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China Secretly Clones Austrian Village
Hugh Pickens writes "A scenic mountain village in Austria called Hallstatt has been copied, down to the statues, by a Chinese developer. Residents of the original Hallstatt attended Saturday's opening in China for the high-end residential project, but were still miffed about how the company did it. 'They should have asked the owners of the hotel and the other buildings if we agree with the idea to rebuild Hallstatt in China, and they did not,' says hotel owner Monika Wenger. People in Hallstatt first learned a year ago of the plan when a Chinese guest at Wenger's hotel who was involved with the project inadvertently spilled the beans. Minmetals staff had been taking photos and gathering data while mingling with tourists, raising suspicions among villagers. The original village is a centuries-old village of 900 and a UNESCO heritage site that survives on tourism. The copycat is a $940 million housing estate that thrives on China's new rich. In a country famous for pirated products, the replica Hallstatt sets a new standard. 'The moment I stepped into here, I felt I was in Europe,' says 22-year-old Zhu Bin, a Huizhou resident. 'The security guards wear nice costumes. All the houses are built in European style.' This isn't the first time a Chinese firm has used a European place as inspiration. The Chinese city of Anting, some 30 kilometers from Shanghai, created a district designed to accommodate 20,000 residents called 'German Town Anting' and in 2005 Chengdu British Town was modeled on the English town of Dorchester."
They're just getting ready the European versions of our China Town for when they inevitably dominate the world. We'll find settling into America Town and Europe Town very comfortable.
Soulskill, why do you have to put the word "secret" in the title of TFA?
As if the project was done by some secret agency of the Chinese Communist Party, or something like that
It's a real estate development project, for crying out loud
And it's not only China that they are doing that
You go to India, and you will find towns that looks so much like what you get in England, with English bangalows and everything
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Er... I think this article proves he is correct. I'm Chinese and proud, but the morals we have when it comes to counterfeiting and intellectual property are just shameful. (Well that and environmental / animal cruelty, utterly shameful.) Nothing racist about it.
They could do worse than copying bits of European culture which are beautiful.
After being inspired by Marx and Engels, this is Much Better.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Well, how is that different from half the hotel/casinos on the strip in Las Vegas ? Appart from the fact that's it's more realistic.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm Chinese too and I don't find it shameful. Certainly not racist.
Environmental? Go do some research on history of industrialization in all the now "developed" nations, e.g., the Great Smog of 1952. Animal cruelty? You've obviously never watched some of the PETA videos showcasing the meat industry in America.
China is going through a phase like every other nation once did. Things WILL get better.
I love how some people are 'miffed' that a Chinese company has copied their city down to the finest details "without asking". What if they said no? Would the Chinese company have just shut down their project? Maybe as a courtesy, but why risk a 'no', when you fully intend to ignore it anyway.
And 'piracy' (as posted above) is the wrong term. These buildings and the landscape are so old that even if they ever existed under some sort of copyright or patent protection, they would no longer be covered now.
It's not even like the Chinese company isn't saying that it's a direct copy, so the original is still being credited as being the 'original'.
What this does show is that there are a whole bunch of people around that think that 'copyright' or 'intellectual property' are some sort of super-rights that preclude anyone from doing anything that the creators don't expressly allow; whether or not any reasonable period of protection has elapsed. And sadly, many others think it's justified, while ignoring the consequences, where pretty much anything created would end up infringing on something somewhere at some time in the past.
no, "Chinese" is more like a civilization and an ethnicity, as the people describe themselves. it goes beyond china, and plenty of groups in china do not consider themselves "chinese" in that sense
you are correct, But a simply heads up like "hey, we really like your town, we like it so much in fact we are going to replicate it in our country" would have been good enough. I personally dont care or have any issue with it, a builder can build what it wants, where it wants, but a heads up would be nice is all im saying
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They're hardly the first to try to reproduce tourist destinations and landmarks. Tokyo has an Eiffel tower and a Statue of Liberty.
