ABSTRACT
In 1996 I taught in a summer school in Beijing, to a group of actual and aspiring university teachers. One of these students was particularly friendly, and during a break, started to chat, asking me about my family. Soon we got on the topic of what my wife did for a living. My halting attempts to explain the secondary licensing market were cut short by his excited remark: ‘Ah, your wife is in business! Like my wife’. Quietly, and with a mixture of pride and tactful sympathy, he added: ‘But I think my wife is richer than yours’. Having already noticed that he was wearing very fine shoes, I was keen to hear more. He told me that his wife and mother-in-law owned a factory in southern China which manufactured ‘low-standard car parts’. Explaining that many people in China drive old cars, he pointed out that when their cars need repair no one wants to be forced to waste money buying parts which will outlive their car. They know low-standard parts are less safe but they take this into account when they purchase them, and, perhaps, in their driving habits. Everyone knows the situation. The factory next door made ‘one-week shoes’: they look great on a big night out, but you throw them away when you get home. The only trouble is that, in both cases, middlemen buy in bulk, re-box them as the genuine article, and sell them abroad. At the time there had been a scandal in the UK about counterfeit car parts, and I had to wonder whether this man’s wife was the only partially innocent source of the problem.
