BEIJING - When will China get real?
On the streets of Beijing, many middle-class accoutrement are on display: phones, movies, music, name brand pants and jackets. The problem is that many of these are knock-offs, expertly made and virtually identical to the real McCoy.
This isn't news; Chinese fakes stock black markets around the world. But will it ever change? If the country's economy continues to develop, it won't be long before large numbers of people make Western level incomes. One hundred million people making $10,000 a year in ten years doesn't seem far-fetched. The Chinese could replace fakes with the genuine article.
A shocking discovery I made last night causes me to think otherwise. A small newsstand on campus had several magazine racks on display just outside the store, one with comics, another with news articles and a third with English titles. They were mostly old issues of Time and the Economist, resealed in plastic and being sold for $1.75.
With the paucity of English language reading material in China, it looked like a good deal. I thumbed through the titles, but one stood out. It was an Economist, maize in color with a nine-photo montage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Meet Germany's New Leader," the main headline screamed, but something didn't seem quite right. Instead of the traditional Economist font, the text on the cover was written in Times New Roman. And the promised articles weren't from the issue with Merkel on the cover, they belonged to the week before. This was a fake Economist.
Why someone would go through the trouble of making knock-off copies of a two year old economic magazine I'm not sure. But someone did and presumably there is a market for this kind of thing.
Fakes are widely available on the Tsinghua campus, China's best science and technology research college. This is the place where China's future inventors are studying, people who should care about intellectual property law. Instead, here they sell knock off iPod headphones for $3 and fake Sony ones for $2. The bikes aren't real, and neither are the basketballs.
Rather than going away, I see the Chinese fake economy branching off into smaller and smaller niches: Economists and Salinger books for the intellectual, North Face jackets and Columbia packs for the backpacker, Hello Kitty dolls and Korean soaps for the teenager.
Sounds like a phenomenon that might interest The Economist.