Isn't there a lot of stuff in Las Vegas as well? (They're not the original Pyramids, I suspect...)
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Pffft. This is a Chinese tourist destination, not a way of life. It is one step away from a theme park. Saying they are discarding their own culture by making/visiting a fake Austrian town is like saying that I'm discarding my Anglo heritage if I go to a Greek restaurant to drink Ouzo, watch belly dancers and break plates. Playing like they are in Europe for the day doesn't degrade their Chinese-ness.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
the chinese will pirate anything.
This copyright protection is going too far... its absurd.... centruries-old... when does original architect's copyright run out, exactly!?
Bullshit. Why would someone taking pictures or doing any kind of observations whatsoever raise suspicion in a heritage site that survives on tourism? I think letting the town know wasn't exactly "inadvertant," but likely overt.
The Admin and the Engineer
The problem with your environmental examples is that those things are all in the past. We humans are supposed to be smart enough to learn not only from our own mistakes, but the mistakes of others too, and not repeat them stupidly. Notice how in many developing countries, everyone has a cellphone these days, but there's very little landline infrastructure. Why didn't they copy us by putting in landlines (with leased phones, no less), and suffer with those and later answering machines? Because that'd be stupid; they just adopted our new cellular technology and leapfrogged over the whole landline bit. That's what developing countries should be doing with environmentalism too; not that they should be going extremist and not doing any development at all, but the technology and techniques are available to avoid a lot of the worst pollution problems.
However, I agree about flattery. I'm American and I think it's pretty funny, and I wish they'd do something more like that over here, instead of building everything with the same boring, ugly-ass architecture everything currently has here.
...be reduced to a Xerox machine.
funny how you put that... I chortled so vehemently at the irony that I had to wipe my eyes with a Kleenex ®, then realizing I did it too, coughed up on my shirt and had to take it to get cleaned in a Laundromat (tm)
The Admin and the Engineer
Don't be ashamed. There is NO SUCH THING as 'Intellectual Property'. It's an artificial construct.
If I go to the town square, and pronounce "blue, blue, blue; blue, purple, blue; purple purple... green!" then I have just published a poem and this will as such be under copyright until 50 years after my death. You are not allowed to call out those colours in the same order, under penalty of copyright infringement. Crazy? Absolutely.
If I want to keep something to myself, i.e. want to own it, I should not shout it out in the middle of a busy square, for everyone to hear. But I can. Because of 'Intellectual Property'. But what "Property" exists? None. It's just some form of agreement, that was of course agreed to by other parties than yourself, if for nothing else than that the basis was laid when your father's father was not even born yet or in his diapers.
I think it's absolutely cool to copy an entire city/town 1:1 and have it sit on another continent. By all means, copy more, and maybe one day I'll come and visit - especially if the hotels offer their "local" cuisine: around the world in 8 days. I can see that work... and "copyright" be damned.
The reason those countries copied the cell infrastructure and not the landline one is that it's cheaper. For all the talk of "New Energy", fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest form of energy available, and will continue to be so for quite a while. If wind, solar, or nuclear energy were more economical (financially and politically), they would ignore the fossil fuel infrastructure and build those instead, same as mobile phones.
It might make you feel better to know that the USA was built on the back of counterfeiting and intellectual property theft of designs from Europe.
And I'll point you at the Clean Air Act (1956). Because, you know, we realized things were wrong and did something about it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Aside from all that, "Chinatown" would have to be the most replicated town on the planet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why is that bad? It's what all the european rulers did in the 18th century with chinese towns, when Asia was a big thing to have, and everyone had to have something chinese. Europeans even copied china (the material), first as fayence, later one with a similar recipe as porcelain. Europeans copied the fireworks, the drinking of tea, and about every larger park had a chinese style pagode. The U.S. copied the chinese sauces in the 19th century, calling them "ketchup", and went on to reinvent chinese food a.k.a. chop suey. Did we hear the Chinese complain how Europeans and the U.S. were stealing chinese intellectual property then?