Abstract
Fan Yang’s Faked in China tells a fascinating story about post–World Trade Organization (post-WTO) era China and its relationship to the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime. At the center of this relationship is China’s growing reputation in the West as a hub of cheap manufacturing and fake goods. Using this as a starting point, Yang skillfully flips the Western perspective on its head, revealing the ways in which the Chinese state and citizens, cognizant of their image in the West, appropriate and remix it to suit their interests and to cater to the demands of the IPR regime. The reader is introduced to two opposing yet often overlapping responses to this Eurocentric framework: the state-driven attempt to rebrand the nation as a location of creation and innovation (what Yang calls “nation branding”) and grassroots efforts to use counterfeit goods to reclaim agency and autonomy in the face of the hegemony of multinational corporations and Western global brands (counterfeit culture).
Scholars interested in the workings of globalization and cultural imperialism will find a great deal of value in Yang’s thoughtful and detailed account. Her work draws inspiration from well-known scholars such as Scott Lash and Celia Lury, John Tomlinson, and Arjun Appadurai, while placing them in conversation with a growing body of scholarship on Chinese media culture. Using Lash and Lury’s (2007) claim that culture has become “thingified,” she explores the ways in which the superstructure has collapsed into the economic base within the confines of post-WTO China.
In her foundational chapter, Yang tracks the movement of the “Made in China” label as it traverses the globe. More than a simple marker of product origin, “Made in China,” Yang argues, has become a “nation brand.” Cognizant of the way this “brand” has been shunned by the West, the Chinese state has made efforts to remake its “global-national imaginary” following its entrance into the WTO (p. 48). Fusing concepts such as “soft power” with attempts to rebrand the country as a cultural (commodity) powerhouse, the Chinese state has invested in a new slogan: “From Made in China to Created in China.” While tracing this shift, Yang also insightfully highlights the problems obscured by such branding efforts. Replacing Marx’s classic notion of the “commodity fetish” with Appadurai’s (1996) notion of “production fetishism,” she points out that the venom directed against “Made in China” in the United States obscures the fact that multinational companies such as Apple are the ones profiting from global systems of production. The misguided and racist boycott of goods “Made in China” thus “precludes the possibility for transnational worker solidarity” (p. 37).
The three chapters that follow serve to illustrate the complex ways in which the state’s efforts to rebrand itself in accordance with the expectations of the IPR regime have met with cultural resistance and contestation from below. As she notes in her conclusion, the cases of shanzhai ji, or counterfeit cell phones (chapter 2), Crazy Stone (chapter 3), and Silk Street (chapter 4), all exhibit a “refusal to conform to global modernity’s one-dimensional production of culture” (p. 172). Importantly, Yang avoids the temptation to romanticize phenomena such as shanzhai. Rather, she argues that the emergence of shanzhai is itself intertwined with the influx of foreign direct investment—many of the factories and workers needed for the production of foreign goods during the day are used for the production of shanzhai goods by night. What is more, Yang notes that shanzhai phones such as the hiPhone and Nokla have become popular among the transnational “information have-less,” often beating out officially sanctioned national brands and coming to represent an “alternative national identity” (p. 73). Chapters 3 and 4 build upon this model, illustrating the ways in which counterfeit film productions such as Crazy Stone and fake good markets such as Silk Street in Beijing are often tied to the global despite being at odds with state-sanctioned efforts to market China to the world. Ultimately, Yang concludes that the IPR regime has intensified the “disjuncture between the nation and the state,” leaving China with a “cultural dilemma” in which state-led efforts to adapt to the norms of the global culture industry are at odds with local “meaning-making practices” (p. 198).
At times the ethnographer in me yearned for more individual voices and grounded local narratives, but as Yang makes clear throughout, the individual experience of counterfeit culture in China cannot exist independently of the web spun by international, state, and corporate actors. And, this is the undeniable strength of Yang’s vision: throughout her book, she toggles between the global and national, state and citizen, corporate and private, refusing to reduce these relationships to simplistic binaries. Committed to a critical interrogation of familiar narratives about globalization, Yang takes her readers on a detailed journey through interdependent and multi-layered transnational spaces. While meticulously researched and exceedingly insightful, Yang’s book is a challenging read, one most likely to appeal to graduate students and scholars. I hope, however, that her arguments will not be relegated to academic circles alone, but will instead be brought to attention of politicians and public figures who remain intent on demonizing China while ignoring the impact of multinational corporations and the unequal relations of power that govern the IPR regime. Sadly, it is a rare occasion when such well-researched and nuanced positions find purchase in public debate.