Faked in China

Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization

Fan Yang

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780253018397
• eBook ISBN: 9780253018526
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

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, captured by the slogan "From Made in China to Created in China," which aims to transform China from a manufacturer of foreign goods into a nation that creates its own IPR-eligible brands. Counterfeit culture is the transnational making, selling, and buying of unauthorized products. This cultural dilemma of the postsocialist state demonstrates the unequal relations of power that persist in contemporary globalization.

ONE

“From Made in China to Created in China”: Nation Branding and the Global-National Imaginary

“A YEAR WITHOUT MADE IN CHINA”

In 2004, two days after Christmas, a writer-journalist from Louisiana named Sara Bongiorni launched her family into a yearlong experiment to boycott goods made in China. That night, upon noticing that most of the presents in the house bore the label, Bongiorni decided to “kick China out of the house,” simply to see whether it was possible.¹ She quickly discovered that the idea was not as original as she had thought; Peggy and Dave Smedley, a magazine-publishing couple, had banned Chinese-made presents and bought only American that very Christmas. After calling Mrs. Smedley for advice, Bongiorni learned about the challenge ahead: not only is it difficult to track down goods without the label, some ostensibly non-China-made goods might also have China-made contents. Weighing the difficulties in the year to come, Bongiorni decided to “avoid one thing only: labels bearing the words Made in China.”²

Bongiorni documented the experience in a book, A Year without Made in China: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy. Its publication in 2007 perfectly coincided with China’s run-up to the Olympic Games. As the global media spotlight zoomed in more intensely on the nation,³ a series of China-made consumer product scandals grabbed national headlines: tainted pet foods exported to America, followed by the recall of a million lead-painted Thomas & Friends toy trains in the U.S. and U.K., and finally, the withdrawal of July 4 fireworks due to a “dangerously unpredictable sense of direction.”⁴ As “Made in China” came to pose threats to American lives, Bongiorni’s book enjoyed extensive media coverage in U.S. and international news outlets, from CBS News, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio to newspapers in the Middle East.

To be sure, the idea of boycotting China was not new. After all, global media have made it a routine to report that nation’s suppression of political dissidents, abuses of human rights, and internet censorship, among other standard Communist or “authoritarian” practices. In the pre-Olympics media craze of 2008, these reports culminated in the infamous Olympics torch relay, when violent protests erupted in London, Paris, and elsewhere aiming to stop the Chinese delegates from passing through. While spectacles of this kind may be reflective of anti-China sentiments among large numbers of media consumers in the West, the idea or place called “China” they invoke remains distant enough to exert little or no impact on the spectators’ everyday life. As fleeting moments on media screens, they at best serve to remind the viewers of their fortunate situation in the “free world” and are capable of moving no more than a handful of activists into action.

However, the threat of “Made in China” in 2007 appeared to be much more imminent and closer to home. In addition to the danger of consuming unsafe products, the label also conjured up the specter of a looming economic downturn, a trend often attributed to the shift of production from America to China. “As many as 2 million Americans have lost their jobs to Chinese competition,” notes Bongiorni, “but we still can’t get enough of what China is selling.”⁵ This predicament was compounded by the fact that many Americans who had “lost their jobs to Chinese competition” could now only afford to buy cheap goods made in China, as opposed to more expensive ones made by unionized, higher-paid American labor. One may argue that more than any other China-related news, the media stories surrounding “Made in China” had taken center stage to become a dominant framework for the American public to process the United States’ growing connections with that “rising power.”

Upon the publication of her book, Bongiorni became the source of “China-free” advice for numerous Americans seeking to de-link from China, sometimes to protect their families from hazardous products while at other times to inject some personal stimulus into the American economy. Like Bongiorni, these consumers felt a “real” and “personal” connection with “China’s place in the world.”⁶ In some sense, the oftentimes “negative” connection between the American consumer and the “Made in China” label continues the age-old “Buy American” movement motivated by economic nationalism.⁷ But the historical forces that gave rise to this new manifestation, the medium via which it was communicated, and the state-citizen relation it came to promote on both sides of the Pacific are indeed telling a new story about China, the United States, and their relationship in globalization.

In this chapter, I will suggest that what distinguishes the 2007 spectacle of “Made in China” from other China-related news events is the emergence of the label as shorthand for a nation brand. Not only was “Made in China” cross-promoted on multiple global media platforms as a brand for a nation, it was also portrayed by both U.S. and Chinese news media as a brand in crisis, the ramifications of which transcended geopolitical boundaries. The formation of this nation brand calls attention to the globally imbricated operation of the postsocialist state – as at once an institutional actor from whom policy directives emanate and a subject continuously imagined into being amid globally circulated images and discourses. The formation of this state-subject, I argue, is emblematic of the entrenchment of the IPR regime, which operates through the global imaginary of the brand. The cultural effect of this regime has manifested itself most powerfully in China’s WTO-era national policy, “From Made in China to Created in China,” or what I call a “nation branding” project. While not exclusively a product of the transnational discursive circulation of “Made in China,” this project nonetheless presents a national vision that corresponds to the same ideological forces and material conditions that gave rise to the brand name itself. The formation of this nation brand in crisis is where I shall begin.

