Made By China

In addition the scandals around lead paint and poisonous dog food there is another important trend happening in Chinese manufacturing, and this one might be more enduring. People throughout China now understand that being the world's manufacturing district has its advantages, but also its limitations. Hence, I have heard from many Chinese the desire to shift from "Made in China" to "Made by China," by which they mean not only to make the world's goods, but also to conceive and design them.

Consequently, innovation is becoming a popular topic there.

It's a long way to originality, but as the Japanese learned during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the path to originality often lies through imitation.

The September issue of Popular Science displays this thinking with a cover story on the iClone, a copy of the iPhone, albeit with improvements. It's quite a good article.

(By the way, I hadn't read Popular Science since I was kid, but I was impressed. There were a lot of really interesting stuff.)