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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.
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.
Yes, except the English had a "presence" in India (not discussing the specifics of Colonialism, just as a reference to their presence there.) There was never any Austrian presence in China. Setting aside the fact the TFA headline is actually (IMO) more inflammatory than Soulskill's, the citizens of the town weren't aware of the activity, meaning it was apparently done without the knowledge of the citizens. In other words, secretly.
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
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
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.
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.