Faked in China Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization [Paperback]

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.

Fan Yang has written a thoughtful and accessible study of the counterfeit culture of China, specifically probing intellectual property rights (IPR) in terms of regime, culture, and power.

[T]he undeniable strength of Yangs vision [is] throughout her book, she toggles between the global and national, state and citizen, corporate and private, refusing to reduce these relationships to simplistic binaries. Committed
to a critical interrogation of familiar narratives about globalization, Yang takes her readers on a detailed journey through interdependent and multi-layered transnational spaces.

[A] timely work to address key concerns regarding Chinas engagement with globalisation through the lens of intellectual property rights (IPR), which is commonly known as an economic and legal regime but revisited as a cultural one in the book.

An intricate picture of the cultural politics and transnational power struggles in World Trade Organization-era China.[A]n original, interdisciplinary, superbly well researched analysis of the PRC under the gun of the global, modern, and Eurocentric IPR regime. . . . [O]ffers an alternativl³>