Yi Shu (亦舒) Talks about Shanzhai culture and fake goods

An interesting article about “sham glam” caught my attention. It was a Reuters report by Tyra Dempster that the world-wide economic downturn has driven more people inside China to buy fake fashion and imitation products. With chic appeal, these faked fashions are no longer shunned and looked upon as knockoffs and imitations but products with its own brand names. It’s a fine line being tread between imitations or faked goods. The products cost much less than the brand-name equivalents and have altered or different names. For example:  Samsung becomes Samsing, Adidas changes to Odidoss or Avivas. Guess what Hike, Like or even Mike are substitutes for? At times, they even reversed Nike’s famous logo (see photo).

The Chinese consumers even coined a fashionable moniker for it – shanzhai, which is applied to fashions to electronics to lookalike celebrities to anything and everything.
In reality shanzhai is not new but rather is an existing word acquiring a new or additional meaning. Shanzhai is composed of two words:  shan (山) which means “mountain” and zhai (寨) which means “wooden fortification” or “rampart.” For thousands of years this term refers to the headquarters of rebels, bandits, or bands of outlaws.

By the fact that this industry is given such a moniker, one may conclude that the general public frowns upon it. But the reverse may be true. With a quick glance at Chinese folklore, one can find many examples of outlaws being portrayed as heroes who frequently took up the causes of the common people and fought for justice. A good example of this is the popular novel Water Margin (水滸傳) and its characters.
Beijing student Cui Lai  offered an explanation for the popularity of shanzhai goods inside China and why the government seems powerless to stop it. “It’s an imitation, so it’s not a fake and it’s not infringing copyright. Maybe it lacks innovation but it’s not really bad.”

This is not only the view of many people inside China but also of Cai Lan (蔡瀾), a well-known Hong Kong writer, movie producer, television personality, entrepreneur, and food critic, who has expressed a similar viewpoint. In a book published on June 2006, Mr. Cai wrote a piece on the e-book readers he saw while visiting Japan. He was truly impressed and taken by these e-book readers. He lamented the fact that all the electronic books so far were in Japanese only and wondered about the availability of Chinese e-books.
Mr. Cai didn’t see software as a obstacle as Chinese software engineering have made great progress. As for hardware, he figured it is a simple case of buying an existing unit and reverse engineering. He stated that imitation is nothing to be ashamed of, the only shame is when the imitator can’t improve upon the original. He iterated this would be nothing more than taking a page from Japan’s playbook as that country grew from a defeated nation to become the world’s second largest economy.

During the latter part of the 1990s another well-known Hong Kong writer, Yi Shu (亦舒), wrote an article on knock-off purses. Her view at the time was that those purses were of such low quality that people can spot them two blocks away. But people do have the right to live in fantasies if they so wish. Yi Shu is the aunt of Hong Kong writer Joe Nieh.
In a nutshell many in China do not see the production of imitations, fakes or knock-offs in the same light as western multinationals and governments. They don’t see it as an intellectual property rights issue at all. This means western interests and the original, mostly foreign, brands have a long struggle ahead of them in protecting their intellectual properties in not only China but in Asia as a whole.

If Mr. Cai looks familiar, it is because he has appeared numerous times in the original Iron Chef cooking show as one of the judges. He also has a Chinese-language blog.
Source: DailyQi