Shanzhai culture, Dafen art, and copyrightsWe are aware of the danger of celebrating shanzhai. Winnie Won Yin Wong argues that in
this emerging discourse around shanzhai, “the Chinese copyist has been newly repositioned as a
guerilla counterfeiter (shanzhai)—the ultra-skilled manual worker who contests Western power
through brazen appropriation” (2014, 87). As she rightly points out, this discourse continues to
depend on the notion of copying as “catch-up”—an idea that also underpins Abbas’ conception
of the fake discussed earlier, resulting in a teleological narrative in which “economic and politi-
cal prowess produces creativity, and that a nation, like an artist, learns to copy only in its earliest
days of ‘training’” (2014, 87). We want to steer away from such a reading of shanzhai, and argue
that the proposed prism of aesthetics, circulation, and especially, the people behind the produc-
tion, offer useful tools to do so.
Figure 15.1 Shanzhai Paul Smith bags in Shenzhen (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)