By Joh Se-hyon
China, which has become one of the world's economic powerhouses, supplying the rest of the world with almost every conceivable commercial product, is also a leading manufacturer of counterfeit goods that range from foreign automobiles to Italian shoes, Swiss watches, even chicken eggs.
``We can make everything that looks like the original,'' some Chinese businessmen were quoted as saying proudly that: ``Everything except a human being!''
And when they say their counterfeit products look like the originals, they are being modest. Many of their fakes, in fact, are so much like the well-known name brand foreign products that even experts sometimes cannot distinguish between them.
That is not all. The quality of the counterfeit goods is sometimes as good _ even better, in some cases _ as the originals, they claim. By way of illustration, they say that if your Swiss watch keeps accurate time all the time, chances are it is a fake made in China; if, on the other hand, it runs erratically sometimes, it could very well be a genuine watch made in Switzerland.
The Chinese are not only copying the products of other countries; some of them are making what nature produces _ eggs, for instance.
Bogus eggs? Yes, and why not, if they can make money? Some people in Hunan Province were reported to have made bogus eggs, everything with chemical compounds, including yolk, whites and shell.
Some 3,000 to 4,000 fake eggs were sold every day at an open market, according to a local newspaper, as the bogus eggs were about one-tenth cheaper than real ones. The only drawback, experts said, ``is that if you eat them, you can develop lapses in memory.''
Reading press reports like this, I am sure, a lot of people in Korea would be appalled by _ even laugh at _ the Chinese, deliberately forgetting that only a decade or so ago, it was the Koreans themselves who were producing counterfeit goods of every kind or copying brand name products from all over the world.
True, Korea's economy has been sufficiently developed now, so that an increasing number of manufacturers realize that in order not only to survive but also compete effectively in world markets, they have to develop their own brand name products.
But there are still some people, especially those in knowledge-based industries as well as television programming and moviemaking, who are shamelessly imitating or copying products made in advanced countries like Japan. Their pat rationale for their plagiarism is: ``Different people often think alike.''
Copycatting is, of course, easy, costs less, and is less time consuming.
In an effort to make quick profits easily, manufacturers and businessmen in developing countries like Korea in the 1970s and 80s and China now, are producing counterfeit products and selling _ even exporting _ them while everybody in their societies feel the great and urgent need for their countries to catch up and join the ranks of advanced nations.
In other words, greed coupled with nationalistic pride is spurring manufacturers, big and small, to produce goods that look as ``good'' as those made in advanced countries even if it means violating international laws against copyright infringement.
But every developing nation eventually reaches the point where, using the acquired technological know-how, it should be able to make products it can truly call its own. This, of course, is easier said than done.
The main difficulty stems from the lack of ideas and creativity on the part of manufacturers, researchers and business leaders as well as ordinary people. And we can blame this on education, which instead of encouraging and fostering the development of creativity in young people, has been teaching students to compete against each other by the rote memorization of mathematical formulas and historical facts.
Talking about education, a parade of sorts is going on in Korea right now, in which an increasing number of university professors and other professionals are coming out of the closet, so to speak, confessing that they cheated their schools as well as their students and the general public with phony degrees or forged diplomas.
What is more surprising is that almost all of them are highly knowledgeable, authoritative and popular academicians and actors, among others, who have been recognized and accepted, if not highly regarded, by the public.
In other words, they knew what they were saying and doing as highly trained experts in their fields. That is why ordinary people are feeling that they have not only been fooled but also betrayed by them when they admit that they either bought phony masters' and Ph.D. degrees or simply claimed that they graduated from universities when in fact they only had a high-school diploma.
All this is occurring in a society where appearance, or facade if you like, is more important than substance.
Actually, many of our institutions, especially those of education, are not capable, I'm afraid, of judging the true qualification of the people they hire. They tend to be blinded by the names of prestigious universities. And this tendency encourages prospective professors and other professionals to lie about their academic credentials.
Of course, the bogus professors are not an isolated phenomenon; they are the products of our society, very much like the counterfeit consumer and industrial goods we have been producing.
There are all kinds of excuses and lame justifications for making bogus goods, as I mentioned earlier. But however hard we try to justify our action, the fact, nonetheless, remains that copying and producing counterfeit products is cheating _ an inexcusable crime, really _ that is being perpetrated because of the lack of morality and sense of justice among ordinary citizens.
And this is precisely why people in a bogus world must do some serious soul searching and make up their minds to stop making fake products _ manufactured goods as well as professionals, such as university professors.
Joh Se-hyon is a retired journalist. He runs a blog (https://blog.360.yahoo.com/choseh).