The Panda Man and the Anti-Counterfeiting Hero: Art, Activism and Appropriation in Contemporary China

Abstract

This article examines the public art practice of the Chinese performance artist Zhao Bandi, aka the 'Panda Man', and situates it in relation to the social activism of the Chinese consumer rights campaigner Wang Hai, aka the 'Anti-Counterfeiting Hero'. Contextualizing the appropriation strategies of these two unlikely figures within contemporary China's changing legal, market, and media spheres, this article places global contemporary concerns with authenticity, copyright, counterfeits, and fakes in relation to notions of performativity and behavior. Challenging the expectation that appropriation need resemble oppositional or antagonistic strategies of Western precedent, it argues that Chinese figures like Zhao and Wang presented transformative models for consumption and citizenship in 1990s China, laying the groundwork for today's public discourse of 'shanzhai' − a distinctly self-conscious Chinese claim on appropriation.

“If the People Do Not Raise the Issue, the Officials Will Not Investigate”: Moral Citizenship among China’s Fake-Fighters

“…Literature addressing fake-fighting has connected it to a broader phenomenon: growing awareness of individual rights (Brandtstädter, 2008;Wong, 2012;Yan, 2000). The question of rights consciousness, defined by Chen (2013: 68) as "the degree to which citizens are aware of and willing to assert individual rights for themselves" is a contentious topic.…”

“…Hooper (2005) has argued that the Chinese government has actively promoted consumer rights awareness, hoping a mass of empowered consumers can be a means to the end of purifying the market of fake and shoddy goods (see also Thomas, 2017). The fake-fighters would seem to represent this ideal, and indeed some Chinese officials encouraged fake-fighting when it first emerged, hoping “that such a model example of activism would bring about broader social change and raise citizens’ awareness and desire to exercise their rights” (Wong, 2012: 24, see also Hooper, 2005: 18). This phenomenon has gone by two terms in the literature: the consumer-citizen (Hooper, 2005, Wong, 2012) and the citizen-consumer (Davis, 2006).…”

“…The fake-fighters would seem to represent this ideal, and indeed some Chinese officials encouraged fake-fighting when it first emerged, hoping “that such a model example of activism would bring about broader social change and raise citizens’ awareness and desire to exercise their rights” (Wong, 2012: 24, see also Hooper, 2005: 18). This phenomenon has gone by two terms in the literature: the consumer-citizen (Hooper, 2005, Wong, 2012) and the citizen-consumer (Davis, 2006). Both terms refer to a phenomenon seemingly unique to contemporary China: consumers’ assertion of their civic rights, “vis a vis the market, with the endorsement and encouragement of the state” (Hooper, 2005: 2).…”

“…Gerth (2008: 48) has argued that in the Republican era, the “combination of nationalism and consumerism became a basis for what it meant to be a citizen in ‘modern China’,” I argue that being a citizen today is also about being a consumer, not because there is a duty to buy Chinese but because there is doubt and anxiety connected with buying Chinese. There is nothing new about this; problems with the quality of Chinese-made goods have existed since the onset of reform (Wong, 2012; Yan, 2000, 2012). What is significant is that it is becoming more and more difficult to explain these problems as a mere stage on the road to becoming a developed nation (Hansen, 2013: 70).…”

“…Ye Guang’s fake-fighting career had begun in the late 1990s, shortly after China’s most famous fake-fighter Wang Hai became a national celebrity after discovering a “double compensation” clause in the then-new Consumer Protection Law that allowed him to profit from buying and returning fake, defective, or misrepresented goods. Wang Hai was initially “hailed as a new model Chinese citizen” (Wong, 2012: 22), but there were always doubts about his motives and techniques. As fake-fighting became an established career, much of the Chinese public came to see it not as activism or advocacy but as the pursuit of profit and celebrity through the devious use of a legal loophole to extort money from retailers (Brandtstädter, 2008).…”