“MADE IN CHINA”: A TRANSNATIONAL PRODUCTION

What is “Made in China?” On a very basic level, it is a country-of-origin label. First introduced in the U.S. by the Tariff Act of 1890, the labeling requirement based on rules of origin (ROO) has never been favored by the proponents of free trade.⁸ This is because the labeling requirements are often perceived as “non-tariff trade barriers” offsetting the free flow of capital and goods. For instance, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in November 2011 that the U.S. requirement for meat products to be stamped with country-of-origin labels (COOL) was a case of “technical barriers to trade.”⁹ The U.S. law came into effect in March 2009 in part as a response to domestic food safety concerns. But it was later said to have affected major multinational food companies, whose cost to import livestock from Canada and Mexico had increased due to the added process of labeling. The complaint, filed by Canada and Mexico at the WTO, faced an appeal by the United States in defense of its own citizens’ right to know.¹⁰ Incidents like this point to a paradox of economic globalization qua trade liberalization embodied by the country-of-origin label. On the one hand, capital’s global move in search of low-cost labor and raw materials shows no regard for national boundaries, except when governments offer tax, anti-union, or other incentives to attract foreign capital. On the other hand, the state’s mandate to protect “national interests” or promote the “national economy” calls for particularized trade policies, such as the stamping of imported goods with a nation-specific mark. These measures are sometimes meant to protect specific domestic enterprises from being trampled by the influx of foreign goods and at other times to inform citizen-consumers about the geopolitical origins of their goods when making purchasing decisions.

The institutionalization of the country-of-origin label complicates Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish in some sense. For Marx, a commodity stands in for the social relations behind its own production. Commodity fetishism refers to a condition whereby the product of human labor appears as an objective entity completely devoid of the labor that produced it.¹¹ The country-of-origin label seemingly disrupts this fetish by placing a location stamp on a commodity, thus bringing into view the place-specific presence of assembling labor. However, by presenting the assembling nation itself as a stand-in for the “globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process,” the label also creates a new kind of fetish – what Appadurai has called “production fetishism.”¹² While the labeling requirement ostensibly seeks to capture the locality of production in one nation’s name, it participates in the masking of the voluminous border-crossing transactions most often engendered by transnational or multinational corporations (MNCs).

Precisely this fetish was at work in the “Made in China” discourse that garnered such attention circa 2008 in the American context. For Sara Bongiorni as well as the candidates in the 2008 (and 2012) presidential race, “Made in China” signifies the transfer of employment opportunities from the United States to China on the one hand, and the growing trade deficit that America holds with respect to China on the other. This rhetoric portrays China as the winner of the game, as the “Made in China” process brings more jobs and a bigger trade surplus to that country. To be sure, these charges are not without material grounding. But more than representing the nation of China, the label embodies a set of transnational processes. The seeming ubiquity of the label in the United States is the result of the massive shift of production from America to mainland China after the congressional granting of Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR) status to China – a “prelude” to the latter’s 2001 accession to the WTO.¹³ This process, of course, was first set in motion by China’s Reform and Opening Up policy since 1978. To attract foreign direct investment (FDI), Deng Xiaoping set up export processing zones in China’s coastal cities, many of which became the destination of production plants originally located in Southeast Asia. In 2002, the leading consulting firm A. T. Kearney announced that China had surpassed the United States to become the “most attractive” destination for FDI.¹⁴ Actual numbers soon caught up with this indicator of confidence, when China replaced the United States as the largest recipient of FDI in 2003, before repeating the act for a second time in 2012.¹⁵

In this light, the label “Made in China” can be seen as a material manifestation of the border-crossing mobility specific to finance capital. While state policies and decisions in America and China play a definitive role in aiding and facilitating capital movement, it is the transborder character of that capital, as well as the transborder commodities it engenders, that are expressed by the country-of-origin label. After all, there is no legal requirement in China or elsewhere to indicate a commodity’s place of origin if it is produced and consumed within the national borders. The labeling practice only becomes an issue that concerns the state (specifically, the American state) when there is a geopolitical separation between a commodity’s place of production and its place of consumption. “Made in China,” then, is a physical expression of the transnational movement of capital and goods.

At the same time, country-of-origin labels of this kind by no means capture the extensive outsourcing and subcontracting activities spread by MNCs throughout increasingly divergent geographical locales. The growth of these activities in the past few decades has no doubt made the determination of the “national” origins of products more difficult. As a response, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (part of the Department of Homeland Security) now designates “the last country in which (a product) has been substantially transformed” as the official mark to be stamped on an imported item.¹⁶ Since China has become a chief locale that provides an abundance of cheap assembling labor, “Made in China” has become an almost ubiquitous label in the United States, despite the fact that various components and parts for goods thus labeled are often made from materials produced in other nations.¹⁷ Even as the “Made in China” label reveals the transnational condition of its own making to some degree, it also conceals the more complex, multi-directional flows that characterize the contemporary global economic system.

Recognizing the complex processes that “Made in China” simultaneously reveals and conceals, however, does not provide the answer to another crucial question: How has “Made in China,” a quintessentially transnational label, come to be politicized as to shape China’s national politics at this particular moment? In some ways, the rejection of “Made in China” is a new development in the union-organized “Buy American” movements, which have been instrumental in mobilizing economic nationalism in the United States throughout the twentieth century.¹⁸ Often fused with anti-Asian racism (toward Japan in the ’50s–’60s and China in the present), the union-motivated call for consumers to purchase products “Made in America” operates on an anti-foreign, “us versus them” logic.¹⁹ What this logic hides, of course, is that the profit generated in this global system of production is seldom if ever retained by the workers who produce the surplus value. More often than not, it flows back to where capital originates. As a 2007 study of iPod’s “va...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Frequently Used Translations and Transliterations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “From Made in China to Created in China”: Nation Branding and the Global-National Imaginary
• 2 From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation: Three Moments of Shanzhai
• 3 Crazy Stone, National Cinema, and Counterfeit (Film) Culture
• 4 Landmark, Trademark, and Intellectual Property at Beijing’s Silk Street Market
• Conclusion: Cultural Imperialism and the “Chinese Dream”
• Appendix 1 Crazy Stone Synopsis
• Appendix 2 The Opening (Copied) Sequence in Crazy Stone
• Appendix 3 Silk Alley Synopsis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index