ABSTRACT
‘How a nation of tech copycats transformed into a hub for innovation’ ( Wired, 2015). This is the title of an article published in the December 2015 edition of Wired magazine. The story features a diverse range of technology entrepreneurship in China. While many scholars and China observers have yet to be convinced about its innovation capacity, China has had a long-standing reputation for the shanzhai culture. Shanzhai is one of the ten words that Chinese writer Yu Hua (2012) chooses to capture contemporary China. Often associated with copycats or counterfeit production, shanzhai carries a distinctive social and cultural significance. Dating back to the popular Ming dynasty novel Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan), the word shanzhai literally means a mountain village where a brotherhood of renegade bandits would gather. In the early 2000s, shanzhai became associated with informal enterprises in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, as well as their products. Underlying this association are the characteristics of escaping from authority, rising up against social injustice, and developing a set of rules parallel to those of the government (Keane and Zhao, 2012). Over time, shanzhai has become further popularised, referring to the cultural phenomenon of parodies and e’gao in the age of UGC and social media (Yang, 2016). Essentially, shanzhai is located in a space where copying, re-use and innovation are not mutually exclusive, and the line between the formal and informal is not clear-cut (Lindtner and Dourish, 2011; Keane and Zhao, 2012; Wong, 2014; Zhang and Fung, 2013).
