Undressing Shanzhai: Gender And Authenticity In The Counterfeit Luxury Goods Market
The patronising stare of the Western world has always reduced the ideas of the rest of the world to stereotypical uniformity, the world of Shanzhai being no exception. For years the internet has seen endless memes of Abibas shoes, KLC fried chicken restaurants, Pingguo (meaning ‘apple’ in Mandarin) phones, and Dolce & Banana shoes. These are quintessential Chinese products, often seen as knockoffs, that dominate huge swathes of the Chinese product market and the creation of Shanzhai manufacturing. Though we might see Shanzhai as a quirky facet of Chinese culture - where international brands and products are replicated and culturally hybridised to meet the expectations of its Chinese consumers - its cultural roots run deep and, unsurprisingly, what little understanding that non-Chinese have of the phenomenon does not include recognition of the highly-gendered nature of such creative work.
The disruption of Apple and Samsung profits and the myriad of pieces written about the tech giants’ woes of grassroots competition in emerging economies, has allowed Shanzhai technology to be well-covered. They have remade what feels like every cell phone it possibly could, bolstered by the industry’s primary base in Shenzhen, the manufacturing hub of the entire world’s electronics. Here, Shanzhai manufacturers have access to the very same parts that power even the iPhone 15 of today. Western media has circulated images and stories of male creators as Robin Hood-like figures, taking from multinational tech corporations and retooling until even the poorest can afford the latest phones and gadgets.
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Shanzhai fashion, the counterpart to Shanzhai tech where the majority of creatives are women, is in many ways similar to it. As Dr. Sara Liao, feminist media studies researcher at Pennsylvania State University and author of Fashioning China: Precarious Creativity and Women Designers in Shanzhai Culture describes when interviewed for this piece, “The masses/grassroots who involve in Shanzhai as a business seldom resist global capitalism.” Shanzhai, both in its tech and fashion counterparts, are means-making industries. They take the creations of others and retool them to fit the exacting needs of a specific audience.
Intellectual property rights in China are much different from that of the Western world.
In China, the idea of originality is far different from ours. Chinese artistic culture abides by a Deleuzian sense of creation, that in art, products and even ideas, creation is not experienced as a standalone event, rather, they are in a state of continuous becoming. Zhen ji is the Chinese word for authentic, but a more literal understanding of the word would characterise creation as an interminable process. Here, imitating the works of a master is a foundational aspect of developing a mastery of a craft.
It is in this process of creation that the distinctly Chinese practice of decreation and deconstruction gives form to Shanzhai authenticity. As the original product copied by Shanzhai designers becomes increasingly distant with each layer of customization and dissection demanded by customers, the importance of the so-called original dissipates bit-by-bit. In the end, the final product, no matter how similar or different it may look from the prototype, is ultimately disconnected from it. What has been created is an artifact of consumer demand, fabricative ingenuity, foreign influence, and the demiurgic digital labor of each Shanzhai designer. To detractors, the Shanzhai process is the Platonic conception of a simulacrum, a copy of a copy that degrades so long as the image of the original is infinitely recreated.
However, Shanzhai abides by the rules of a Deleuzian simulacrum: it is an image of an image, a copy of a copy. Attempts to determine the origin of, for example, a Shanzhai-ed purse are fruitless because one attempting to unmask the true creator of an idea would instead find an infinite set of Matryoshka dolls. Each illusion would beget another, because every thing is generative.
What gets lost in the tournament to unmask Shanzhai are the very people who make it. While male Shanzhai creators in the technology domain have been given their flowers, female Shanzhai fashion designers have not. Shanzhai technology has the luxury of leaning into parody in a way that fashion does not. Largely invisible, largely female designers are not able to embrace this sense of humour available to men for the very reason that their work is feminised and precarious. Women are compelled to take themselves seriously, in China just like in the greater world, because if we don’t, no one will.
The work of female Shanzhai designers requires an extra layer of digital labour absent from Shanzhai tech. Fashion is utilitarian, yes, but it is also aspirational. This is the nature of fashion whether in the East or West. Shanzhai designers may copy the latest Chanel tweed skirt suit, but the labour of these designers does not begin and end with the product.
Shanzhai designers are responsible for creating a brand for their products, even when to others that ‘brand’ might seem like just the copycat production of another designer’s work. For female designers, this labour is a constant collaborative process between designers, customers, both individual consumers and other brands. Designers tasked with this essential digital labour are responsible for not just creating a garment from conception to finished product, they also must imbue the item with a sense of authenticity. This precarious creative work that Shanzhai fashion designers must undertake in order to operate their businesses successfully is unique to their segment of Shanzhai. While these entrepreneurs are hustling to make ends meet, performing feminised digital labour as well as uncompensated domestic labour in their home lives, their contributions to Shanzhai go unacknowledged while also attracting the ire of the Chinese government’s fledgling set of intellectual property rights.
Words: Stewie Myers
