What do China’s high-speed rail disaster, backyard steel furnaces, and the drive to file 2,000,000 patents a year have in common? The ‘Great Leap Forward’ mentality…that ‘Mr. Chabuduo,’ that is, ‘Mr. Close Enough’ brought to each project.
Among the reports about China’s rail crash, ‘China Failed to Heed Rail Safety Warnings,’ in the Financial Times on July 26 attracted my particular notice, especially:
In the last year and a half, many rail experts have warned that the country’s rush to build the world’s longest and fastest high speed rail network in record time was a recipe for disaster. [italics added]
. .
But executives at foreign rail companies have long complained that trains meant to run at up to 200km/h have been copied modified somewhat and then made to run at speeds that they were never designed for, potentially compromising their safety. [italics added]
As I read the words…
- warned
- rush
- world’s longest and fastest
- record time
- modified somewhat
- [run at speeds] never designed for
- disaster
…China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ came to mind.
In 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong announced the movement. Two of its main purposes were to leap over the stages outlined by Marx and become quickly a fully communist society, and to move China rapidly from an agrarian economy to a leading industrial power.
The most often cited example of the the latter is Mao’s goal for steel production. In 1957, he called on China to overtake Britain in steel production within 15 years. Then, in 1958, he decided that to meet that goal, China’s steel production would double within one year.
How? Mao ordered every commune and urban neighborhood to build ‘backyard furnaces’ to make steel. 600,000 in all.
Fuel for the furnaces came from cutting down whole forests and harvesting anything made out of wood, such as doors and furniture. Repeated collections of pots, tools, jewelry, anything iron, provided the scrap metal.
Less leftist leaders, like Liu Xiaoqi, warned Mao about the consequences of this and myriad other actions. But to no avail.
The results: 1958 iron production up 45%; lots of low-quality, virtually worthless pig iron; a lot of devastation.
Modifying the FT’s words a little about the rail disaster, Mao, heedless of ‘warnings,’ was in a ‘rush’ for China to become one of the ‘world’s leading’ steel producers in ‘record time’ using backyard furnaces ‘modified somewhat’ from those used in steel mills, but that were really ‘never designed’ to produce quality steel. The result: ‘disaster.’
These are two dramatic examples. Consider something less charged: The Chinese government’s goal of having 2 million patent filings a year by 2015.
According to ‘China as an Innovation Center? Not So Fast: An impressive volume of patent filings conceals serious challenges to Beijing’s R&D aspirations’ in the Wall Street Journal on July 28:
At first blush, data on “outputs” also look impressive. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, Chinese inventors filed 203,481 patent applications in 2008. That would make China the third most innovative country after Japan (502,054 filings) and the U.S. (400,769).
Yet there’s less here than meets the eye. Over 95% of the Chinese applications were filed domestically with the State Intellectual Property Office. The vast majority cover Chinese “innovations” that make only tiny changes on existing designs. In many other cases, a Chinese filer “patents” a foreign invention in China with the goal of suing the foreign inventor for “infringement” in a Chinese legal system that doesn’t recognize foreign patents.
A better measure is to look at those innovations that are recognized outside China—at patent filings or grants to China-origin inventions by the world’s leading patent offices, the U.S., the EU and Japan. On this score, China is way behind the others.
. .
Starkly put, in 2010, China accounted for 20% of the world’s population, 9% of the world’s GDP, 12% of the world’s R&D expenditure, but only 1% of the patent filings with or patents granted by any of the leading patent offices outside China. Further, half of the China-origin patents were granted to subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.
Chinese Patent for an LED Light Adapter
So how is working? According to John Kao, ‘an innovation consultant to governments and corporations’ and former professor at Harvard Business School, as quoted in ‘When Innovation, Too, Is Made in China’, New York Times, January 1, 2011:
It is a brute-force approach at this stage, emphasizing the quantity of innovation assets more than the quality.
Sort of like instantly increasing steel production by running lots and lots of backyard furnaces.
These three failures have in common wildly ambitious projects, shortcuts, and speed or quantity over quality.
Dr. Hu Shih
But there may be something more fundamental underlying the failures. The answer might be found in a famous Chinese essay I suffered through in Chinese language school many years ago, ‘The Life of Mr. Chabuduo (Mr. ‘Close-Enough’),[read the translation after the Chinese] written in 1924 by the great and influential Dr. Hu Shih.
Dr. Hu believed that there is in the Chinese character, a tendency toward imprecision that held China back. In the essay, he wrote:
[Mr. Chabuduo] would often say, ‘Things only to be done ‘chabuduo’ (meaning ‘more-or-less or ‘close enough’) to be good. After all, what sense does it make to be a perfectionist and waste the time and effort necessary to have things absolutely correct all the time?’
Which leaves me to wonder if the failures of China’s leaps, great and small, are caused; not just by rushing and by-passing key steps; or taking shortcuts; or failure to listen to advice and warnings. But, instead, by the attitude that ‘close enough is good enough.’ And, that it is this attitude leads to all the others–’why not skip a key step, close enough.’
