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China Lays Claim To Four Great New Inventions That Have Existed Elsewhere Before (bbc.com)
dryriver writes: The BBC has an interesting story about Chinese state media increasingly touting "4 Great New Inventions" in modern China that were not invented by Chinese inventors or in China at all. The original term "four new inventions" harks back to the "four great inventions" of ancient China -- papermaking, gunpowder, printing and the compass. The new claim, however, appears to be that China actually invented high-speed rail, mobile payment, e-commerce, and bike-sharing, which is not true at all -- all 4 were invented or pioneered in other countries, all of them decades ago. The provenance of the claim appears to be a Beijing Foreign Studies University survey from May 2017, which asked young people from 20 countries to list the technology they "most wanted to bring back" to their country from China. The respondents' top answers were high-speed rail, mobile payment, bike sharing, and e-commerce. Since then, Chinese media and officials have drawn on this to promote these technologies as China's "four new great inventions" in modern times.
China has certainly adopted these "4 great inventions" on a bombastic scale of late. China now has the world's largest high-speed rail network -- about 25,000 kilometres (15,500 miles) -- and aims to double it by 2030. China's total mobile payments in the first 10 months of 2017 stood at $12.7 trillion, the world's largest volume, according to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. And with more than 700 million internet users, China is also the biggest and fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, according to a 2017 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. In February, the vice minister of China's Ministry of Transport said that there are 400 million registered bike-sharing users and 23 million shared bikes in China. That much is true. But did these 4 great new inventions emerge from China itself? It would appear that that part is untrue.
China has certainly adopted these "4 great inventions" on a bombastic scale of late. China now has the world's largest high-speed rail network -- about 25,000 kilometres (15,500 miles) -- and aims to double it by 2030. China's total mobile payments in the first 10 months of 2017 stood at $12.7 trillion, the world's largest volume, according to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. And with more than 700 million internet users, China is also the biggest and fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, according to a 2017 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. In February, the vice minister of China's Ministry of Transport said that there are 400 million registered bike-sharing users and 23 million shared bikes in China. That much is true. But did these 4 great new inventions emerge from China itself? It would appear that that part is untrue.
...they have the resources and the drive to perfect them and make them a part of daily life for their citizens, thereby changing the current paradigm and effectively OWNING the idea for the foreseeable future as they infect those around them with the same new minimum "standards of living".
Gee, I wonder where they learned THAT from?!?
mnem
I am not my pants. No, I am not your pants either.
Apple invented the mp3 player, the smartphone, music production on computers, the tablet computer
America of course saved everyone's ass in world war 2, invented the computer, won the space race, founded a nation based on freedom (black slaves, ethnic cleansing of native americans?) , invented free speech, invented american food like Pizza, Hamburgers and French fries.
Oh wait they didn't...
Japan is a counter-example. Nationalism never stopped them from adopting something foreign if they think it's good.
Take ramen -- we think of it as quintessentially Japanese food, but in fact it's actually Chinese -- or at least the all-important noodle is. The Chinese in the 1500s developed an alkaline noodle that remains chewy in hot broth rather than falling apart. These only started to appear in Japan about a hundred years ago, and it was only about thirty years ago that it reached its current status as an iconic national dish.
This is something I really admire about Japan: it's ability to adopt things from elsewhere and make them their own. Ramen are Japanese because the Japanese took Chinese lamian and transformed it into something new through their mania for refinement. It's a lesson other cultures could learn.
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