In 2010, I spent six months in Beijing battling the crowded mobs on the subway lines praying for a little space to breath on the central No. 1 red line. But that was nothing compared to when I wanted to travel to other parts of China. That was a whole different kind of battle – the buying rail tickets kind. Think about the lines at Disneyland or to get into a store at midnight on Black Friday, now make them longer, more crowded, more frenzied, more prone to pushing, shoving and cutting in line, and you’re getting towards the state of what it’s like to buy train tickets in China. It’s hard to understand because the U.S. has a crap-tastic railway system, but in China its the cheapest and easiest way to get from Point A to Point B. Virtually every Chinese person has a horror story about trying to get train tickets. And naturally, the train ticket buying situation is at its worst right around the Lunar New Year when the whole country takes a collective vacation to celebrate and more than 200 million people, the majority of them migrant workers, want to get home.

This year, China’s rail ministry tried to fix this whole ticket buying fiasco by creating a website to reserve tickets. Only it didn’t work. The volume on the site was so high that it crashed all the time (and by volume I mean that this is China and one day it got 1.4 billion hits) and the website occasionally charged people for tickets they didn’t get. Most of the people traveling long distances home for the new year are migrant workers and many of them don’t know how to use computers, let alone the internet. You can imagine that this might create problems – you can’t get your tickets on the site and you can’t get your tickets in person because they’re all sold-out from being on the internet. One worker, Huang Qinghong became a folk hero after he wrote a scathing note to the rail minister after his own personal difficulties trying to get tickets: “You guys sitting on couches in air-conditioned offices…and coming up with buying tickets online, have you ever considered our lives? Have you experienced the agony of buying tickets?” Luckily for Huang, the newspaper that picked up his story gifted him an airplane ticket home, but for others, the problems remain. Maybe the government learned its lesson from this debacle and will come up with an actual way to solve the ticket buying problem, I’m not terribly optimistic.

The last time I blogged about Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, was when he was on The Charlie Rose Show. This latest interview was a few weeks ago during All Things D (Digital) Asia conference in Hong Kong. Being in the mobile space professionally, I’ve been quite interested and impressed with Nvidia’s entry into the smartphone and tablet space with the Tegra line of processors. In this interview, Huang talks about Nvidia’s latest upcoming Quad-core processor and the future of mobile computing.

A Chinese businessman tells me offhandedly that he’s under federal investigation. He doesn’t know enough to explain that he’s being investigated for massive amounts of trademark infringement. Those words aren’t in his vocabulary. IP isn’t part of his knowledge set. Instead he says, “You ever heard of Chanel? My factory in China makes Chanel bags. I ship them here and sell in America, in Chinatown. Oh, but my bags are much cheaper than what Chanel sells them for. You want one? You can have it, free. I like you.” He’s beaming with pride. Needless to say, he doesn’t have a license from Chanel to make their bags or use their trademark. Hence the federal investigation.

It’s astounding to me how many manufacturers in China thrive on the business model of copying. They copy designer handbags. They copy electronics, furniture, coffee mugs, medicine, anything that will yield even a penny of profit from copying. And I’ve come to see why. They simply don’t give a rat’s pink hiney about intellectual property rights. It’s not about creativity or establishing one’s own unique brand. It’s not about making your mark in the world. There’s just no respect for any of that. The only thing the Chinese value is money. And until China can educate its entrepreneurs to think differently, to value creativity and intellectual property, it won’t become a world superpower. It just won’t. Because they won’t be intellectual enough to make it.

Once while I was visiting factories in China, a factory owner whipped out samples of next season’s collection from a very well-known French designer and showed them to me. I didn’t ask him to. He did it to boast about his factory, to brag about landing a contract with a big name designer. But I was aghast. I shouldn’t be looking at these designs! These should still be secret until they’re presented to the public next season. I’m technically a competitor! He went on and on revealing all sorts of trade secrets about that French designer, who is one of his paying clients. Unbelievable!

There just isn’t any sense of respect or value placed on intellectual property. The owner didn’t think he was doing anything wrong by showing me the collection because the concept of IP doesn’t register with him. He smiled and pointed at the designer’s bags. “We can make these bags for you, too. Promise you, they will sell very well. And we’ll give you a good deal on the purchase order. Instead of [the French designer’s] logo, we can put yours on.”

WTF?

“They’re in France. You’re in the U.S. Oh, it’s fine!” he tells me. Meanwhile my eyeballs are popping out of their sockets.

I tried explaining to the factory owner that designers value their own work. We pursue designs that are the product of our own creativity, sprung from our own sources of inspiration. Pride comes from other people’s acknowledgment and acceptance of these designs we have conceived, inspirations that are all our own. Pride doesn’t come from the net profit.

