Description
From AQ] Faked in China is a critical account of the cultural challenge faced by China following its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. It traces the interactions between nation branding and counterfeit culture, two manifestations of the globalizing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime that give rise to competing visions for the nation. Nation branding is a state-sanctioned policy formation that is captured by the slogan ""From Made in China to Created in China."" It aims to transform China from a manufacturer of foreign goods into a nation that creates its own IPR-eligible brands. Counterfeit culture, a more diffused cultural practice, encompasses the transnational making, selling, copying, imitating and buying of unauthorized brand-name and audio-visual products. Animating the interactions between these two cultural formations are myriad artifacts, including a media buzzword, Shanzhai (literally meaning ""mountain fortress""), which signifies the Robin-Hood-style rebelliousness of knockoff mobile phones, a popular film, Crazy Stone, whose production, distribution and reception are inseparable from the culture of film piracy, and Silk Street Market, an open-air counterfeit bazaar that was transformed into a shopping mall in Olympics-era Beijing. Paying particular attention to the ideological contestations that emanate from the material and discursive formations of these artifacts, Faked in China argues that globalization s contradictory cultural effects are manifested in 21st-century China as an intensified discordance between the nation and the state. While the state has internalized IPR s value-producing conception of culture in conjuring a ""branded"" national vision, the continuing claims to the national made by the various publics of counterfeit culture defy IPR s cultural logic as well as the state s attempt to conform to it. This cultural dilemma of the postsocialist state, which arises from global conditions not of its own choosing, therefore bespeaks the unequal relations of power that persist in contemporary globalization.
