ABSTRACT
Over a 20-year period, China has become the world’s third-largest economy and has formed a culture of self-interest, rank materialism, and growing cynicism. The study of counterfeiting captures China’s unique “post-development state,” in the words of the shanzhai Godfather, Ming-Kai Tsai. As opposed to the modern paradigm, the copy culture in China has come to refl ect a post-modern parody of present-day capitalist societies. Consumerism and culture do not sit opposite one another at two ends of a spectrum, as Igor Kopytoff suggested. Rather, gray zones of new meanings circulate among fake producers and counterfeit consumers, which counter traditional binary oppositions between high and low, material and cultural, fake and real, and legal and extralegal.
