It has been just about a week since I arrived back in Shenzhen, China for my 3 week trip. I started this trip with an evening in Hong Kong, one of the most futuristic cities I have ever visited. I managed to score a harbor view room at my hotel, which overlooked Victoria Harbor with a fantastic view of the Center side of Hong Kong. HK is essentially a large island, a few smaller islands and the portion connected with the Chinese mainland, and I was staying on the mainland in Kowloon overlooking HK Island. The cityscape was incredible, with tall modern skyscrapers trimmed in every imaginable color of neon, and hundreds of animated billboards hawking everything from casinos to Chinese brands. Imagine Times Square extended to the whole of Manhattan and you would have the right mental image. I half expected a flying car to zoom past my window as I admired the view.

The next morning I walked around the city, getting a good dose of dumplings, checking out the jade market and passing myriad high-end watch and jewelry stores. Rolex seemed to play the role of Timex in Hong Kong, and I admired several $50,000-$100,000 Swiss watches sitting proudly in seemingly every other store window. I picked up a lowly Citizen Asia-only model with several timezones and other neat features that I found particularly fitting for this city of the future.

That afternoon I took the ferry over to Shekou and checked into my home for the next several weeks. I’m staying in the heart of the expat area, in a part of town (Shekou) that is renowned for expats. I have an apartment-style room with a sitting area, kitchen and bedroom which is nice, although my sparkling kitchen is equipped with a tea serving for four and no other utensils or cooking implements. I guess I look like a man that enjoys his tea.

The hotel is a couple blocks from an area called “Sea World,” which has nothing to do with Shamu (other than cooking quite a few of his cousins) but has a docked cruise ship-turned sportsbar/hotel, and about 20 restaurants. There is everything from McDonalds to Starbucks, a few Chinese and Asian places, and a mix of Italian, Indian, Irish and everything in between. I had dinner at an Italian place with our project manager who generally refuses to eat Chinese food, and was amazed to find that the lasagna was actually quite good, and on par with anything I’ve ever had in the states. No small feat for a country where cheese is virtually ignored and unknown. Not only can the Chinese come up with a decent copy of an Italian suit, but they also have the food down pretty well.

After a relatively uneventful week of work, yesterday I ventured into Lohou Commercial City, cited as a mecca of counterfeit goods and apparently where people from Hong Kong go to shop for cheap stuff as it is literally right on the border. The city I am in, Shenzhen, is home to China’s 2nd busiest port, and also many of the factories churning out goods for western companies so counterfeiting runs rampant, to the point that some factories making legitimate goods have been busted producing exact counterfeits during the night shift. The market was five stories of madness, with literally thousands of small shops most of which were hawking some combination of bags, luggage, watches, shoes and clothing. You could drink and smoke in the market, so there was a haze that seemed to go well with the crowds and shouts of “ROLEX! DVD! NORTH FACE! IPHONE! HANDBAG! YOU LOOK NOW! YOU BUY NOW!” Hawkers would firmly grab your arm in an attempt to corral you, while proudly displaying catalogs of designer copies. While I was told the market once had the latest Gucci copies proudly displayed, several bands are no longer on the shelves after some high-profile police actions, but a western face and 30 seconds got you’re a look at glossy full-color catalogs of copies of varying quality. You could get everything from low grade knockoffs to what seemed like quality stuff, with brands from Adidas and Nike, to relatively esoteric once like Mountain Hardware and IWC.

At one point, I was looking at jackets and the lady produced a catalog of North Face knockoffs. I told her I would take a look and she said someone had to go to the “warehouse.” She shouted to a colleague, who pushed aside a rack of coats revealing what seemed to be a wall. He pushed open a panel, crawled in, and returned a few minutes later with a bagged North Face jacket. The bag even had the correct logo, and the jacket had North Face and Gore Tex tags (despite there being no actual Gore Tex in the coat). It was quite amazing and while the jacket did not fit, it seemed to be about 80% of the quality of the genuine article for 20% of the price.

A colleague picked up an “iPhone” that does not resemble any current model, but had Apple branding and even had the “Designed in California by Apple” quip on the back like the real thing. The phone actually works, and includes a copy of Apple’s operating system and everything, although it looks only vaguely like the real thing and a few programs were still in Chinese. Despite that, it plays video and music, includes a GPS chip and was his for about $40US. Fake Nokia phones also abounded, and even Shure wireless microphones and Panasonic DVD players were not safe from being knocked off.

There were even some legitimate goods. My iPhone friend also bought what was billed as an “MP9 Player” (and here we Westerners are still stuck on MP3) which looked like a large pen, but was actually a working video and sound recorder. The pen would even write, and at the press of a hidden button the device would begin recording video and audio, in what was every James Bond fan’s dream. Once done, you unscrewed the pen revealing a USB plug that connected to your computer and allowed you to download the captured video. All this for about $14US.

China clearly places more stock in the doing rather than the conceiving, and no compunction was shown for painstakingly ripping off major brands. Most of the items were high quality, and I got the sense that there was a pride in workmanship and that if you could build something that was similar in quality for a pittance of the price you were actually doing the world a service. This even seems to extend to China’s adoption of a market economy. In talking with people here it seems relatively easy to start a business, and government interference and taxation is minimal to the point that China’s “wild west” capitalistic economic system is arguably more open (for better and worse) that the US. The area I am in was one of China’s first “Special Economic Zones,” where China essentially “knocked off” market economics as an experiment and then ran with it. This seems rather unexciting today, but when you think about it this would be like the US declaring California or Massachusetts a “special economic zone,” then coming back a few years later to find everyone wearing a grey smock, calling each other comrade and leaving to go work on their five year plan at the village commune. The Chinese seem to have no compunction whatsoever about taking anyone’s ideas and making them their own, a trait that might just well be an asset despite giving Intellectual Property lawyers a bad case of heartburn.

That said, politically this is still a socialist country. This hotel is connected to a Chinese internet connection, and I’ve already ran into several websites blocked by Chinese government firewalls, including my own company blog at www.itbswatch.com, as it’s hosted by a major blog company that also carries blogs the government might find unsavory. Articles about Tibet on Wikipedia are blocked, as well as the Chinese-language versions of several western media outlets. Mao still smiles benevolently from the currency, and immaculately uniformed police and military still stroll the streets. Despite all that, this is an incredibly exciting country and I’m quite happy to see it.

This should be a busy workweek, and then on Friday I grab the ferry back to Hong Kong and catch a flight to Bangkok, where I’m staying for the weekend and meeting my good friend Sean. He working in Jakarta and Bangkok is about half-way between us, had cheap flights and does not require a visa in advance, a perfect combo for a quick reunion as I have not seen Sean in quite some time.

Until next time…

Categories: Travel
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