the Chinese bandits

No President Obama has not begun marketing a Chinese "BlockBerry" in his free time around the White House. This advertisement is just another masterpiece from the “Chinese Bandits.”

The Chinese Bandits are known as Shanzhai (山寨) companies that have moved beyond the world of merely copying ideas and products to begin dabbling in the world of creativity. The Chinese have long been known for their expertise and mastery of copying ideas and products. Shanzhai (山寨) refers to Chinese knock-0ff or pirated brands which have become increasingly common in electronics. Literally "mountain village" or "mountain stronghold", the term refers to the mountain stockades of warlords or thieves, far away from official control.

Even entire websites have been dedicated to this world of knock off phones. Featured recently is the iPhone F9 M-Smart on www.shanzhaiji.cn.

Not exactly the most realistically Apple logo.

These companies have begun to see opportunities in the marketplace and are trying to capitalize on creating products and services that can meet specific needs of the consumers. For example, adding two slots for SIM cards in cell phone for businesspeople traveling between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland. Some phones can even identify fake money, or include loud speakers for farmers who have trouble hearing their phones.

"This is an important way to cultivate grassroots innovation," said Jack Linchuan Liu, a communications professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong who has studied the shanzhai industry.

"There is a lot of raw power in the development of these bandit phones that could be channeled into normal, productive creativity from the bottom up."

The key is that this energy or power is channeled into normal, productive creativity instead of just illegally copying of ideas and products. There is still a long way to go.

If you have ever read "Rivertown" by Peter Hessler, a great read about life in China, then you might remember his referencing of Shanzhai culture in Chinese society starting on page 258.

The demand for Nalgene-knockoff bottles was much more understandable, especially in a tea-drinking city like Chengdu, where the bottles spread quickly throughout the city's social strata. They were first acquired by cab drivers, who tended to be at the forefront of such trends - cabbies had a certain maverick quality, as well as plenty of money. After that, the businessmen followed suit, and then xiaojies, and finally by summer even the old people in the teahouses were sipping their tea out of fake Nalgene bottles. Soon you could buy them for twenty yuan in any Sichuan city or town.

The bottles came with a label that described them as American-developed Taikong Pingzi - Outer Space Bottles. But they were clearly the product of Chinese factories, because they weren't quite standard and often the label was misspelled. In that regard things hadn't changed greatly from the seventeenth century, when a Spanish priest named Domingo Navarrete described the business methods in China. "The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation," he wrote. "They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the Province of Canton (Guangdong) they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe."

The amazing thing about this Shanzhai trend is how much of the global market it entails. Out of the 1.15 billion cell phones sold worldwide in 2007 over 150 million of those were Shanzhai. Thats over 10% of worldwide sales and that data was the officially reported amount from the Chinese government (so it could be even higher.) And this is only one area of the "Chinese bandits" work... cell phones.