‘Let’s reverse engineer some high-speed rail systems. Then, if we change a few things, that ought to be good enough to run the trains at much higher speeds.’
‘Steel from a ‘backyard furnace’ is close enough to steel from a big steel mill.’
‘A patent–low quality, high quality–is still counts as a patent. That’s close enough to meet the target.’
‘Close enough is good enough’ works fine in many of life’s arenas. But not in milk production or drywall material or paint for toys. And, definitely not for high-speed rail.
Next time you hear Chinese officials announce another grandiose plan to race ahead of all others, remember the ‘Great Leap Forward’ mentality that ‘Mr. Chabuduo’ brings to each project.
Great thoughts Malcolm,
I’ve just returned from five weeks in China and this was a hot topic during my travels. I was actually headed south on this exact rail line from Shanghai to Wenzhou when this tragedy occurred. As the wreck was down in Wenzhou, we were all asked to get off of the train in NIngbo and find a hotel for the night. It was pretty amazing to me how many people shrugged their shoulders and said “this needed to happen before the government would spend the money on proper safety measures”. So many people I spoke to labeled this standard operating procedure for government projects. I was actually pretty surprised that the state media was allowed to be so critical of the Chinese government early on. That didn’t last very long and they were soon limited to stories of rescue and happy endings. I’m optimistic but I too fear that Mr. Chabuduo will show himself again in the world of HSR.
Interesting connection.
Hi Dave,
Look forward to hearing more about your trip. Hope you found a good hotel in Ningbo.
Old Mr. Chabuduo is still alive and well. Just did an interview yesterday with a Chinese friend whose drafting the new law for affordable housing. He tells me that in some the projects that been completed, big holes are already appearing in the floors and walls–Mr C forgot to put sand in the concrete mix. But that’s close enough!
Best, Malcolm
Excellent analysis, Malcolm. Like Mr. Chabuduo, I believe that in some cases, “the perfect is the enemy of the good” — but not in all cases, as you rightly point out. Remember this building that fell over in Shanghai a couple of years ago? Shoddy construction techniques and corruption to blame. Would have been advisable to err a bit more on the side of perfection.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5685963/Nine-held-over-Shanghai-building-collapse.html
A few things that need correcting in the WSJ quote, as it apparently has been written by someone who knows nothing about patents:
Patents are granted by national patent offices – if you want a Chinese patent you have to make an application to SIPO, either through WIPO, via some other international mechanism, or directly, so there is nothing particularly special about most Chinese patents being ‘filed domestically’.
Actually, this is pretty much true of most patent applications everywhere. However, I think what is being referred to here is not actually patents for inventions (in Chinese: 发明专利) but what are normally called ‘utility models’ (实用新型专利) – a kind of ‘mini-patent’ granting only limited rights allowed in countries like Germany and Japan. In fact the picture in the post is not of a certificate for a patent for an invention, but one for a utility model.
As a general rule, no country in the world enforces the patents of other countries. To expect otherwise is foolish – each country has its own legal system and different standard of what constitutes an invention. There is no such thing as an ‘international patent’ which can be enforced the world over, instead there are only international organisations such as the EPO and WIPO, through which you can apply to the national patent offices of member states for national patent rights.
And no, I have worked on more than a few Chinese patent applications and have never seen a Chinese applicant intentionally trying directly to patent something already patented or otherwise published in another country by a foreign inventor. This is not to say that it doesn’t happen – but even if someone did try, the examiners at SIPO would most likely reject the application as being non-novel based on the invention having already been published. Even if they succeeded, the patent could easily be invalidated through court proceedings simply by showing that the invention had already been published.
Where there is no prior publication, but someone is trying to patent an invention which is actually stolen from someone else, just as elsewhere there are various mechanisms by which the real inventor can take over the application. However, like most of the rest of the world, China is a ‘first to file’ country – the person who first files a patent application is the inventor, even if someone working independently invented it first but kept the invention secret.
Firstly, there is no ‘EU’ patent office. The European Patent Office is a separate to the EU and has a different membership.
Secondly, to get a patent you must file an application – the main reason that there are relatively few grants for China-origin inventions in the US/EPO/Japan is that the inventors in the main aren’t even trying to get them. Instead they are filing patent or utility model applications only in China because their is no business reason for getting one elsewhere. This is often because the reason for making the application in the first place is to fulfil a quota or for prestige reasons – this is the reason that so many Chinese academics are filing applications at the moment..
(PS – sorry for the double post, for some reason blockquote doesn’t work on this blog)
Hi FOARP,
Thank you so much for the clarifications. It certainly seems that the WSJ writer doesn’t have much of a clue.
All that said, though, what do think of the broader point that the push by the Chinese government to sharply increase the number of patents over a short time emphasizes quantity over quality?
And, do you think that the general thrust of the discussion about patents, WSJ errors aside, supports the point of China’s having a ‘Great Leap Forward’ mentality?
Best, Malcolm
China has had only two train crashes in the last few years. They transport more people than many small countries populations each day. The linking of trains to backyard smelters is silly.