Introduction
China is generally perceived as the manufacturer of the world. Whereas “created in China” has
become one prime focus of national cultural policy (Keane 2013), the label “Made in China”
continues to proliferate in global stories about abuses of labor in the production of iPhones
and the massive production of steel and coal. Dovetailing with this narrative of China as the
world’s factory is the image of China as a nation of copiers. After China’s entry into the World
Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the nation aspired to a more stringent implementation of
its copyright laws—performed at times by the public burning of pirated DVDs. However, from
the production of imitation smartphones and designer clothes, to the building of look-a-like
architecture, and the faking of events, copying practices still persist. While “fake” remains the
prevailing term in English, particularly in the legal language of intellectual property, in China the
popular qualifier is shanzhai. There are shanzhai iPhones, shanzhai Paul Smiths, shanzhai White
Houses, shanzhai movie stars, and shanzhai CCTV Spring Festival Galas (Zhang and Fung 2013).
In this chapter we examine the proliferation of the vernacular term and its potential use-
fulness in rethinking notions of the “original,” the “authentic,” the “pirated,” and the “fake,”
notions that are mapped onto a discourse of authorship that constitutes the basic underpinning
of the global copyright regime. After presenting the circulation of Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) and its articulations in China, we move on to one particular case—Dafen art village in
Shenzhen—to understand how shanzhai operates in practice, especially in its implicit interroga-
tion of the IPR discourse. In doing so, we argue for more research on three aspects of shanzhai
culture: the aesthetics of the artworks or objects being produced; their local, national, and global
circulation; and the aspirations of the people who are making shanzhai art. In this chapter, this
third dimension will be our primary entry point, which allows us also to reflect on the other two
dimensions. Informed by two rounds of fieldwork in Dafen, we believe that these three dimen-
sions, pertaining to aesthetics, circulation, and aspirations, help complicate our understanding of
the production of the fake and the copy. Nevertheless, our study also shows how resilient the
discourse of originality is, and how the notion of shanzhai is less productive in explaining what
is actually occurring in Dafen. We conclude by reiterating the empirical importance of the three
dimensions, less for recalibrating the global IPR regime, but instead to challenge and complicate
the stereotype of China as a “copy nation” abusing a massive labor force of migrant workers.