China is guilty of way more culture theft than a kid in a prom dress

Chinese manufacturers are shipping thousands of fake iPhones to more than 30 fake Apple stores in the city of Shenzhen alone. These phones are designed to look just like the Apple original, capitalizing on the American brand to sell look-a-likes to the emerging Chinese middle-class.

The market for fake iPhones had once been so strong that in 2009 it comprised 20 percent of all Chinese smartphones. The Chinese government has been perfectly content to let their factories appropriate and imitate our technology until it no longer becomes useful to them. For example, just as China apologizes for letting its companies run amok with Apple brands and technology, its factories are now being accused of stealing our wind turbine trade secrets. It’s almost as if they know we’re in on the joke.

I write this because of a debate stirred over many corners and fathoms of the Internet about a Utah girl who wore a “traditional” Chinese dress called a Qipao. The Qipao is actually a Western-Chinese hybrid dress, which, of course, only adds to the absurdity of the fact that even though the Chinese first appropriated Western fashion to design this dress, it is now being attacked as Western cultural appropriation of Chinese fashion. How dare a Westerner attempt to wear a cultural garment that the Chinese stylized from the West! And, as it turns out, dresses aren’t the only thing the Chinese have “stylized” from the West.