earticle

영어

This article attempts to illuminate, in terms of technology and mimesis theories, China’s copycat practices generally called shanzhai and the recent US-China tech war in which the USA and China fight against each other over the global techno-hegemony. Positioning a step outside the global regime of Intellectual Property Rights(IPR) and the hegemonic discourse of the USA, this study tries to approach China’s shanzhai practice and the US-China tech war as a fundamental process of mimesis and the politics of mimesis channeling the general trajectory of technological evolution. The research findings of this study are as follow. Firstly, China’s shanzhai practice is not a villain of the global IPR regime but a part of the universal process of technological evolution and a historically and culturally specific effect of technological mimesis. Secondly, the incessant drama of technological imitation and emulation unfolding through shanzhai practices and the US-China tech war is the field of mimetic politics as what Gilles Deleuze calls “simulacra” involving the positive potential that negates at once the original and the replica, the model and the reproduction, which ultimately deconstructs the IPR regime. Thirdly, the technological mimesis and the politics of mimesis shaping the process of China’s shanzhai practice and the US-China tech war allow us a new perspective in which one may examine the unruly technical renovation and competition under the current global capitalism beyond the absolute authority of the IPR regime and the hegemonic discourse of the USA. Based on these research findings, it suggests an epistemological transition through which one comes to be capable of imagining modern technology in general as “technology commons” in order to overcome the global climate crisis and catastrophic environmental problems.