There are actually quite a number of entrepreneurial people in our society. We may say that they are well ahead of their time. One good example was Dr J. Many years ago, when academics in our universities were only beginning to study dental implants, Dr J was already providing the service for paying patients in Singapore. Like many ambitious entrepreneurs, Dr J looked beyond Singapore. He arranged for demonstration surgeries in China and planned to market his own system of implants there.
Punching above their own weight. Don't be surprised if this clinic offers dental implants
The Chinese provided a VIP reception for him. The patients were all prepared and on the first day of the clinical demonstration, 30 Chinese dentists packed into the surgery to watch him operate. On the second day when Dr J went back to demonstrate on the rest of the patients, he was told that the 30 eager dentists who watched him operate just a day ago, have already put what they’ve learnt to good use and finished up all the remaining patients.
Well, Dr J may have been a bit overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and the hastily declared independence by the dentists in China. After all, he had planned many hours of training programmes for them. Nevertheless, he still saw this as a positive sign of how keen the mainland dentists were. Either they were such fast learners or they just didn’t really care if they were doing it properly. Dr J preferred to think it was the former and he happily marketed his dental implants to them. Sales were brisk, but only for a year. By the next year, someone had copied his design and mass produced the implants in some backyard factory.
This happened during the early 90s; at a time when the “Asian Way” was widely touted as superior to Western decadence. This bias was more than a little obvious in our mainstream media back then. Anyone who criticised China’s callous way of dealing with dissidents and common citizens was instantly branded as being brainwashed by the Western media (yours truly being one of them even though I speak and write much better Chinese than my accusers). It did seem to me that we were undergoing a cultural revolution of sorts. Luckily, I was never forced into 劳改. I figured that the people who might suggest it can’t even pronounce 劳改 or translate “Asian Way”.
But what did we really know about being mainland Chinese (whom we are not) or being Asian for that matter? Are we really of the same breed as the folks who pulled the rug from under Dr J’s feet? There is an unspeakable moral to this story. And perhaps by being unspeakable, many people don’t learn or realise that if such practices and mentality were allowed to propagate, more disasters will occur.
The bullet train technology took Japan many years to perfect. The Japanese are proud that they have done their research and construction meticulously and didn’t have a single fatal accident in all the years that their bullet trains have been in operation. The Japanese were obviously not just boastful about their cutting edge technology, they were also totally committed to public comfort and safety. In contrast, when one Chinese train was stopped dead in its tracks in the latest incident in Wenzhou, the supposedly high tech train system turned out to be so idiotic that it didn’t even automatically warn or stop an approaching train! The horrendous accident could have been avoided if someone was there to manually divert the tracks! Punching above their weight have cost many lives. Is this sacrifice even necessary? Perhaps the loss of lives is not even an issue to the people at the helm as long as economic progress is on course.
When such tragedies occur, I wish the Chinese people have Justice Bao’s drum to beat. Not even Ip Man’s fist can deal with such greed and utter irresponsibility. Isn’t it such an irony that Ip Man should lecture his Japanese opponents on “Chinese morals” which he claims they will never understand? Did Chinese business operators have more social conscience and responsibility back then? Did they really have the right to teach the Japanese how to be civil, humane and righteous?
According to some reports, The Chinese attitude towards the acquisition of the bullet train technology is not very different from that of their dentists “acquiring” Dr J’s dental implant technology. We should have been concerned, if not worried from Day 1. Everybody (like Dr J) was euphoric about China’s modernisation at light speed, but while speed is thrilling, are we also watching out for the same kind of pitfalls which affected Dr J AND the numerous dental patients who had untrained dentists placing imitation and possibly contaminated titanium implants into their mouths?
