Shanzhai culture, Dafen art, and copyrightsclaims (Wang Hui in Pang 2012,15), any discussions along this line inevitably evoke discussions
and paradigms of authenticity, originality, and ownership, imbricating to aesthetic, legal, and
moral judgments that ultimately dismiss the fake as aesthetically insignificant, legally infringing,
and morally wrong. In their article, Montgomery and Fitzgerald revert to Confucius, who is
alleged to support the idea of transmission rather than creation, and argue for its new relevance
in today’s China (2006). While we wonder whether such claims to indigenous history resonate
with contemporary realities in China, they help open up ways to rethink the current IPR regime.
Pang observes that “the West fears China’s copying power, while China is concerned that it can
only copy. Copying is feared because it is both powerful and powerless, depending on where one
sits and what is at stake” (2008, 123). She also shows how the discourse of creativity has a different
tradition in China, driven by a “rationale of protecting and promulgating culture through mimesis
[which] is found in almost all dimensions of traditional Chinese pedagogy, in that reciting and
copying classics and rituals is the backbone of humanities education” (2008, 123). As Pang stresses,
the point is not to invoke an essentialist notion of Chinese creativity, but to point at the relative
newness of the discourse of copyright in the context of China, a newness that, we contend, makes
the discourse more unstable and more susceptible to changes and slippages of meaning.
Some scholars situate discussions of the fake within the parameters of the global political
economy, specifically with regard to inequality. As China is framed as collectively and nationally
stealing creative products from other countries and reproducing them at low cost to flood the
market (Pang 2012; Wong 2014), such practices can be understood as embedded in our times,
or in Ackbar Abbas’ formulation, “as a social, cultural and economic response, at a local and
appa rently trivial level, to the process of globalization and to the uneven and often unequal rela-
tions that globalization has engendered” (Abbas 2008, 251). Richard Rosecrance points to the
division of the world into what he calls the “head” and “body” nations (1999). While the head
nations are responsible for the creative side of things, the body nations offer the manual labor.
When people in the body nations are only allowed to produce but not to consume the products,
fake products start to emerge to respond to this global inequity.
Similarly, Abbas argues that what makes the fake desirable and possible is the historical con-
juncture where people who cannot afford the real, demand the real, and thereby engender the
supply of something that looks exactly like the real. In other words, the production of the fake is
intricately connected to processes of globalization, of information, of lifestyle, and of economic
inequalities not only between the global North and South but also within the South itself.
However, while fake products may be seen as cheap entrance tickets for poorer consumers to
feel included in a certain lifestyle and identity, Abbas rejects their subversive potential. Rather,
he sees fakes as confirming, or being symptomatic of, the global order itself. After all, the “body”
nations are still working on the products, real or fake, conceived, designed, and therefore squarely
originated in the “head” nations. A fundamental redress to this persistent global inequality, Abbas
thus concludes, is the promotion and proliferation of design education and culture in China
(Abbas 2008). In his reading, however, the paradigms of authenticity, originality, and ownership
in the end remain in place. While the fake may be understood differently, as a response to, as a
subversion of, or as a confirmation of global inequality, they remain fake, vis-à-vis an unper-
turbed underpinning of what is considered real.
Shanzhai
The emergence of the discourse of shanzhai culture is illustrative of the instability of the IPR
discourse in China. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it began to circulate, the term
was noted around the turn of the millennium. It has since become so popular that in 2008