Counterfeiting: China is Being Boiled in Its Own Oil

China, the counterfeiting capital of the world, is well known for its government-sanctioned and even legally institutionalized intellectual property theft.

This type of intellectual property theft is increasingly common, according to American companies operating in China. In fact, they say, it is tacitly supported by Beijing, and includes forcing foreigners to disclose their technology in order to gain contracts.

China’s new antimonopoly laws would allow compulsory licensing of foreign technologies in some cases and require foreign companies that wanted to merge with or buy a Chinese company to transfer technology to China. Several foreign companies have found themselves competing against Chinese firms using a slight variation of the foreign technology.

Ouch.

Well, now, it seems that China is falling victim to its own culture of intellectual property theft. Well, it has been for a while, but now it's getting downright hilarious.

To see a design come to fruition is surely an architect’s greatest thrill — but to see it reproduced twice must be mindboggling, especially if one of the constructions is entirely unsanctioned. This is the plight currently faced by world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid. One of her designs is being realized twice in China: as planned at a construction site in the Chinese capital of Beijing, and — completely off Hadid’s accounts — at another location in Chongqing, where copycat architects are trying to complete the very same building in a “massive, open counterfeiting operation,” and in less time than the official one.

The 500,000-square-meter (5.3 million square foot) Wangjing Soho office and retail complex takes the shape of three futuristic cones reaching 200 meters (656 feet) tall and is expected to be completed by 2014. But by then, its design may be old news: the copycat architects in the central Chinese hub of Chongqing are expected to have completed their pirated version, according to Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who’s funding the original, told the Der Spiegel.

“It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project,” Satoshi Ohashi, project director for the Soho complex told the German weekly. Hadid said it could be “exciting” to see cloned copies of her projects with mutations.