And as for trademarks, it’s about pushing yourself to cultivate a brand that is recognizable, that stands for something special, something that is also a reflection of you. Entrepreneurship is about coming up with a business model or mission that is distinct from what’s already out there, and to protect your brand via trademark, so when consumers see the mark, they know it’s you. Why would you want somebody else’s identity, someone else’s brand? Or am I just so full of hubris that I love being me too much? Because nowhere in my mind would I ever process the notion that I should copy somebody else’s design. I want to create my own. And I want to succeed on the merits of my own creativity.

It’s true, unintentional copying happens. It’s the way our brain absorbs information subconsciously and we dupe ourselves into believing it’s our own idea. Or it really is our own idea, but somebody else thought of it too, and they got it registered before we did. I’m not talking about that kind of infringement here. I’m talking about the guy who “makes Chanel handbags,” the designer who would have the effrontery to copy a French designer’s upcoming collection and slap her own logo on it. That’s the kind of intentional infringement that is so commonplace among the Chinese. That’s the kind of infringement that disgusts me.

Sure, America built itself by copying Europe. We were terribly guilty of copyright, trademark, and patent infringement during the Industrial Age. Yet from that heritage of copying, we finally found our own voice. Then up rose the creative class. American society as a whole came to respect IP jurisprudence, right down to the layman. Even your average Joe Plumber has some rudimentary grasp of intellectual property and why it’s important. Your average Joe Chingchong? Not yet.

I’m not saying that it won’t happen to China, that it won’t someday find its own voice. I’m just saying that until it does, China won’t earn the respect it craves from the world. (And boy do they crave it.) Creativity is the highest form of intellectualism. And I’m holding my breath for the day the Chinese recognize that.

[Details, brand names, and such changed to protect the Chinamen referenced herein. In fact, this is a work of fiction. For reals. Any resemblance to actual persons, Chinese or otherwise, is purely coincidental.]

Oh, the things that people will do for 48-member J-Pop group AKB48. From the Japan Times: “Hardcore fans who cough up ¥1,480 ($19) a month will be able to use the AKBaby app that allows them to see what kind of baby they might have in the extremely unlikely event that they got to impregnate their favorite pop idol.” AKB48′s members, by the way, have members as young as 15 years old.

From 8Asians Reader PeterLo: “I absolutely hate this group for the way it objectifies the girls. I feel like this allows otakus to further develop an unhealthy virtual reality with their already unreal idols. If you’re wondering why AKB48′s Yuko Oshima’s bewbs are a bit low and round for the breast-feeding photo, it’s because they’re photoshopped (duh, i guess).”

While the app itself is one of those merge two faces into one applications that you can download on the iPhone or throw down five dollars at a Dave and Busters on, does it really need to be marketed with a suckling 23 year old with the caption “Make a baby with me?” REALLY, JAPAN OTAKUS? REALLY? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Can’t you just stick to a bad interviews in English?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Glad you brought this up, Ernie. 8Asians is excited to announce our new online venture. No, not an official YouTube channel but a new app called "Make A Baby With Ernie" available in your iTunes store for only $99.]

So my mom has been bugging me about getting her an iPhone. First I got one (because I’m cool like that), and then my dad decided to be “hip” and get one himself (because he’s a poser like that) and now my mother is hinting that she’d like one, too. She already owns a PowerBook, an iPod, an iPad and emails me incessantly from her Gmail account so buying an iPhone 4S would only complete her hipster look.

Except now that I’ve seen this video of a Japanese man trying to use the Siri personal assistant, I’m wondering if this is a bad idea.

If Siri can’t even understand what this poor man is trying to say (WORK! NOT WALK! WORK! But WOK could work, too, cause we’re Asian!), can you imagine how much trouble my mom is going to have with this, especially if she has to use words like “wolves” and “gray” and “ambulance”? And yes, those are words I’d use daily if I had an iPhone 4S. Siri, I’ve been attacked by a pack of gray wolves! Call an ambulance!

It doesn’t help that there’s no way to really say “Siri” in Japanese. You’d have to say shiri which means “butt” which makes me laugh which means yes, I have the sense of humor of a third grader.

That’s not the only thing. Once my mom can’t figure out how to use Siri (aka “Butt”), she’s going to bug me to fix things and help her out with it. And that, my friends, is the biggest problem of all. Trying to be tech support for my Japanese parents is so frustrating that I’d rather be disowned than help them figure out why they can’t double-click fast enough (true story) or insert addresses into their GPS (another true story) or why their laptop won’t power on because they jammed the power cord into the printer jack (another true story).

Conclusion: the next time my mom brings up the iPhone, I’m getting her a Jitterbug.