We all love bargains and paying the lowest possible prices for premium products, so it comes as no shock when China tries to give us what we want. China, with its giant economy and infrastructure have the capabilities to mass produce copies of products originally made by many other famous companies. The issues arise with the quality of the products, the legitimacy of the copyright laws, as well as obvious fraud in some cases. Fortunately for the many crooks in Asia, China has very lax copyright laws, so there is little to no fear of legal repercussions from outside nations. These are 5 strange Chinese knockoffs you won’t believe actually exists.
5. Missile Chips
When the US Department of Defense decided to buy the cheapest possible microchips in 2010, they got almost 60,000 cheap, knockoff copies. It seemed that capitalism was almost their own downfall when the department almost paid for the Trojan Systems to infect their radar defense system. Fortunately it was caught and stopped; but who can be sure this is the only time this has happened.
4. Disney World
In China there was even an entire Disney World knockoff. Started in 1986 and completed in 2006, the park opened with cartoon depictions of a mouse, a duck and essentially Snow White. Since then it was toned down, but with the tag line of, “Disney is too far, please come to Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park,” it’s hard to think it’ll ever be considered anything other than a cheat.
3. Fighter Jets
In 2009, Lockheed Martin came under cyber attack. What wasn’t known was from who or where from. In 2014, China started making J-31 fighter planes which looked like exact copies of the F-35 made by Lockheed and Martin. The terrifying part of this is that China is making the extremely cheap relative to the US suppliers, and allows countries to purchase them when the US are unwilling to sell.
2. Cities
Deciding to copy cities such as Paris with the Eiffel tower, Venice with its beautiful canals and London with the riotous pubs, Shanghai has become home to more than ten of these duplitectures. Strangely though, they built these cities not as tourist attractions to steal visitors from other countries, but in an attempt to create full, working communities.
1. Rolls-Royce
Known as the pinnacle of luxury automobiles, the Phantom will set you back almost half a million. Yet thanks to Geely from China, in 2009 they announced that for a tenth of the price you could get one of their knock-offs called the Emgrand GE. Yet strangely enough none have been brought to sale since then; but that would not be the first Chinese take on a European vehicle.
