Eye on China: China pirates just trying to get by

The question of counterfeiting is never far away in China. The French and the Americans exhibit a steadily boiling fury at the transgressions they see everywhere in the country. But that pressure usually comes from head office outside China, rather than in China itself.

Most expats in China, and I'm including diplomatic staff from even the worst-affected countries, rapidly get into the habit of buying clothing knock-offs, pirated movies and software.

The outrage in the US and Europe about pirated items leaves most such buyers cold. The inflated figures put out by Microsoft and Hollywood about the amount of revenue they are losing is hard to swallow. It's not as if Bill Gates and Hollywood's overpaid and under-talented actors are anywhere close to living on the poverty line.

In contrast, several hundred million people in China are actually living below the poverty line. To expect them not to take advantage of any ladder to improve themselves, including the use of pirated items, is not realistic. The market that Hollywood and Microsoft say they are losing wouldn't even exist if the Chinese had to pay the full market price. Perhaps the solution is for the quasi-monopolies like Microsoft and the Hollywood studios to lower the price - by a lot.

Even more hysterical than the US is the French reaction. Some French lawyer friends found themselves reluctantly featured in a rather dramatic article in a French newspaper about the rip-offs you can get in Shenzhen, a mainland Chinese town just over the border from Hong Kong. According to the reporter, my lawyer friends were professional cowards who refused to track down the companies faking French products because of the fear of repercussions.

The truth was far more prosaic - the lawyers weren't interested in helping out on the story because it's such a thankless job. It takes ages to close down one store only for it to spring up again immediately.

In a Beijing DVD shop, the assistant told me politely to make my choice by 3pm, because that was the time the police were coming for their "surprise" raid.

But I believe the panic exhibited by Lacoste, Dior and the others is rather amusing. After all, it's them that took the genuinely brilliant marketing decision to elevate the product's brand far above the actual product.

Thus, for most brands, product quality has nothing to do with the price you pay. You pay a premium for a TagHeuer watch or CK shoes because you have been influenced by an insidious advertising campaign.

I confess to being a Lacoste addict despite the fact that whenever I spend US$100 ($140) on such a shirt I feel a bit of a fool. I really can't distinguish them from the black market ones.

But haggling for hours with the shrewish Shanghainese traders on Xianyang Lu is a far less pleasant experience than browsing through the immaculate stores on Shanghai's main shopping street.

Yet there is a price to be paid for the brand strategy: It's easy to piggyback on. Any fool can now copy a Lacoste or Ralph Lauren Polo shirt because it's basically a simple item. If one wanted to be really rude, one could say that the brands are just as cynical and dishonest as the fakers are. After all, in the West, even children are regularly targeted by companies wielding multi-million-dollar advertising budgets against which even parents are defenceless.

That is the easy and rather flippant answer to the counterfeit problem in China. Defending China's counterfeiting becomes a lot less easy when you consider the extent to which phoniness permeates every facet of society.

Britain has many universities that are popular with Chinese. And Chinese students are welcomed as cash cows, since they pay a great deal more than British students. But it's well known that you can buy fake degree certificates for any university in China for a few dollars.

Given the inherent language and logistical difficulty of checking people's applications from a country as far away as China, I wonder how many completely unqualified fraudsters end up taking degrees at prestigious British institutions. When their incompetence manifests, it affects the reputation of all the graduates.

Good Chinese students are fully aware of the cynicism and incompetent screening of British universities and Chinese attendance has plunged by more than 20 per cent this year.

That's still fairly benign compared to other cases. On visiting one small city in Guangdong a few years ago, I turned a corner and found myself confronted with a shop selling every possible variation of police gear, including electric cattle prods.

Given the numerous cases of thugs impersonating policemen to carry out serious crimes in south China, it is mind boggling that such a shop can operate with impunity.

Even more serious is when food is imitated, such as the case in the poor province of Anhui, when mothers were recently sold fake powdered milk which ended up killing numerous children.

Fake and potentially lethal medication is also widespread, especially when demand for a certain brand of medication jumps during a time of crisis.

Overall, it's clear that there is no easy answer to intellectual property theft in China. While a student in a rural village using pirated software to improve his grades is hard to denounce, that's not the case at the other end of the spectrum, when consumers are being hurt and maimed by fakes. Hopefully, these issues will solve themselves as China gets rich enough to pay for the originals.

* The writer remains anonymous to protect his position in China.