Attack of Sinofritz football clones. via Christopher Koss

German government computers were recently hacked by Sino style competitive advantage strategies - Wen Jiabao was supposedly gravely concerned. Now the Pentagon was hacked - foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu says no. Welcome to the Project of the New Chinese Century.

Rip them off and then deny it. Nothing new in the advance of Chinese business interests. Remember the times when Japanese products were declared inferior and those jokes about product clones? Since then Toyota has become the most successful car manufacturer, both in quantity and quality. Remember when “Made in Germany” was introduced in Britain?

The label was originally introduced to Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as the British society was considering foreign produce to be inferior to domestic produce, and tried to get buyers to adhere to the concept of ‘buying British’.

Well, that’s history. If it repeats itself, we’ll see Chinese products on top in terms of subjective quality pretty soon. At the largest consumer electronics fair IFA, currently held in Berlin, they make up a whopping 50% of exhibitors and OEMs, no one seems to notice. It shows in the menu on the website though, where Chinese is the second listed language.