Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [58]
Today, Shanghai is no longer bland, of course. There’s a transcendental hipness to the city. It’s a happening place. There is groove music. There are lounges. And spaces. There are restaurants, like M on the Bund, that rival any restaurant anywhere. It is the sort of place where, if I were a restless, unattached, childless man of twenty-some years with lungs of steel, I’d perhaps make it a point to learn the Shanghainese dialect of the Wu variation of the Chinese language, then hightail it pronto for this city on the coast. Because there is action here, even on the Bund, where stores line the cobbled streets offering the latest from Givenchy and Hermès, and bankers can be seen in slick suits and skinny ties driving BMWs, the 7 Series, on their way to lunch at Jean Georges.
But I was just a visitor in Shanghai, and as I viewed the goings-on on the Bund from the River Path across the road, I experienced exciting first-time-visitor encounters with the path’s local denizens.
“You want Rolex?” asked a woman, displaying her wares on her arms.
“A Rolex? Really?”
“It is very beautiful.”
“Yes. It sure is beautiful.”
“I give you special price. Hundred dollars. Good price.”
“Gosh. That sounds like a real bargain. But tell you what. Let me help you today.” I showed her my traveling watch. “Let me give you a special price—say, $50. It is very beautiful. See, it even has Mickey Mouse on it. It’s very valuable.”
She laughed and pulled out a pen. “Mont Blanc. Good price.”
I pulled out my pen. “Bic. Very good quality. Made in China. Ten dollars for you.”
This was fun for the first three Rolex sellers, but then I grew bored and instead I replied to their inquiries with the all-time most useful Chinese words I had yet learned in China: bu yao. I don’t want it. But if I’d had a pressing need for a Rolex, I now knew where to find one. Of course, the watches on offer here were poor imitations, but if I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t, shopping in China being one of those things best left for professionals, I have no doubt that somewhere in Shanghai I’d be able to find a top-of-the-line, can’t-tell-the-difference genuine imitation Rolex of sufficient craftsmanship that not even a watchmaker in Basel, Switzerland, would be able to tell them apart. The Chinese not only produce mountains of fake products, they also produce mountains of very good fake products. And the aspirations of fake-product producers had moved far higher than watches to include such things as, incredibly, cars. The Chinese automaker Shuanghuan Automobile even went so far as to produce a knockoff of the BMW X5, an SUV, and if you think they felt a little shameful about shamelessly copying a BMW, you’d be wrong. They unveiled the car at the Frankfurt Motor Show, just up the autobahn from the home of BMW. Now, that’s gumption.
But, apparently, the Chinese regard counterfeiting a little differently than people do in the West. “The Chinese believe they can make the same thing, same quality, at lower cost, and pass the savings on to consumers, while making a profit,” Dan had explained one afternoon as we perused the DVDs for sale on a Beijing sidewalk. “So it’s a win-win for everyone. That’s the Chinese view. No one is going to spend $100 or whatever buying an operating system from Microsoft, when they can buy a counterfeit operating system for $10. It’s just inefficient.”
But hadn’t they been forced to crack down since joining the World Trade Organization?
“Sure. It’s not as blatant as it used to be. There aren’t as many people selling counterfeit DVDs as there used to be, though, as you’ve seen, there are still a lot of them. In the Silk Market, you used to be able to buy fake Armani. Today, you can still buy fake Armani. But it doesn’t say Armani anymore. Same jacket. Different label.”
The result being, of course, that it is nearly impossible to ascertain the authenticity of anything in China, and while I walked around magnetically attracting every peddler of Rolex watches or jade pendants, the Chinese, too, could find no assurances that the baby