, if there really was little or no fraud taking place? If you leave no possibility for the evidence to indicate the opposite of a statement, then you have a-priori decided that said statement is true and you are merely seeking ways of making the evidence support your conclusion, not the other way around.
And what if there were a lot of convictions for patent fraud happening in China? Would it mean that China is very diligent in enforcing the law, or would you assume that this simply means that the problem is even bigger still, because there must be a lot more that they aren’t catching?
You see the point i’m trying to make? You’re trying to extrapolate about an unknown quantity based on the existence of known cases, without knowing what percentage of the whole those cases actually are. We should be careful with this, because we see this kind of faulty logic from liberals a lot: they have an already pre-conceived idea of what they want to believe about X country, so when confronted with a lack of evidence that something is happening (or only very few cases of that something happening) they paradoxically become more sure that that thing is happening and moreover that there is a conspiracy to hide it.
I think the only justifiable position to take is to say, ok, we know that some instances of fraud are happening and being punished, but we honestly don’t know how common of a problem it is. It’s ok to admit that we have insufficient data to draw conclusions beyond what we know for a fact.
Anyway, putting China aside, i wonder if you can find similar sentences being handed out in the US. Because obviously it’s not like patent fraud only takes place in China, right? But do we ever see the US punishing their fraudsters as harshly? Or does the US rather reward them, especially if they are big corporate entities doing the fraud? I don’t know. I haven’t looked into this topic much. I’d be interested to find out.
To your first point, it is the sheer volume of it that makes it easy to assume there are many cases that haven’t (yet) been caught. China is producing such an absurd amount of patents, and there are clearly people who are willing to try and defraud the government in China enough that it’s been a real problem. There is also a huge problem with providing enough jobs for qualified scientists in China, it is not hard to imagine that there will be people doing whatever it takes to provide for their family if the alternative is not having any job at all. I wasn’t even saying China was trying to hide anything, although we know that they do that. The Thai building collapse I mentioned in another comment was pretty quickly scrubbed from Chinese social media, for example. In the case of fraud, I would imagine that China would prefer to be open about that data domestically because it shows they are diligent to the masses and potentially scares other people from trying. I haven’t had the time to look for it myself yet. Either way, I wasn’t making a point that there are many cases that haven’t been caught, I was saying that in context to being told the very notion is a conspiracy theory with no evidence, that there are some that have been caught that we can see makes it real, and surely there are more that haven’t been caught.
I’m just posting on forum, not writing to convince an audience of anything, so I feel fine making speculative statements without statistical evidence. I get if you hold yourself to a different standard, but I don’t take any of this seriously enough to think about it like that. I agree that China is probably setting the global standard on fraud prevention and prosecution, and that the US does something like the opposite.
There’s a difference between “some people try to commit fraud” and “China is inflating its numbers to look innovative when it’s actually not”.
Of course some people commit fraud. Of course, some people actually do try to take government money and run with it.
The former is basically true in every single country no matter where you look. The latter is actually the conspiracy theory that China isn’t innovative because “1.4 million patents are all universally bullshit” or something to that extent.
That’s my 2c
Yeah and no one here said the latter, so glad you cleared that up