Nemesis Has a Long Memory: China’s Copycat Past Is Finally Collecting Interest

 

China built an empire by copying others. Now its own ideas are being stolen, its courts are clogged, and the monster it fed is turning inward—with lawsuits, raids, and global backlash.

I have watched China’s rise for years like a long street fight caught on slow-motion replay. First came the punches it threw at everyone else’s ideas. Then came the trophies built from borrowed blueprints. Now comes the twist nobody in Beijing can dodge. China wants protection. Hard protection. Courtroom protection. And the irony hits harder than any sanction ever did. Nemesis doesn’t knock; it kicks the door in.

The image says it all. A six-inch plush toy named Labubu, born inside China’s own creative economy, now has an evil twin called Lafufu. Factories crank them out like counterfeit conscience. Police raid warehouses. Shanghai cops seize fake toys worth 12m yuan in one swoop. I almost laughed when I read it. Not because it’s funny, but because history has a brutal sense of humor. The country that once told foreign firms to stop whining about stolen designs is now crying foul over stolen dolls.

Let’s not rewrite history with soft lighting. China was the world’s factory for imitation long before it became the world’s courtroom for intellectual property. Walk through markets in the 1990s and early 2000s and you’d find fake Nike shoes stacked next to fake Nestlé seasoning, all sold with a straight face. Western companies knew the risks but came anyway. The market was too big. The labor was too cheap. The rules were too flexible. And flexibility often meant your trade secrets walking out the back door.

General Motors learned that lesson the hard way in 2003 when a Chinese partner rolled out a car that looked suspiciously like GM’s own model. Kawasaki and Siemens watched China’s high-speed rail miracle unfold and wondered how their proprietary technology suddenly felt so familiar in someone else’s hands. At the time, complaints were brushed aside. Growth mattered more than ownership. Speed mattered more than permission. Borrow first, apologize never.

But here’s the pivot nobody wants to say out loud. China grew up. And grown-ups hate thieves even more than children do. Today’s Chinese economy isn’t just an assembly line. It’s a laboratory, a design studio, a patent office on fire. Chinese firms now dominate smartphones, electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and telecom equipment. They file more patents than any other country on earth. According to global IP data, China has led the world in patent filings for several consecutive years, with millions of active patents on the books. Suddenly, loose rules aren’t a growth strategy anymore. They’re a liability.

That’s why Chinese courts are drowning. More than 550,000 IP cases flood the system every year, turning judges into factory workers of justice, processing roughly one case per day. Shanghai has become the preferred battleground because its judges actually know IP law. Even then, companies wait 3 months just to get a case on the docket. Justice may be blind, but here it’s also backed up like rush-hour traffic.

The root of the problem isn’t mystery. It’s excess. Too many factories. Too much capacity. Not enough original demand. Idle plants don’t like sitting still. They copy because copying keeps the lights on. I read about lawyers like Li Hongjiang who describe the same nightmare on loop. Win against one counterfeiter today, face another tomorrow. It’s industrial whack-a-mole. Cut one head off, two grow back. And this mess doesn’t stay inside China’s borders. It leaks. It floods. It shows up on Amazon listings with suspiciously low prices and suspiciously familiar designs. In the United States, patent-related cases involving Chinese businesses jumped by 56% in 2023 alone. Many of them involved Chinese sellers clashing with Western rights holders over copied products in electronics, communications gear, and consumer goods. This isn’t ideological warfare. It’s commercial chaos.

Part of the blame sits squarely with inexperience. Many Chinese firms expanded abroad without running proper freedom-to-operate checks. They built first and asked questions later. That approach works at home when enforcement is uneven. It fails fast in courts where injunctions hit like a hammer. Now these companies are scrambling, hiring senior in-house IP lawyers and paying top dollar to clean up mistakes that never should have crossed borders. Cheap shortcuts become expensive detours.

Then comes the final irony, the one that makes this story sting. Chinese companies are no longer just defendants. They’re plaintiffs. They’re accusing foreigners of stealing Chinese ideas. Luckin Coffee sued a Thai business for copying its name and logo and won. Trina Solar sued Canadian Solar in American courts, arguing that its technology had been infringed. Read that again slowly. Chinese firms are now asking Western judges to defend Chinese innovation.

This is where nemesis steps fully into frame. China built a system where imitation was tolerated, even encouraged, because it accelerated development. That same system now threatens to eat its own children. You can’t train an entire economy to cut corners and then expect it to suddenly respect boundaries. Habits don’t vanish because policy changes. They linger. They resist. They bite back.

I don’t see this as moral awakening. I see it as economic self-interest wearing a judge’s robe. China didn’t discover the value of intellectual property because it found religion. It discovered it because it finally has something worth stealing. The courts are full because the mirror is finally clear. The thief now owns the jewelry. And ownership changes everything.

The coming years will be uglier. More lawsuits. More raids. More global clashes. Chinese firms will demand protection abroad while struggling to enforce discipline at home. Western companies will keep pressing back. And somewhere in the middle, a plush toy named Labubu will sit on a shelf, a soft reminder that when you spend decades copying the world, the world eventually copies you back.

Nemesis always collects. With interest.

 

 On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my “Brief Book Series”  worth exploring. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.